There’s a moment early on in If This Is a Man, Primo Levi’s first-hand account of the horrors of Auschwitz, when the author, newly arrived at the death camp and desperately thirsty, reaches for a “fine icicle” to suck on, only to have it brutally smashed out of his hand by a prison guard. “Why?” asks Levi, plaintively. “Hier ist kein warum,” replies the guard (“Here there is no why”).
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.
Finkelstein, a Times columnist and member of the House of Lords, isn’t trying to explain why these utopian ideologies arose. His preoccupation is on the who and how: “…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”.
The author’s mum and dad – Mirjam and Ludwik – were very young at the start of the second world war (around six and 10 years old, respectively). 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.
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.
Once the second world war breaks out the book works like a thriller, as both families race against the clock to escape certain death. 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).
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”.
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.”
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.
If like Finkelstein’s mother’s family, for example, you’ve fled Berlin because it’s no longer safe to be Jewish there, and you’re in Amsterdam, living close to Anne Frank, once war breaks out, are you better off in the Netherlands or in Britain? Now we know the answer, but Finkelstein’s skilful use of dramatic irony helps us see that at the time, smart people could conclude that the Netherlands was the better place to be and so stayed put – with disastrous consequences.
Understandably, despair is a constant theme. Even amid the relief of survival towards the end, there’s an overwhelming sense of what has been lost: so many families, so many happy homes, so many childhoods. Despair, too, at the fragility of our social order, and the way we can so easily lapse into irrationality, on account of our inherently flawed nature (what Immanuel Kant memorably called “the crooked timber of humanity”). As Finkelstein puts it: “What happened to my parents isn’t about to happen to me. It isn’t about to happen to my children. But could it? It could. Absolutely, it could.”
Perhaps the more people that read this brilliant book, the less likely it will be that our liberal society ever disintegrates. But that faith in rationality was what Finkelstein’s grandfather, Alfred, believed in too, and it didn’t change a damned thing.
• Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad: A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival by Daniel Finkelstein is published by William Collins (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
