In this remarkable family memoir, the political journalist and Conservative peer Daniel Finkelstein documents the lives of his parents and grandparents under Hitler and Stalin, and “how the great forces of history crashed down in a terrible wave on two happy families; how it tossed them and turned them, and finally returned what was left to dry land”.
His mother Mirjam’s family, who were German Jews, survived the Dutch holding camp Westerbork, and a spell in Bergen-Belsen. Meanwhile his paternal grandfather, who was from Lwów in Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), which was occupied by the Soviets in 1939, was arrested and sentenced to hard labour at one of Stalin’s gulags, while his wife and child were dispatched to a Siberian farm. Moving back and forth between their respective stories, Finkelstein’s account of his grandparents’ efforts to evade death and protect their children unfolds like a wartime thriller.
