Dan Snow's History Hit - Surviving Hitler and Stalin

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

Lord Daniel Finkelstein recounts stories from his parents' remarkable lives. His mother Mirjam Wiener survived the Nazi concentration camps, and his father Ludwik Finkelstein lived through a Soviet gulag. Daniel tells Dan how these remarkable people survived the horrors of both regimes, and imparts some of the lessons that they learnt along the way.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.PLEASE VOTE NOW! for Dan Snow's History Hit in the British Podcast Awards Listener's Choice category here. Every vote counts, thank you!We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Welcome, everybody, to Dan Snow's History Hit. It's an astonishing case of tenacity, of war, of genocide, of survival, of love, of persistence, of all sorts of things, of liberal democracy. We're covering it all, folks. I've got Lord Daniel Finkelstein. He's on the podcast. He is a journalist. He's the associate editor of the Times newspaper. He sits in the House of Lords. He's a brilliant polemicist, and he's just written a superb book about his family story. Long time listener to the podcast. Remember when I went to interview him in the House of Lords years ago now, and he hinted at various aspects of this story. Well, he's now decided to write it all up. It's called Hitler, Stalin, Mum, Dad, a family memoir of miraculous survival, and it is truly miraculous. The book is almost unbuttonable. I read it in a

couple of sessions late into the night. It caused me sleep deprivation, but it was well worth it. One side of his family were hugely affluent, elite members of Austro-Hungarian and then Polish society living in what is now Lvov until in 1939, they found themselves under Soviet occupation. The other side of his family were German Jews, and his grandfather was one of the first people in the months following the First World War

to warn about the far right and anti-Semitism. How they all survived the next 30 years, how they all came to be in Britain, how they came to be a loving family in which Daniel grew up, is the story of this book, and it is superb. Enjoy. Daniel, thank you very much for coming back on the podcast. Thank you for having me. Did you always know that the stories of your families was... I mean, you've told me about them before,

and they're obviously fascinating, but we all find our own family stories fascinating. Is it strange that there is now a global story, there's now a global interest in these familiar domestic relationships that you have? Funny enough, I was having a discussion with somebody about Lucia the other day, and Lucia is my paternal grandmother, and we always knew her as a granny. And she's an extraordinary character who survives and makes sure that her son survives through the most extraordinary trials and

tribulations. And it's very odd to be sharing her character and was with a former Member of Parliament. And I felt a bit odd talking about her in that way, I suppose. Yes. Well, obviously, I don't know any of these people intimately, but I now I look upon them as sort of great heroes of European history. And that must be very strange for you who knew them in a domestic setting. You must have told the story so many times, but I would love to give the audience a sense of just what we're talking about here. Let's start. We've got two families, both alike in dignity. Well, first of all, we've got a family living in Lvov, your dad's family living what is now Lvov. We should say, by the way, of all the cities in the world, of the

last 120 years, what an extraordinary story that city's been. Just paint a picture of the city that your family would have known, particularly at the end of the 19th century, as a centre of learning, part of the kind of European enlightenment, full of chess-playing physicists, cosmopolitan, part of the kind of large, slightly rickety Austro-Hungarian Empire. And in the space of 120 years, it's been through dozens of regimes, genocide, frontline of First World War, Second World War, Russian Civil War. And now again, shockingly again, it's being assaulted from the air in 2023. So tell me about Lvov and their family there. Absolutely. It took me, by the way, two months of reading to produce three paragraphs of history of Lvov, because I didn't want people to be spending forever

discussing past history, but I had to understand it myself in order to understand what my father went through. Somebody the other day said to me, your grandfather was quite well off, and that really understates it. When I was doing the research, I discovered that my grandfather's nickname was the Iron King. He had a metalworks business. And I think the Iron King gives you some idea of how prosperous and successful that business was. And they built in 1938, this beautiful house on the hill in Herbatov Street. And all the houses around them are neo-Gothic, but they have built a house in the style of a cruise liner. It's modern, it's progressive, it's self-confident. The Finkelsteins have lived there for hundreds of years in Lwów. They imagine living there for hundreds of years more, and they live in their

house for a year. And that is the result of a central political event in this book, which is the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviets and the Germans is what allows the Poles to be divided between Germany and Poland. And also, as we'll come on to later, allows the Germans the freedom to attack Holland, where my mother is. So as a result of this, this self-confidence they have, they're going to live in the city. My grandmother goes off in a beautiful coat to play bridge, taking chocolates from Zalewskis near their house. They go to the Scottish cafe where Bartel, the three times Prime Minister of Poland, is a mathematician sitting there writing equations on the tablecloth. That is their life.

And this is completely upended as the Soviets invade from one end and the Germans from the other. So the Germans and Soviets have invaded Poland. Lvov ends up falling into the Soviet sphere of influence. And indeed, now that's why it's in Ukraine, because that Russian-Soviet border was pushed deep into Poland as a result of that. And that was never reversed after the Second World War. So let's go to your mother's family. They are German Jews. Absolutely. 1919, my grandfather has just come back from fighting on the front. Both my grandfathers were part of the German or Austro-Hungarian armies. My grandfather comes back from the front. He's nearly died during the First World War of Dysentery. He's been a

journalist on the newspaper. He's fought in various campaigns. And he sees the battle is, in fact, ahead of him, not behind him, because he realizes that anti-Semitism is on the rise in Germany. And in 1919, he publishes a tract that says, if we don't do something about this, our descendants will speak of bestial murder. And of course, he spends the rest of his life, and certainly the rest of the 20s and 30s, as one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Berlin. He becomes one of the leaders of the biggest communal body, goes around everywhere trying to make the middle class understand what was about to engulf them,

to explain that it wasn't just about Jews, but about the entire democratic health of Germany. Germany, and he fails. And he has probably got good claim to be one of the very first people to see what was going to come in Germany first in 1919, with that pamphlet or that tract. And then again, in the late 1920s, where he tries to persuade the Jewish community, it's not just the far right, it's specifically Hitler, have to be concerned about. And he begins to create an archive. Other people don't think that Hitler should be the focus. He persists and he creates an archive of everything the Nazis do or say. He sues them in court. He goes around to middle class businesses and shows them Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zarnia as a little suitcase he carries around, he puts on the floor, leans into it, pulls out these pieces of evidence. Sometimes people

tell him, Hitler was sitting in your seat only yesterday, telling us what was coming from them. And this whole effort to tell the truth and to have the truth understood ultimately ends in failure. Well, and a very personal failure, the utter tragedy of the book, because Hitler gets into power, but obviously your grandfather has worked out what the consequence of that will be. And he's moved his family to Holland. So we think, great, well done. He's keeping ahead of the terror that will engulf his community and the mass murder. And then invasion of Poland is over. Hitler turns his attention to the West. The utter devastating tragedy is that your grandfather has moved his archive and moved

his work to Britain because even the Dutch were getting a bit worried about all this anti-Nazi activism. But his family were hours, hours away from getting out of Holland. Tell me about that bit. At first, both Alfred and his wife, Greta, my grandmother, believe Holland will remain neutral like Switzerland. Then they begin to appreciate maybe it would be a good idea to apply for visas. They were trying to stay there for the sake of the kids. And my grandfather then is informed by his intelligence community contacts

because he's helping British intelligence by this point understand who the Nazis are. You've really got to get your family out. But by the time they begin to make the concentrated effort to do that, it's too late. It's very interesting this on both sides of the family. Lots of people often say, you know, my family was very perceptive, it got out, or my family, some relative was complacent and they stayed. Actually, it wasn't really like that. In order to get out, you had to not only know that it was the right thing to do to escape the Nazis, which some people didn't understand, but Alfred didn't understand that. You also had to know that where you were staying was more likely to be taken over than where you were going. So

Alfred was in London, there was a war already. I can see why him and Greta thought maybe the children are safer in Holland. Well, First World War, of course, the Kaiser's armies had not marched through Holland. So yeah, you can be forgiven for thinking that. Holland capitulates within sort of 36 hours or so. And he tragically finds himself in London while his wife and children are in Holland. Characterise their experience under German Nazi military occupation. Originally, Greta worries they'll come specifically for Alfred and Alfred's family, not knowing that he's not there. They burn a lot of papers, they go into hiding for a couple of weeks, then they realise actually not coming for specific individuals. They go home and the first year that they spend is actually a perfectly ordinary

childhood for the children. And it's still going to be all right as far as they're concerned. But Greta knows that they've really got to try and get out. Alfred is trying to get them papers. And increasingly, the restrictions begin. So you begin to get, you know, Ruth is given a tennis racket. My aunt, my mother's older sister is given a tennis racket. By the time she receives it, Jews can't play on the courts anymore. They love to go swimming. Their papers are full of information about their life as swimmers. They can't go swimming in the pools anymore. And then the markets are shut. And then they lose the ability to have any bikes or any cars. They have to walk everywhere. Then everyone has to wear the yellow stars. It becomes worse and worse. Much of this is in advance of what then

happens in 1942, where this policy is going to be changed from one of excluding Jews from social life into transporting Jews to the East. And what transporting Jews to the East meant, of course, was being sent to the gas chambers. And this is what happens to many families in Holland next. Right, well, let's switch back to the Eastern Front now, because this is such an important point of your book. And I think it's something that we still struggle to talk about. So the Finkelsteins are back in what had been Poland, now is part of the very Western Soviet Union.

They are also transported East. We talk about the Gulag, we talk about the Soviet camps. You say another word for these is concentration camps. Absolutely. Did you feel that we still aren't good enough at talking because of the eventual system of allies in the Second World War and the fact that the West and the Soviet Union ganged up to defeat Hitler? Do you think we're still not good enough at talking about the similarities between the Nazi and the Soviet regimes? Absolutely. At the end of my mum's life, she was talking everywhere about her experience, you know,

talking to schools. She went to Downing Street. She did a BBC radio documentary. My father, who suffers an experience which my mother would acknowledge was as bad as hers, was not asked to give any talks. Died, really, without telling his story to many people apart from the family. And he did leave a tape, but he was never asked in public forums to talk about it at all. And Stalin's crime of trying to decimate the elite of Poland

is hardly ever talked about. If you look at it, I suppose both the Nazis and the communists were trying to destroy the elites. In the Nazis case, they killed all the Jews, some of whom happened to be shopkeepers. And in the Soviet case, they had a good go at killing all the shopkeepers, some of whom happened to be Jews. But the correspondence was clear. Look, there is a big difference in this transport to the east explains it. What transport to the east meant for my mother or for some of my mother's relatives was transport to the gas chamber. It was merely a euphemism. Whereas, as you correctly say, for the Poles, a lot of those people actually were transferred to Siberia, to Kazakhstan, but they were also expected to die there. A really telling detail of this is that my grandfather was sent to the Gulag with a definite sentence.

He's given a definite sentence of eight years. My grandmother and my father are deported, because the families were, to Kazakhstan, Siberia, with an indefinite sentence. And the fact that there was no correspondence with this suggests that they expected both sets of these people to die before finite terms became an issue. This is Dan Snow's History. There's more on this topic coming up. Hey, I'm Don Wildman, and on American History Hit, my expert guests and I journey across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made the United States. From first flight to first ladies, from stitching the star-spangled banner to striking gold in California, to shooting for the moon with Apollo, we've got you covered. Catch new episodes

of American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit, every Monday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. as with your other side of the family in your your father's side finkelstein was sent to a as you say as a kind of member of the polish elite lucky not to be killed as so many of the polish officers were and he worked appalling conditions in the gulag in forestry saved by his wits and his his ability to prove himself useful and his clerical skills and mathematics and everything. Your grandmother and your father survived through her unbelievable tenacity. Kazakh winter spent in the open almost, people dying around them. As you say,

the kind of existence that implies that the Soviet Union certainly didn't care about them or actually wanted them to die during that captivity. My grandmother always used to tell me these stories and they were often told me as a kind of little tease or about the way that the Soviets were, you know, useless bungling bureaucrats and couldn't cope with her defiance, all of which was true, but didn't really do enough credit to her incredible toughness. Don't forget, this is somebody that I knew as granny who lived around the corner from me in Hendon Central and gave me pocket money and was endlessly indulgent. And when I studied for this book, I just understood what an extraordinarily formidable

person that she was. And the way that they lived in a house that was made of cow dung bricks that they had formed themselves in the previous summer, but lived a winter with no heating, which meant that it was below freezing indoors. And during that period, she still decides to teach my father languages, to tell him about the Odyssey and the Iliad, to teach him about the work of Schiller. She was so dedicated to his survival, but not only his physical survival, also his emotional and mental development, which is quite extraordinary. I mean, it's impossible really to find superlatives to talk about that part of the book. It's very emotional to read it, let alone I can imagine to write it and be part of that

family tradition. Then Hitler invades the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. And it's interesting. It feels like a temporary moment of slight weakness by Stalin because of the gigantic nature of that assault. The British and the Polish government do actually manage to extract some respite for the Poles that were imprisoned, that I think wouldn't have been the case in 43, 44, 45. But at this moment, Stalin concedes that those Poles, like your family,

in their camps will be released, sort of released, and allowed to form a Polish military unit. And if anything, Stalin actually goes, you know what, we kind of want these people out. They're awkward. Let's get them out of the Soviet Union. One of the reasons he does that is because they keep on asking where the officers are that he arrested. There's only so often he can lie. At one point, he actually gets on the phone, apparently to the NKVD and reassures the Poles that they've just been lost somehow in the kind of melee and chaos of war, even though he knows that he signed a document together with Beria and Molotov instructing that they be executed.

So he realises he shot the officers in what's called the Katyn Massacre, obviously about three different massacres. He knows what he's done and he kind of understands that if he keeps the Poles, however much he'd quite like them to fight with him, first of all, they probably wouldn't fight with him. And secondly, eventually, his lie will be exposed while those people are still there, and he doesn't want that. So he ultimately agrees to allow them, the Anders army, to leave to go to Iran. And that is a great achievement, because the British don't want these Poles either. There's an amazing

foreign office documentation, which I've got in the book, in which one of them says, you know, maybe it'd be better to let Stalin keep these people because he won't mind them dying. It won't be an embarrassment to him, whereas it will be difficult for us to let them die. So possibly our tactic ought to be to try and put this off as long as we possibly can, so that they die with him rather than with us and somebody underneath puts it i don't think this will read very well to future historians in which judgment they were correct it did not read very well that's an amazing moment and your grandfather went through all sorts of contortions and managed to

get reunited with your grandmother from their different places of captivity they came together as part of that army led by General Anders, the son, your father with them. You don't wax poetical about that moment because you don't need to, but it must just be the most extraordinary reunion. One of the things I try to do in this book is, first of all, no diversions into long political disquisition. These events speak for themselves.

The reader can make for them what themselves. They don't want my opinion and they don't want to relitigate Alfred Wiener, my maternal grandfather's old political battles. At one point, my son read it and I'd had a few paragraphs about his dispute with Hannah Arendt. And my son said,

you know, they don't want to read that. And he was right. So I've kept this to the story. You may a judgment for yourself, what the politics of it. And the second thing is, to let the emotion of it speak for itself. So I tried to organize the story in such a way that it's a compelling human narrative, that you always want to know what happens next. You always want to know what happens to the characters, you're emotionally engaged with them in the same way that I am. But when there are reunions in this book, some of those are the most emotionally compelling moments in the book,

and I don't want to spoil them by intruding a lot of my own thoughts at that moment. When I wrote this book, it speaks for itself politically and emotionally. That's why I told this story. And so therefore, I had to do that in the prose. It certainly does. So the Finkesteins arrive in an amazing moment when they arrive. They get off Soviet soil. They take a ferry boat across and they arrive in Iran.

It must have been an astonishing sense of relief. Let's go back now to the Dutch, the Dutch side, your mum's side. They are being transported to the east as well. What happens? They've gone to a camp called Westerbork, built by the Dutch with Jewish money and Jewish cooperation to house Jewish refugees who were coming there from Germany. And then the Germans take over and they take over Westerbork camp, build a railway spur right into the camp and start every Tuesday

taking the Dutch Jews and Dutch German Jews sometimes, whom they've concentrated in that place, taking them to the east, to Auschwitz or to Sobibor. And that is what happens to my great aunt. She goes to Sobibor, a place that listeners may not have heard of because in Auschwitz, but not many people, some people did survive Auschwitz because they were sent to work, whereas others were sent immediately to the gas chambers. In Sobibor, the lifespan of a Jew was three hours and there was really nobody left. None of the Dutch Jews who went to Sobibor survived. And that is where my

great-aunt, my great-uncle, my mother's first cousin, Fritz, that's where they went because they did not have any documents to save them. What do I mean by that? Himmler had decided that he was going to try to exchange some Jews for money, tanks, or other Germans who were in occupied countries. And what he needed, therefore, were Jews who had some exchange value, which meant they had papers from another country. And among other things, because it's a little bit more complicated than this, but the central fact of my mother is that she was a citizen of Paraguay. Now, you may ask me, oh, I didn't know that you had some Paraguayan blood. I do not. Nobody in my family has any Paraguayan links whatsoever. And it's a laughable suggestion, in fact. Nor did the Paraguayans think we did, nor did the Germans think we did, because they realized that my mother was a citizen of Paraguay in a completely false way, and so did the Americans. And yet, extraordinarily, the documents that said they were citizens of Paraguay

end up saving their life. There is a group of Polish diplomats based in Bern who were called the Vados Group after Alexander Vados, the charge d'affaires, who hit on the idea that if they can create passports for Paraguay, they can create exchange of value for Jews and help save their life or otherwise allow them to be interned or to move to other places in the world that aren't occupied by Germans. So they set about purchasing these

blank passports from the Paraguayan consular Swiss man called Rudolf Hooghly, who lives in Bern, filling these out in the name of Jews with photographs and then getting Hooghly to stamp them. And that is exactly what they did for about, I think there were about a thousand of those pamphlets. This document meant that when it came to deciding on the Tuesday transport, they had some form of exemption. And they ultimately are able to go to the place in which Himmler sent the Jews that had exchange value, which was Belsen, the camp he created for that purpose. But nobody gets exchanged because the Allies are concerned about who they'd be sending in the other direction. The Paraguayans don't want to recognise the documents, and the

Germans are desperate to do the deal but can't persuade the Allies to agree to it. And this carries on almost to the point where every deal possible collapses. And by this point, people in Belsen are sickening and they're dying. And yet the State Department continues an argument about corrupting the passport system and actually tries to persuade the power grinds at one point to completely deny these passports in a way that would have then definitely led straight to the gas chamber for everyone who held them. But ultimately, this doesn't happen. And 136 people in this entire 6 million deaths and 50,000 deaths in Belsen, 136 holders of these Latin American passports get swapped. And four of them

are my mother, her sisters, and my grandmother. An extraordinary thing to have happened, and one of the reasons why I call this a story of miraculous survival. There are lots of moral questions about the whole system of swapping, but the interesting thing when you're a family is how quickly those moral questions are drowned in issues of mere survival. Whenever you talk to a Holocaust survivor, there's never a straightforward survival story. There was always some extraordinary act of God, some moment, some strange. And I think that underlines the fact that in the normal run of things, everybody died.

There are no normal survival stories. And I find that very telling. I agree with you. Somebody described it as having to get each number on a six number combination lock come correct. And that's true. Actually, both for my mother's side, but also my father's side, where it's just simply amazing that they survived to meet each other and marry in Marble Arch. Tell me about the, because being swapped wasn't as simple as it sounds and it was deeply traumatic and tragic. They obviously weren't sure when they were called for this swap, but that's actually what was going to happen. Among, you know, a number of the completely unnerving things

was being sent to the showers and water coming out. And one of the things I was researching is, you know, what point did they know? My aunt has to, each Tuesday, she has to take old people in Vestiborg and put them on these carriages. And she says at that point, which must be in the late summer of 1943, she knew already that she was sending him to a certain death. So they did know, I think, about the gas chambers, certainly by this is January 1945. Then they have this extraordinary moment, which is they had money taken from them when they arrived at Westerbork. They had to count in their money. Along the way, there are various things for which there are costs. So there's a little shop in Westerbork where they bought, I think, a toothbrush.

Then they're also charged for the trains, right? That's pretty extraordinary. Half price if you were going to the gas chamber, the train was half price. I mean, honestly, and it was charged against your account. And then they were given this money back with all the charges taken out on the train heading to Switzerland, leaving the camp.

But also there is a last minute heart-stopping moment where a guard comes through and they decide they've got too many people on this train and they're actually not going to send all of them because it's a one-for-one swap. And the guard comes through, sees my family, says, right, off. And my Aunt Ruth says, we can't leave because Greta, my grandmother, was by that point very ill and she can't really move easily. And he looked at them, shrugged his shoulders and went, all right, stay. And that was what happened. So when you read that, you just think that story was the opening story of my mother's obituary when she died in 2017. And I think justly so, it was pretty extraordinary. I'm Matt Lewis.

And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder,

rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. They come to the UK, and you explain to me about sort of working class immigrant Toryism and your grandmother had that wonderful expression about Buckingham Palace and the affection that people not over endowed with money and privilege and access the affection people had for the monarchy in the British state my My grandmother, Lucia, my father's mother,

used to say, while the Queen is safe in Buckingham Palace, we're safe in Hendon Central. So it's interesting you call it working... So they certainly, they didn't have very much money when they came to this country. No, sorry, they were significant intellectuals. No, it's an interesting way of describing it because I think it definitely, definitely links to that phenomenon.

I was struck by you saying it because I think it's actually worthwhile discussing it. One of the things that's really interesting is that we come from sort of outside the class system because of our history. If you look at my grandfather, he was called the Iron King, Dolly Finkelstein. He was a very, very wealthy man. But obviously, they come to this country and they're in the welfare system. My grandfather on my mother's side, he was a highly educated individual, but always completely sort of outside the system. And an outsider, even in this country, I think as a sort of, you know, he used to give people George Mikish's How to Be an

Alien as a present. And when he dies, he has his funeral eulogy in German. So he feels from outside. So it's interesting that I don't instinctively relate to the class term, but certainly a small C conservatism is a natural response, political response to what's happened to the family. And at different times, my parents voted different things. And so it's not, it wasn't a big C conservatism always, but it definitely was a feeling that stability, the suburbs, the rule of law. My dad brought this to me, but I mean, I wouldn't tape records for people because it broke intellectual property rights. And the reason for that was, you know, we used to have discussion and my father would say, if you want to be involved in politics, what's the point of that if you think you can just break any law anyway why are you spending all that time trying to create them and they felt very strongly about that and there's no doubt that linked to

their experience so yeah I think calling it that actually I listened to I thought that it's a very interesting way of putting it because it wasn't quite that but it has immensely strong correspondence to it. I should say of course we know that a typical experience of immigration is that people they come to a place and are forced to take up roles initially certainly far beneath their levels of education and that they've experienced back home as these various qualifications and experiences aren't valued in that. My grandmother contemplated taking a job as a tea lady in the johnson chemical factory behind her house and eventually becomes a language teacher and my grandfather for all of his riches he dies in a small um semi-detached house on the on the main road going through hendon central

the family photos that you share the stories of your childhood there is a happiness. You might even say there's a tranquility that is inexplicable given the trauma people have been through. How would you characterize that? Yeah, so this is a story with like a very, very long tale of happy ending. It's a concentrated period that I've written about. But my parents lived for decades after that, and very happily, too, around the corner from Lusha, my grandmother. And my father felt they were fated to meet each other. So he has this some edge of him that thinks this extraordinary event, well, it brought him together with my mother. And he felt that was, you know, almost meant to be. He wasn't a mystical individual anyway.

He was a scientist, and so was my mum. But they certainly felt that. And they love this country a lot. It's orderliness. For all that, my father still felt a great fealty towards the Poles. And my mother to Holland, I suppose, where she'd grown up. So yes, they felt that sense of happiness. You know, my mother and father talked about their experiences. My mother, obviously, people were very interested in the fact that she'd known Anne Frank and Ruth had gone to school with Margot. And obviously, my grandfather's library, all those things had a big part. And my father did want people to know about what had happened to the Poles, but they wanted to live in the future. They did not want to live in the past. They were victims, but they didn't want their life to be taken over by it. And they particularly didn't want mine. There's a concept called second generation for Holocaust survivors. And my mother did not believe in that in the slightest. She felt she was a survivor of the Holocaust. And I was somebody who'd been brought up to live in this

country. And she wasn't going to let Hitler ruin her life, but she wasn't certainly not going to let him ruin mine. Daniel, let's come to the contemporary politics of it, which you start the book out and talk about the end. You said a few years ago, I won't say how many years ago, you had a significant birthday, and you gave a speech that you said, well, thank goodness, isn't it nice to be living here in this day and age and think of all the things our forebears went through, and thank goodness that's a chapter nice to be living here in this day and age and think of all the things our forebears went through. And thank goodness, that's a chapter of history, which has just

closed. We don't have to even contemplate that we will ever experience or anyone in this room at this party will experience something like that. And you now say you're not as sure as you once were. No, you can see around Europe that what I would describe as living in the post-post-war era, there were certain things that, lessons that were learned in the cataclysm of the Second World War that produced the Pax Americana, America abandoning the isolationism with which the right in America had dallied

certainly throughout the 1920s and 30s, had received its contradiction in the events that had happened in the war. There was the understanding that at the end of Schindler's List, they're in the Brinlitz camp, and they asked this Russian who liberated them where they should go. And he says, I don't know where you should go. I wouldn't go east. And then he pauses for a minute and goes, and I wouldn't go west. And that is the reason why the state of Israel with all of its flaws and all of its problems was created a case which people completely understood over a long period of time.

So all those things were part of the post-war political argument and an understanding of the basic value of liberal democracy and that's what western countries in particular stood for. Now each of those things is being questioned. You can see the United States is contemplating returning to the leadership of Donald Trump with the extraordinary consequences that would have for Western liberal democracies. You can see the rise in places like Hungary or even in Poland. And it is different and it's not as bad, but you can see the, you know, the edges of it in this country and in France, and you've seen it in Holland and in Sweden and in Italy. And in each of those places, political forces, which were completely discredited by what happened in the Second World War, have begun some sort of rise.

And people regard some of these arguments as kind of antiquated or irrelevant or hyperbolic in relation to what's happening now. And all I'm saying is, do I think the things that happened to my parents will happen to my children? No. Do I think it could? Yes. The big question of our times, what can we all do about that? You've done something, you've written a bestselling book about the perils of totalitarianism, dictatorship, extremism, anti-Semitism. What do we have to do, those of us who do have that kind of historic understanding and attachment of, well, and how that awareness of how precious and unusual that post-war liberal Western democracy has been in the broad scope of human history. What do we do about that? So my grandfather, Alfred, strongly believed that the weapon was truth. And I start with the words, the truth lies at the feet of liberty. And that is a real story, the fact that my grandfather's First World War medals were dropped by the Statue of Liberty by his daughters, worried that they would be seen as spies when they came into Ellis Island, a correct fear, actually. But it's also a broader point, which is that my grandfather believed that liberty and truth

belong together and that he would simply expose who the Nazis were. And there's evidence in this book of its success as a method, but there's an awful lot of evidence, obviously, that it was not enough. But certainly that's part of our armory, telling the truth. And it's one of the reasons why I've told this story. The second part of what we can do about it is to make sure that we make the capitalist liberal democracy that we try to establish with people work. My son often says, you want to give people an argument, dad, and what they want is a house. And I think we've got to make it work for everyone, the capitalist liberal democracy, otherwise the people for whom it doesn't work will turn against it. You know, it's no coincidence that some of these developments have come after the financial

crash. And, you know, the fact that there's low continuing growth is linked with the rise of some of these kind of populist movements. So we've got a task of making it work and not just making it work, but making it work for everyone. And the third thing is we've got to be prepared to defend it when necessary. So lots of people correctly say to me, your parents' experience must make you very sympathetic to refugees and to international solutions to the refugee problem on a fairly generous basis. And it certainly does. But they also forget to

add at that point, your grandparents didn't want to be refugees. They wanted to live where they were living. My grandfather's funeral was in Germany, he wanted to be a German Jew. And we've got to be prepared to try to join in the struggle to retain democracies in the places where they are. And sometimes I can see this in the Iraq war, for example, that probably led me into error, that instinct. I'm not ashamed of the instinct. I couldn't watch Saddam Hussein putting people into mincemeat machines and think, I don't really want to do anything about it. Sometimes I think that may lead you to do more about it than you really can. I'm not ashamed of the instinct, although the outcome was baleful.

it than you really can. I'm not ashamed of the instinct, although the outcome was baleful. So I think you've got to do all of those things and you can't really leave any of them out, I think. Well, you've done more than most. So thank you very much, Daniel Fingerslin, for coming on the podcast. What is the book called? It's called Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad, a Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival. Thanks so much. you