Recently, Bernice and I finished reading Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad, a family memoir written by British journalist and political analyst Daniel Finkelstein. As we progressed through the book, I found myself thinking about the qualities needed to write a successful family memoir, and I thought I might share some of those thoughts with you today.

The most important point, it seems to me, is to choose your grandparents wisely. Here, Finkelstein has done an exemplary job.

His mother’s father was Alfred Weiner, a decorated Jewish German World War I soldier, who then, as early as 1925, identified the Nazi Party as the chief danger to German society as a whole and began collecting documentary evidence of the true nature of the Nazis. This collection eventually became the Wiener Holocaust Library, a unique resource that provided most of the documentary evidence used in the Nuremberg Trials and in the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In 1939, Alfred moved to London, and later New York, to continue his work.

From then until 1945, Alfred’s wife, Finkelstein’s maternal grandmother, raised her three young daughters as a one-parent family. Their hardships under the Nazis brought them to Bergen-Belsen. Eventually, the family were reunited and settled in England.

Finkelstein’s paternal grandfather, a successful industrialist in pre-War Lwów, joined the Polish army. Arrested in 1940 by Stalin’s NKVD, he was eventually deported to Siberia. His wife and their pre-teen son, Finkelstein’s father, were later deported by Stalin to an even more remote area of Siberia. Miraculously, all three survived and were reunited in 1942, eventually settling in Tel Aviv in 1943 before arriving in Britain in 1947.

Having met and married in England, the two survivors, Mirjam from Berlin, Bergen-Belsen and stations in between, and Ludwik, from Lwów and Tel Aviv, via the frozen wastes of Semipalatinsk, produced three children. All three children have successful public careers, in academia, politics and the Civil Service, and, like their father, all three have been awarded multiple honours. They are, respectively, a baron, a knight, and, most recently, a dame.

So, yes, Daniel Finkelstein certainly chose his family well. It hardly needs saying that he has an incredible tale to tell. It increasingly seems to me that every Holocaust survivor story is amazing, because the Nazi death machine was so single-minded, and most of Europe was either vociferously, or quietly, in favour of the Nazi Final Solution. Of those who were not, most were happy to stand by and do and say nothing. So, any survivor must have shown remarkable strength of character, and almost certainly had at least some strokes of luck.

However, I have read enough Holocaust memoirs to know that not every amazing story reads well. It requires a gifted storyteller to bring it to life, and this is the second point I want to make. Finkelstein is a masterful story-teller, and his mastery manifests itself in two distinct ways.

First, he is telling his own family’s personal story, and family records, conversations with surviving family members and meticulous research enable him to provide the telling intimate details that lift the story off the page. We become emotionally involved with all of the major players in this story, through the generosity with which Finkelstein shares their lives with us.

It does not matter whether it is Daniel’s aunt’s autograph book marking her 8^th birthday, with messages from her older sister and her father, or the tricks of survival that Daniel’s paternal grandmother Lusia devised to ensure her own and her son’s survival and mental stability through a Siberian winter; we always feel that we are privileged to be allowed to share these intimate details.

The second area in which Finkelstein displays his mastery of his story-telling is the flip-side of the first area, and is, in my opinion, an almost inconceivable achievement. He manages to tell, alongside the intensely personal story of his immediate family, the sweeping story of not just one, but two, geopolitical realities: the Final Solution and the oppression of Stalin’s Russia. A frontispiece map traces the journeys of Daniel’s parents and grandparents: Germany–Holland–Germany–Switzerland–France–USA–England; Poland–Ukraine–Russia–Kazakhstan–Uzbekistan–Turkmenistan–Iran–Iraq–Palestine–England. This gives some sense of the scale of the story.

However, it is not only a huge geographic and political scale. The story also needs to convey the scale of the mass human tragedy. This is one of Finkelstein’s most impressive achievements. To give just one example: there is a brief passage, about five pages, fairly early in the story of Daniel’s mother’s experiences, in which she, her sisters and her mother, are living in Amsterdam in 1941. Together with a group of friends, the girls form a club, with membership cards, a newsletter, subscription fees. Finkelstein describes the club in enchanting detail, then states that it folded when the family were forced to move from their family home.

Over the next five pages, Finkelstein details the fate of every single member of the club. Most of the stories end in Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor or Auschwitz, and the cumulative effect is to make graspable the scale of the Holocaust. This one tiny slice of Amsterdam life exposes us to the scale of the destruction of life.

Then Finkelstein zooms one level out, and points out that the survival rate of the members of the Joy and Glee Club (oh, the aching irony of the innocence and optimism of that name) was higher than that of the residents of the street where the family had lived. In half a page, he moves from house to house in a stark catalogue: …Number 3, killed in Amsterdam; Number 5, murdered by gas in Sobibor; Number 8, murdered by gas in Auschwitz…

This was one of many, many passages in the book that brought me to tears. Bernice and I usually read as we drive up to Zichron every week, and my only criticism of this book is that we were never able to carry on reading after we finished a chapter, no matter how far from Zichron we still were. Each sobering chapter in this book needs to be pondered over before reading on.

It is possible to imagine this story being told by someone who had neither Finkelstein’s organisational skill, nor his sensitivity of language. It would, in anyone’s hands, undoubtedly be a powerful story, because it tells of extraordinary people summoning the will to triumph over unimaginable adversity.

However, it takes a particular kind of genius to balance the detail with the over-arching narrative, the intensely personal with the national and international. The author has at all times absolute command over his material. The extraordinarily complex tale he weaves is told with stunning clarity.

If you read only one history book this year, make it this. If you read only one Holocaust memoir this year, make it this. If you read only one adventure story of survival against all odds, make it this.

And if you suspect 388 pages is too long a read for you, visit us one day and I’ll let you read the first three pages. It may make you change your mind. I’m not sure I’ve ever been reduced to tears by the end of page 3 of any book, but I was by this.

[Blogger’s Note: American publishers are a strange lot. They clearly felt that the title of the book was intimidating, with those British references to ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ (as opposed, presumably, to ‘Mom’ and ‘Pop’, or, just possibly, ‘Maw’ and ‘Paw’), and so in the US it is published as: Two Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin, and the Miraculous Survival of My Family. I assume they haven’t tampered with anything other than the title. I am, however, reminded that the first Harry Potter volume was entitled, in the US, …and the Sorcerer’s Stone (shades of Mickey Mouse in Fantasia) rather than …and the Philosopher’s Stone, which has the virtue of being an actual (if mythical) thing.]