Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad by Daniel Finkelstein - WWII Family Memoir - Non Fiction - Paperback

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Condition: BRAND NEW. Format: Paperback. ISBN: 9780008483852. Publisher: William Collins. Overview:. Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad is Daniel Finkelstein's Sunday Times bestselling memoir tracing his parents' extraordinary survival through the two great totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century. Combining rigorous historical research with deeply personal family recollection, Finkelstein reconstructs how his mother endured Hitler's death camps and his father survived Stalin's slave labour camps. Written with clarity and restraint, it is a moving testament to endurance, love, and the fragile threads of chance that decide who lives and who does not.. About the Book:. Daniel Finkelstein, the well-known British political columnist and broadcaster, spent years piecing together the fragmented histories of his mother Mirjam Wiener and his father Ludwik Finkelstein. Mirjam's family, prominent and cultured in pre-war Germany, was swept into the machinery of Nazi persecution, ultimately surviving Bergen-Belsen through an extraordinary series of circumstances. Ludwik, meanwhile, was deported from Poland to a Soviet labour camp in Siberia, enduring starvation, brutal winters, and forced labour on a collective farm before eventually reaching safety. Finkelstein interlaces these two parallel stories with wider historical context, drawing on letters, documents, and family testimony to illuminate how ordinary families were caught between Hitler's Final Solution and Stalin's Gulag system. The result is a book that operates simultaneously as an intimate family memoir and as an accessible work of twentieth-century history. Reviewers and readers have praised its emotional power and its refusal to sensationalise suffering, instead allowing the facts and the family's own words to carry the weight of the story. It is a book about persecution and survival, but also about resilience, identity, and the long shadow that history casts over subsequent generations, including Finkelstein's own li