It is a miracle this book exists. It’s a miracle its author Daniel Finkelstein exists. How they both do is this astonishing memoir’s remarkable story. As Finkelstein writes, Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad is a chronicle of “love and murder, a story of how the great forces of history crashed down in a terrible wave” on to his parents’ families. And it is a story of how, against fearful odds and the vicissitudes and cruelties of two of the 20th century’s most murderous dictatorships, those two families not only survived but prospered and finally came together at a youth group meeting one Sunday night in 1956 in central London.
But before that terrible wave came crashing, there was happiness. Finkelstein’s mother Mirjam’s family, the Wieners, were German Jews and intellectuals with three daughters living in Berlin. Her father, Alfred, a decorated World War I veteran and loyal German, was a prominent scholar and Arabist; her mother, Grete, held a PhD in economics.
The author’s father, Ludwik, was the only child of Dolu and Lusia Finkelstein, Polish Jews from Lwów, in what was then eastern Poland and is now the Ukraine city of Lviv, who were cafe society habitués and members of a very successful, well-connected business family.
It was the fate of these two blameless and flourishing families living some 1000km apart that they, with many millions of others, became enemies of two extreme and preposterous political systems simply for who they were. Communist Russia hated the Finkelsteins, into whose clutches they fell after Stalin occupied eastern Poland in 1939, because the family were wealthy capitalists. Hitler’s Germany detested the Wieners because they were Jews, but also because Alfred’s anti-Nazi activism was a threat to the regime.
Indeed, Alfred is considered the first person to identify how much of a danger Hitler and Nazism presented to Jews. From as earlier as 1919, with a tract called Prelude to Pogroms?, he began writing and speaking publicly about the rise of antisemitism in Germany, and did so throughout the country during the 1920s and early 1930s.
As an official for the lobby group the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, Alfred also began, in secret, to collect and compile Nazi writings and publications. Well before the outbreak of war, he transferred this growing, ever-more-valuable collection to Amsterdam, where it was called the Jewish Central Information Office. Renamed the Wiener Holocaust Library after the war, it is now in London and is considered the world’s foremost collection of materials about the Holocaust and its causes.
Sensing the coming conflagration for German Jews, Alfred also moved his family to Amsterdam in 1933, where Mirjam’s elder sister Ruth was a school mate of Anne Frank.
Yet Alfred’s prescience failed at a crucial moment. While he was in London in May 1940 seeking to move his office there and aid the war effort, Hitler invaded the low countries, and Grete and their three daughters found themselves in Nazi-occupied territory.
In the ensuing years, while Alfred helped the British and American governments, his family faced increasing oppression and the threat of being deported to the camps. They were finally transported in June 1943, and were eventually sent to Belsen.
To reveal how most of Alfred’s family survived would be to give away too much of their remarkable story, but it’s enough to say that it involved such cinematic elements as a fake Paraguayan passport, spies in Switzerland, an adjutant of Adolf Eichmann, blind luck with a border guard, and a train ride to freedom.
The Finkelsteins’ story of survival is no less dramatic. After the Soviets took eastern Poland, but before Hitler’s attack on Russia, this close, loving household was separated from family, friends and eventually themselves. Dolu was arrested by the Soviet secret police, disappeared in a gulag and was thought executed, while mother and son became slave labourers in a Soviet state farm thousands of kilometres from home in eastern Kazakhstan. Lusia and Ludwik’s piteous existence – that they survived the hunger and the Siberian winters is astounding – mirrors the worst of the Nazi camps. As Finkelstein notes in his concluding chapter, there has never been a full reckoning with the perfidious Soviets about their atrocities during the war.
Again, to say how the Finkelsteins survived would be to reveal too much to the prospective reader, but their story, too, contains luck and improbability and a train ride to freedom, this time to Iran.
That is, you might say, a lot of story. So, it’s as well that Finkelstein, a columnist and former executive editor for the Times, has chosen to impose a quite formal structure on it, breaking his story into three parts – “Before”, “During” and “After” – and alternating chapters between the Wieners and the Finkelsteins. It is as well, too, that he is such an eloquent but restrained writer; in lesser hands, such tumultuous stories might have become melodrama.
You will find few family memoirs – or miraculous survival stories – quite like Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad. But the real wonder is that, despite all the death and the horror and the heartbreak, Finkelstein’s story is really one of hope, love and family.
