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

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Daniel’s multi generational tale, tracks his mother Mirjam Wiener's journey from Germany, to Holland and eventually to starve in BergenBelson in tandem with his father Ludwig's story from Poland to slave labour in the Gulag and eventually to freezing Siberia. 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.

The author skillfully weaves together the stories of his grandparents, Alfred Wiener and Ludwik, highlighting their resilience and strength in the face of unimaginable adversity. Which is why Mirjam and Ludwik celebrated the ordinary and mundane and passed on the importance of the things that protect that – liberal norms, civil rights, and the rule of law – to their children.The inclusion of two very different parallel stories explicitly and deliberately connects the horrors of the Nazi regime to the less often discussed crimes of the Soviets, shining a light on both.

The book moves deftly between Finkelstein’s mother’s family in Berlin and his father’s family in Lwow, Poland (now Lviv, in Ukraine), ratcheting up the sadness and tension as it cuts from one narrative to another.What truly makes this book stand out is the near-miraculous reunion of Daniel's parents, Mirjam and Ludwik, as refugees in Britain. There are not too many whys either in Daniel Finkelstein’s powerful and beautifully written new book, which tells the story of how his Jewish parents lived through the Holocaust, as European civilisation was ripped apart by nazism and communism in the 1930s and 40s. But there are bigger themes running through Finkelstein’s writing, elevating Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad to the status of a modern classic – and just as deserving of acclaim as Philippe Sands’s East West Street or Edmund de Waal’s The Hare With Amber Eyes, both of which used inventive ways to examine the Holocaust afresh (using the unlikely prisms of jurisprudence and ceramics, respectively). later on what happened every one were started thinking bout food,talking about food dreamt about food,even Grete has jotted down her favourite reciepe in paper.

The first and most overwhelming impression is just how fortunate we are to be living in comparative safety - this was not the norm throughout history, nor is it the norm throughout the world. A compelling narrative of two families that survived the horrors of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia. I always go into a nonfiction book expecting to learn one new fact, and I was able to in this one so I consider that winning. It is a story of persecution; survival; and the consequences of totalitarianism told with the almost unimaginable bravery of two ordinary families shining through.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. Likewise, Ludwik's journey from a prosperous Jewish family in Poland to Siberia and then Kazakhstan under Stalin's rule is heart-wrenching. Those two sentences capture perfectly how a global war was made up of small personal struggles — each distinct, each important. The family story is interwoven with a historical perspective and is very clear also on Russian atrocities carried out which have never been tried and accounted for in the way that Nazi crimes were at Nuremburg.