Hitler, Stalin, and the Miraculous Survival of My Family
by Daniel Finkelstein
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Sep 2023
400 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
An epic and uplifting World War II family history of resistance that spans Europe, telling of two happy families uprooted by war, their incredible suffering under Hitler and Stalin, and the near-miraculous survival stories of the author's mother and father.
In Two Roads Home beloved British journalist Daniel Finkelstein tells the extraordinary story of the years before his mother met his father—years of war and trials they barely survived.
Daniel Finkelstein's grandfather was a German Jewish intellectual leader who tolled an early warning of the impending Holocaust and became an archivist of Nazi crimes. He relocated his family to safety in Amsterdam, where they knew Anne Frank. But in those years safety was an illusion: Anne Frank famously went into hiding and Daniel's mother, Mirjam, also still a child, was sent to Bergen-Belsen with her mother and sisters.
Finkelstein's father, Ludwik, grew up in a prosperous Jewish family in Poland where his father, Dolu was a patriotic hero of the Great War. But when Stalin took control, Dolu, was deported to Siberia and Ludwik and his mother were sentenced to forced labor in Kazakhstan, starved and housed in a stable in freezing conditions.
Two Roads Home is a page-turning account of the narrow escapes, forged passports, ingenuity, bravery, and luck that allowed Mirjam and Ludwik to survive the war and find each other. Using their personal testimony, letters sent to Siberia, a diary written in Belsen, and years of historical research, Daniel Finkelstein tells what happened to two families, one the victim of the Nazis, the other of the Soviets. A tale of deliverance and triumph over evil, Two Roads Home will profoundly touch all who read it.
"[An] extraordinary narrative...An excellent contribution to the literature of the Shoah and a moving homage to the will to endure." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Powerful and beautifully written" —The Guardian
"Beautiful...This book took possession of me. I read it quickly, but then couldn't stop thinking or talking about the Finkelstein and Wiener families...With grace, Finkelstein tells this story not as a tragedy but as a tale of love, hope and resilience." —The Times (UK)
"A haunting but humorous family history of survival ... Daniel Finkelstein's account of his ancestors' experiences of the Holocaust is sobering, elegiac and, at times, even joyful." —Financial Times (UK)
"[A] superb memoir" —The Daily Telegraph (UK)
"Powerful and beautifully written...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 [Two Roads Home] 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...Brilliant" —The Observer (UK)
"A masterpiece...At once an epic tale on the scale of War and Peace, an intimate portrait of his family and its traumas and a book of compelling urgency, with a vital political message at its heart...This book will be read for generations as a classic, a work of truth and history but with the emotional power of the most searing novel." —The Jewish Chronicle (UK)
This information about Two Roads Home was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Daniel Finkelstein is a weekly political columnist at The Times of London. Formerly an adviser to Prime Minister John Major, he was appointed to the House of Lords in 2013. He recently became a director of Chelsea Football Club. He is married with three children and lives in Pinner, a suburb of London. He is grandson of Dr. Alfred Wiener, founder of the Wiener Library, the world's oldest Holocaust archive, where he is a patron.
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