“She rebelled against the idea that I should have to claim that burden, but she would answer any question I asked her about it. She was very matter of fact about things. She was going to get on with her life, she wasn’t going to let this spoil it. She was going to enjoy herself; her children were going to enjoy themselves.”
It’s an incredible story, novelistic and almost impossible to precis, but the essence is this: Finkelstein is here because of two extraordinary women, his grandmothers Lusia Finkelstein and Grete Wiener.
The Finkelsteins — Lusia and Dolu, an industrialist — lived in what was Lwów in Poland, but which is now Lviv in Ukraine. (However, Finkelstein pointedly uses the Polish spelling: Dolu was devoted to the idea of a free and independent Poland).
Ludwik and Lusia in the early 1950s (Photo: HarperCollins)
When Hitler and Stalin divided Poland between them, the Soviets arrested Dolu for capitalism — Khrushchev moved into their street, to oversee the purge of the Polish elite — and sent Lusia and her only child Ludwik to a state farm.
His mother’s parents — Grete and Alfred, Berliners who had fled to Amsterdam when Hitler became chancellor — were also separated. Alfred, the archivist of Nazi crimes since the 1920s, was in America educating the allies about Nazism.
His collection would become the Wiener Library. (When Hess landed in Britain, for instance, Wiener briefed the government).
Daniel's grandfather Alfred Wiener painted by his aunt Eva (Photo: HarperCollins)
Grete and her three daughters, Ruth, Eva and Mirjam, were sent to Westerbork, then Belsen, where Grete starved herself to feed her daughters.
The love echoes from the page. Lusia walked in the snow to get water for Ludwik as he lay on the floor of a lean-to in a collective farm, too cold and hungry to move. She taught him The Iliad from memory.
They survived because Lusia’s sister Dorotea sent food parcels, not all of which arrived, and because Ludwik established a dung heap for fuel and burnt copies of A Short History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , written in Kazakh, which incredibly no one seemed to want. When Hitler invaded Russia, the Soviets released them.
The crucial Paraguayan passport (Photo: HarperCollins)
The Wieners survived because Alfred arranged fake Paraguayan passports, which saved his family from the extermination camps. Ruth had to help the elderly onto the trains going east. Mirjam, who was ten, cried for days.
During the last winter of the war, the family was released from Belsen. As they left, the money taken from them when they arrived was returned with reductions, which reminds me that Nazis are insane. From Belsen, they went to Switzerland.
There were moments of trauma in the research. Grete’s only sister, Trude, and her family were transported to Sobibor where they were murdered.
Grete and Trude in 1919 (Photo: HarperCollins)
Finkelstein has her letter of farewell to Grete: “I kiss you, my dear, a thousand times in my thoughts…” “I got to know people who are no longer here,” he tells me. “I stumbled into things and thought: ‘There’s a bit of me in that.’” Dolu had a gift for conciliation, he says: “I have always had that as well.”
He talks about Grete’s PhD, which he had translated, with particular delight. “It was [about] how utopian German free marketeers didn’t understand pragmatic English free- market thinking, which is,” and he sounds astounded, “my own political obsession!”
Similarly, he had always wondered why his son is a gifted guitarist; then he learnt that his aunts played the piano every day in Amsterdam.
Mirjam and Ludwik at the beach (Photo: HarperCollins)
I ask who he most resembles. “Lusia said I look a lot like Dolu. There’s a lot of Alfred in my sense of humour and my intellectual habits and in my ears.”
Alfred was brilliant, a conscious man in a world falling to madness. “It [liberal democracy] was slipping away, and he tried so hard to stop it slipping and couldn’t.” He was indomitable: he helped to prove The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were a forgery in a famous court case; when the Nazis destroyed his archive, he built it up again.
His collection of provincial German telephone books is the only evidence that some Jews were murdered in the Shoah.
It taught Daniel: “How much what we take for granted can disappear and how calamitous it is when it does. You always feel that if something truly unjust were to happen to you, somebody would do something. You read their story and realise — no, they wouldn’t.”
Mirjam and Ludvik on their wedding day, in London in 1957 (Photo: HarperCollins)
It is this view that explains his liberal policy on immigration and his belief in intervention. “I abstained deliberately — as did the Labour Party — on the second reading of the illegal migration bill,” he reminds me.
“There was simply too much in it I couldn’t support. I have also been quite outspoken about the language the Home Secretary [Suella Braverman] has used.
Some of that I do take a bit personally. My grandfather [Alfred] did not want to be a refugee. He wanted to be German. Dolu wanted to be Polish.”
It also explains his moderate conservatism: he was an early critic of Boris Johnson. “They [the Johnsonians] had begun to believe in ruling by popular opinion without the constraints of institutions and the law and that’s very dangerous.”
Family Friday night dinner in the 1970s (Photo: HarperCollins)
He adds that as a schoolboy at University College School, an independent day school in London he “wouldn’t make tapes [from records] for people because it was stealing their intellectual property rights”, which I find incredibly touching.
I ask if he was surprised by Corbynism. He was not. “I was surprised that people were surprised. In anti-imperialism [and] socialism there has always been this strand of conspiratorial thinking.”
But he does now marvel that Corbyn, “still can’t see it. It’s [an] epic misunderstanding. They couldn’t see it was a conspiracy theory that was completely threatening to Jews because they didn’t see themselves as the sort of people who would hold to racial stereotypes.”
And, like Alfred, “I thought: isn’t somebody going to do something? I mean, inside the Labour Party, democratically. But they seemed to let it happen.”
Mirjam and Ludwik in around 2000 (Photo: HarperCollins)
The Shoah is inexplicable of course, but he offers, “a little observation”. His mother was rounded up in south Amsterdam on June 20, 1943. It was a Sunday. “They take them to different squares where there are trams waiting to take them to the station”.
He pauses. “There are Sunday morning games going on, the sort that go on in any park and they carry on while they are registering the Jews. People can be brought to regard as perfectly normal things that are horrendous.”
After the war Dolu’s family came to England, as did Alfred and his daughters. In 1956, his parents met at a Jewish youth group, in London. Ludwik, an engineer, became an authority on measurement and control engineering who planned London’s response to a nuclear war, which feels apt: if you are raised in a gulag, and don’t neglect your Homer, you are unlikely to panic. (In fact, Finkelstein notes that at the age of 12 Dolu did the books at the state farm. After announcing their release, the Soviets tried to persuade the family to remain).
His parents, “did not merely claim to have happy lives”, says Finkelstein, “they did have them. They really loved each other. Beyond this disaster the rest of their life was tranquil.
“They had the right to be victims, but they weren’t going to embrace victimhood.
"They weren’t going to imagine that because a neighbour was furious with them, things were going to happen again. They weren’t going to resign from the synagogue council in a furious row about something.“
“The Soviet experiment was to destroy the Polish elite,” he says. “They were going to take away Dolu’s house, take away his business, send him to the gulag, ensure that none of them could ever come back.
"He ended up in this country with nothing and his grandchildren are now a knight, a permanent secretary in the civil service and me. In one generation, the Soviet experiment completely failed.”
Finkelstein returned to Lwów a few years ago with his cousin, the writer Philippe Sands. They visited Dolu’s “incredible modern house” at 12 Herburtów Street, built in 1938, the year before the cataclysm.
It still has the original radiators that Dolu, who was called the Iron King of Lwów, installed, and the locking mechanisms he designed for the doors.
“It always worried me a lot,” he says, “that the trains that took them to Siberia might have run on Finkelstein and Fehl railway tracks.” But Mirjam taught him to see the good in life, and so he says the visit, “was a magical experience”, and I believe him.
'Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad 'is published next week by William Collins and is available to purchase for £25.
