Daniel Finkelstein (2023) Hitler Stalin Mum & Dad. A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival.

In the Sunday Times bestseller, Daniel Finkelstein deals in the mundane and miraculous. He concludes with both.

‘Our family has survived. Love has conquered hate.’

In the battle with Hitler and Stalin, Mum’s victory is over Hitler and the Nazis. Dad’s victory over Stalin and Communism. Surviving, starting a family and thriving, a thumbing of the nose at totalitarianism.

Finkelstein’s memoir fits broadly into a type of Holocaust literature which has grown in recent years. Families of survivors telling their parent’s or grandparent’s story. Art Spieglman’s Maus, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is an example of this.

A picture book in which Gentiles were portrayed as pigs. Nazis, in uniform, as cats. Jews as mice.

Different kinds of animals in which the Nazis have the whip hand.

In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a satire of USSR communism, the pigs learn to walk on two legs. ‘Four legs good, two legs bad,’ is no longer seen as an impediment. The latter as a virtue.

Similarly, the Israelite holocaust against its neighbours, regarded as justified. The mice have become the pigs.  

Sir Martin Gilbert, over twenty-years ago, in a Foreword to Survival Holocaust Survivors Tell Their Story suggested, ‘Finding publishers is often hard.’

In the post-Second-World-War world, most people were indifferent and unknowing. Many memoirs were published in Yiddish. The numbers published, read and reviewed were negligible.

‘Even today the number is probably four or five thousand.’

Many of us will be familiar with the most widely read. Elie Wiesel – Night. Primo Levi – If This Is a Man.  Viktor Frankl – Man’s Search for Meaning. Anne Frank – The Diary of a Young Girl.

The latter, written by a Jewish teenager in hiding in Amsterdam, and murdered in Ravensbruck, has created a cultural industry and is perhaps the most popular.

Popular is the wrong word in the right way. Justin Bieber, for example, is cited as having visited Ann Frank’s attic hideout in Amsterdam in 2013.

‘Anne was a great girl,’ he wrote in the visitors’ book. And in a play on words, he was widely condemned for added, ‘Hopefully she would have been a belieber’.

Daniel Finklestein’s mother, a survivor of the Westerbok and Ravensbruck concentration camp said Anne might have been a ‘bieber’. She was a normal teenage girl. One she’d gone to school with and known. Margot, Anne’s older sister, was a few years older and very smart. She’d been surprised at Anne’s emotional maturity, portrayed in her writing, but not at her death. In death camps most people died. That was a given. Those that lived and survived were the exception to the general rule.

Anne and Margot’s disappearance from their Montessori school life in Amsterdam meant they’d gone into hiding.

  Alfred Wiener, Finklestein’s maternal grandfather, a Jewish activist who founded the Wiener Holocaust Library and was one of the first people to recognise the danger posed by Hitler’s National Socialist ideology.

Post-war Wiener helped and advised Otto Frank edit, publish and publicising his daughter Anne’s diaries.

 Daniel Finklestein, his grandson, stressed the killing of around six million Jews in Europe was framed in ideologies of hate and denial. The equally murderous Stalinist regime, with the Yalta Agreement and in interest of real politic largely got a free pass.

He’s calling the totalitarian regime of the USSR to account. So it’s an added dimension to Holocaust literature and a reminder from the past. In Moscow, they signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, officially called the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union, on August 23, 1939.

 Daniel’s father was born in Lwow. His grandparents were wealthy Jews and friends of the former Polish Prime Minister, who lived nearby.

Then they weren’t wealthy Jews. Just Jews. Scapegoated and stigmatised.

America pursued a policy of anti-Semitism, with public figures like Charles Lindberg and Henry Ford advocating a policy of isolationism and shutting American borders to Jews in particular.

‘Truth lies at the feet of liberty.’

While his father, Ludwik laboured in a Siberian gulag, his mum escaped from Nazi Germany to Amsterdam. We know what happened next. A family joke was that Reagan (then the American President) was visiting Bergen-Belsen, his mum joked, ‘So what? I’ve been there.’

    His grandfather Alfred Wiener was an archivist and activist. He prefigured the Shoah Archive and the Holocaust Centre at Beth Shalom. He documented how the Nazis came to power and who said what and when. The racial laws against Jews used in Hitler’s Germany were largely copied from those used against blacks in America.

When Rudolf Hess, one of Adolf Hitler’s closest confidants and the Deputy Führer of Nazi Germany parachuted into Eaglesham, a village near Glasgow, 10th May, 1941—just south of the River Clyde—offering to negotiate a peace deal with Germany, Wiener and his team could compile a detailed report on who he was, and where he stood in the Nazi hierarchy of hate.

Allies used Wiener’s archive and detailed knowledge, including the Russians, in the Nuremberg trials. Ironically, when the war ended, British funding for his work ceased.

Nazis had been routed.

Wiener, of course, saw a similar pattern of fascism in the race hatred against blacks or diaspora communities that conservative politicians had stirred in Britain. It’s an easy step to denounce Vladimir Putin as holding the same totalitarian ideology as Stalin. A more difficult step is to recognise the eugenic and race hatred policies supported by the moron’s moron Trump as being fascist.

Wiener, as a pre-war Jew, argued that the establishment of a Jewish state in British Palestine wouldn’t be feasible for several reasons, including the majority of the population in Palestine weren’t Jewish. After the Holocaust, he came to support the establishment of a Jewish state but remained unsure how it would be feasible economically. He didn’t consider how it would become a proxy state for American involvement in the Middle East. With, for example, the U.S. providing over $3 billion annually in military aid to Israel, making it the largest recipient of American foreign aid. Following the money is a good rule of thumb for cats, mice, pigs.    

I’m sure more than one Palestinian Alfred Wiener is documenting the evidence framing the ideologies of hate now. And there are different totalitarianisms. Not just Nazi, or Communist, or Putinism, but the kind exported and imported and backed by America, land of the free as the uniformed cat toys with the mouse. Read on.  

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