Escape to victory

Tanya Gold

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

By Daniel Finkelstein

William Collins £25

Danny Finkelstein is a columnist at the Times, and a moderate Tory peer, and he lives in Pinner, north London.

My mother asked me, ‘Why does Danny Finkelstein live in Pinner?’

Now I have read his book, I feel I can give her a very full answer.

Dolu and Lusia Finkelstein, Danny’s grandparents, were Polish Jewish industrialists. His father, Ludwik, was their only child.

When their story begins, in 1938, they had built themselves a modernist house in Lwów, a manifestation of their hope for the future. Dolu was the Iron King of Lwów, dedicated to a free and independent Poland.

After the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact carved the country up, Dolu was arrested for capitalism. Lusia and Ludwik were transported to a state farm in eastern Kazakhstan. Corpses of fellow travellers were taken off the train and left by the rails.

Finkelstein writes brilliantly on the Soviet hoax: free citizens were free to starve to death. Ludwik almost froze to death that first winter, but the beloved only child of a Polish-Jewish iron baron was not allowed to neglect his schoolwork: what would that achieve?

Lusia taught him The Iliad and The Odyssey as he lay in his wicker basket in a lean-to: I smiled at that. Finkelstein fears that Dolu’s company built the rails to take them east.

Stalin freed them when Hitler invaded Russia. They were reunited with Dolu and came to England, where Ludwik became a distinguished scientist, entrusted with planning London’s response to a nuclear war. He lived a long, tranquil, useful life. And that was Stalin and Dad.

Then there were his mother’s family,

‘Hello, my name’s Gucci, this is Hermès and you must be Mulberry’ the Wieners, Berlin Jews of the most erudite kind. Finkelstein’s grandfather Alfred Wiener was the first to amass detail on the National Socialists in the early 1920s. His collection eventually became the Wiener Library in London.

As Hitler rose to power, Die Welt judged that Alfred ‘devoted his energies to the goal of eliminating the mistrust between Germans and Jews’. Finkelstein, ever a newspaperman, retorts that a German Jew is ‘one indivisible concept’.

Finkelstein gives Alfred the book’s epigraph: ‘I’m prepared to forget as long as everyone else remembers’.

Alfred and his wife, Grete, an economist, and their three daughters –Finkelstein’s mother, Mirjam, was the youngest – fled to Amsterdam when Hitler took power, where they knew the Frank family. Ruth, the eldest daughter, was at school with Anne Frank.

Weiner went to London to advise the British government – when Rudolf Hess landed in 1941, he provided briefing notes for his interrogation – and then to America, where he spent the war. He was a fanatical archivist: his collection of provincial German telephone books is the only remaining evidence that some German Jews ever existed.

The visas he secured for his family arrived too late. They were transported to Westerbork, a concentration camp Dutch

Jews paid for – the smaller crimes stay with me – and then to Bergen-Belsen.

These are the most awful passages in the book. The family avoid the transports to the extermination camps, day after day. Then Grete’s older sister Trude and her family are transported to Sobibor and murdered.

Their love for one another never falters. Grete starved herself to feed her children. Hours after she ensured they got to Switzerland and safety – Alfred finally secured fake Paraguayan passports, and the family were swapped for Allied prisoners – she died, knowing her daughters lived, and was given the Jewish burial denied to so many.

The girls went to America to join Alfred, and then to London, where Mirjam met Ludwik. And that was Hitler and Mum.

All this Finkelstein writes in the calm and detailed prose that is essential for his story to be bearable. It is perfectly judged, with Finkelstein’s customary habit of emphasising what is good.

Much of it is agony, as Europe delved deep for its greatest cruelty. The Poles attacked the Jews before the Nazis did, he notes. The Soviets were immune to the suffering of the Poles they farmed with. (Lusia was a terrible farmer. The day she led a working party, her group ripped up the growing crops, and left the weeds. I smiled at that, too.)

There is dehumanisation from left and right. And yet Ruth, dining with a local Jewish family in Switzerland after her liberation, retained the table manners Grete had instilled in her, even after Bergen-Belsen. She waited for the family to serve themselves before she ate and, somehow, that means everything.