A last-minute escape from the Holocaust

At the beginning of his profoundly moving memoir of his grandparents, parents, the Holocaust and the Gulag, Daniel Finkelstein writes:

This the story of how my family took a journey which ended happily in Hendon, eating crusty bread rolls with butter in the café near the M1, but on the way took a detour through hell.

Who would have guessed what those people, tucking into rolls at the newly-opened Brent Cross shopping centre in the mid-1970s, had been through? There was Finkelstein’s elegant Polish-Jewish grandmother, Lusia Finkelstein, known locally as ‘the Lady of Hendon Central’ in her hat; his German-born Jewish mother, née Mirjam Wiener, a maths teacher, who particularly enjoyed reading books that argued against positions she held; and his father, Lusia’s only son, Ludwik, an engineering professor and quite formal man, who ‘always straightened his tie to answer the telephone’.

Lusia and Ludwik, from a wealthy family of Polish industrialists in Lviv, had survived the Gulag together. Mirjam, whose parents Grete and Alfred Wiener had moved with their three daughters from Berlin to Amsterdam in 1933 when Alfred had foreseen the danger to Jews in Germany, had survived Belsen.

To read Finkelstein, one of our great thinkers and writers, on the precise nature of those two versions of earthly hell and the exact process by which people came to be in them, is an unforgettable experience. This is a vital addition to the literature of two catastrophes of the 20th century. With great clarity and wisdom he demonstrates what evil politics can do. A document, a pact, is signed. Millions die. A sister writes what will be her final letter to her beloved sibling, cheerful and full of hope to the last, before boarding a train to death.