Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad: A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival

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Daniel Finkelstein continues the heartrending memoir of his parents' experiences of persecution, resistance and survival during WWII, this week focusing on the story of his father's family at the hands of Stalin.

An amazing story, well told. Probably the most interesting aspect is that it tells the stories of two sides of the Second World War: the Germans and the Russian, which, apart from the concentration camps, are not so well known nowadays. Personally, I’d always believed that the Dutch had been helpful to refugees and Jewish people, but it appears they weren’t necessary so. Perhaps Anne Frank’s story has persuaded me otherwise previously. Amazing to think that the author’s maternal family not only knew the Franks but met them again in Belsen. I certainly found the German part of the story more interesting than the Russian / Polish side, though the gulags sounded terrible. Today: after being reunited, Daniel's grandparents and father, still now only 12, must find a way to live and to make sense of what happened to them at the hands of the communists... Daniel Finkelstein reads the final part of his heartrending memoir of his parents' experiences of persecution, resistance and survival during WWII, this week following his father's story at the hands of Stalin. So by keeping these little things from my own life, I am merely maintaining family tradition, staying true to my inheritance.It is impossible to find words adequate to describe the demonic and barbarous brutality meted out to the extended family and to the millions of other Jewish people . The dreadful facts and statistics are well known but I found the greatest strength of these 12 hours to be the haunting minutiae of the family’s lives. Alfred Wiener's role as a German Jewish intellectual leader who recognized the impending Holocaust and became an archivist of Nazi crimes is both inspiring and chilling. His determination to safeguard his family and relocate them to safety in Amsterdam, where they formed a connection with Anne Frank's family, is a testament to the power of hope and human connection. Daniel's father Ludwik was born in the Polish city of Lwow, now Lviv, the only child of a prosperous Jewish family. In 1939, after Hitler and Stalin carved up Poland, the family was rounded up by the communists. His grandfather Dolu was arrested and disappeared, while his father and grandmother were sent to Siberia, working as slave labourers on a collective farm. They somehow survived starvation and freezing winters, living in a house they built from cow dung, but always hoping to be reunited with Dolu. This was a very emotional read. Tears were shed in parts. But later in the book comes the good parts where you learn of all these families were able to accomplish, despite what they had been through.

Daniel’s grandfather was a German Jewish intellectual leader who warned the holocaust was coming. He relocated his family to Amsterdam for safety where they became close with Anne Frank’s family. They were eventually separated. This story is one of ingenuity, bravery, and coincidences. Keeping things had been his profession. The main weapon of his war against fascism had been his collection of everything that the Nazis published and a record of all they had done and said. The Wiener Holocaust Library (thriving still in Russell Square) became the world’s leading centre of documentation of the Nazis. While personal drama drives the story, there is much of contemporary relevance. The author tells us that the global turmoil of the last decade has shaken his former confidence that we are perpetually safe from the fate that befell his parents. When he writes that their tormenters, both Nazi and Soviet, “believed the will of the people was being thwarted by elites, and that the individuals who made up the elites needed to be eliminated by force”, it’s not hard to hear the echoes today. Mirjam, as an adult and survivor, also emerges as a woman of remarkable wisdom, someone who has seen the worst of humanity and chosen to represent the best. For instance, there is an ongoing controversy over the decision taken by the leadership of the Dutch Jewish community to work with the Nazis so as to avoid immediate retribution. Her response is the correct one: it was the Nazis’ fault. There is no value in blaming the victims for making one impossible choice over another.Likewise when Justin Bieber created global outrage for commenting in the visitors’ book at Anne Frank’s house that he hoped “ she would have been a belieber”, Mirjam defends him. The whole point about Anne was her ordinariness, someone who absolutely would have been a fan of a teen idol. In a world of perpetual outrage such calm reason from someone who had every right to play the victim is a balm.

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Both sides of the family were remarkable. His mother’s parents, Alfred and Grete Wiener, were highly educated and bookish (Grete had a PhD in economics, a rare achievement for a woman in the 20s), and ran the world’s first and foremost research centre on the Nazi party, collecting vast amounts of documents that charted its rise. Meanwhile, in Poland, Finkelstein’s father’s family had built a hugely successful iron business, and lived a settled, happy life in a peaceful multicultural city. Another leitmotif – made possible by the craft of Finkelstein’s writing – is the way you’re made to understand how even deeply intelligent and politically attuned people were caught unawares by war and genocide, and were left with no idea about where to go or what to do. Such a brilliantly written book about how Hitler’s and Stalin’s appalling states ripped two families apart, and how they - somehow - managed not only to survive WWII but produce such a remarkable family at the end. This book is all about the jews family who is survivors of holocaust, its all about the journey especially the story of parents who want to survive just because to keep safe of thier heirs. it is all about the hope,dream, psychology and himanity. through out the book one can say wow or some time one can dismay.Yep,its all about living thoughts which is invisible but you can feel it.

I learned so much from this book particularly about the experience of polish Jews and the Katyn Massacre.This was an incredible book. This is a story of two Jewish families, the Weiners and Finkelsteins, during WWII and beyond, and all that they endured. One family was affected by Germany and one by Russia. Before reading this I had not realized that in the early days of the war, Russia sided with Germany and was also taking actions against Jews. The two families had different experiences but both endured exile, starvation, separation from family and uncertainty over the future. One theme in Finkelstein’s work is the futility of intellectual reasoning in the face of rabid irrationality. From 1919 onwards, Finkelstein’s maternal grandfather, Alfred Wiener, worked tirelessly to use logic to combat antisemitism, writing pamphlets and speeches that, among other things, “attempted to expose the contradictions of antisemites who blamed Jews for capitalism while simultaneously characterising them as communists”. You’re made to understand how even deeply intelligent and politically attuned people were caught unawares by war and genocide Nevertheless, the extent, the thoroughness, of my family’s collecting habit startled me when I set out to tell their story. Not simply momentous documents — the piece of paper telling the family that they were to be sent to Belsen, for instance, or the last letter of my great aunt before she was sent to Sobibor — these anyone might keep. But little things. An old passport, long expired. Or the dining room coupons from the liner that took my mother and her sisters on the last leg of the journey from Belsen to New York. Or the letters congratulating Alfred on his daughter’s engagement. These projects need our support. After the war, my grandfather found it hard to get support for his work, with many people openly wondering what the point was. They don’t wonder now.

But tragically, despite “all the truth-telling combating all the lies”, Hitler still came to power, destroying Alfred’s “romantic idea” of “the liberal values he associated with his country’s better nature”. There’s an echo here of Clive James’s haunting ode to Viennese cafe culture in Cultural Amnesia: “For the Jewish intelligentsia, cultivated to the fingertips, it was very hard to grasp the intensity of the irrationality they were dealing with – the irrationality that was counting the hours until it could deal with them.” As a young boy, Finkelstein’s father survived incarceration during the Holocaust years with his indomitable mother after the family had become separated. Being read by Finkelstein himself, the deeply harrowing details of these years of torturous suffering and of his family’s persecution in the 1930s strengthens the impact of this indelible memoir. Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad is a deeply moving and powerful memoir about persecution, survival, love and loss, man's inhumanity, and the almost unimaginable bravery of two ordinary families. Likewise, Ludwik's journey from a prosperous Jewish family in Poland to Siberia and then Kazakhstan under Stalin's rule is heart-wrenching. The sacrifices made by his family, their struggle against freezing winters and grueling forced labor conditions, highlight the resilience of the human spirit. Initially, I’d thought the family trees needed dates, but I now realise that having these would have spoiled the story.I listened to this on audio and unsurprisingly because of the theme found myself muttering aloud disbelief at parts of this story. Not just the horrors that the family endured but also the complete fate or serendipity that saw their stories interlink and intertwine over the time horizon. This is a story that is tragic yet gives one hope. A story of family and love that survived unimaginable hardships. They aren’t a pile of junk, even if they look like a pile of junk. Or at least that’s what I tell my wife. The second thing I realise is how valuable these relics are. The Wiener Holocaust Library was vital to the Nuremberg trials and remains a unique and important resource. It has certainly brought home to me how extraordinarily important it remains as a record of the Holocaust, as is the wonderful Refugee Voices project of the Association of Jewish Refugees. Without their recording of my father’s story, a four-hour interview, I am not at all sure that my book would have been possible.