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

Product Information

Personally, I’d always believed that the Dutch had been helpful to refugees and Jewish people, but it appears they weren’t necessary so. As a young boy, Finkelstein’s father survived incarceration during the Holocaust years with his indomitable mother after the family had become separated. Jwes were not getting sufficiant amount of food there,everything were countable and people were getting weak. I imagine this book will become important to the further teaching of the Holocaust on both an individual human level, and on a more socio-political one too.

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.

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. It was poignant moment while i was reading about Katyn massacre, during the stalin's regime almost 22000 murders took place of polish officers. The book charts the fates of both families over more than three decades before his parents actually met in London - with both families suffering separation and imprisonment, with some being made to work in inhumane conditions in Siberia or the living hell of Belsen, while all the time never giving up hope that they would be reunited.

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. I am certain that this is an interesting story for the author’s family to read, but I didn’t find myself becoming involved with the characters at all. 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 mother Mirjam Wiener was the youngest of three daughters born in Germany to Alfred and Margarete Wiener. 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.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. This book is plethora of events which compelled and usher you towards the places where holocaust took place.