Hitler | Stalin | Mum&Dad - A Memoir of Miraculous Survival - Instytut Pileckiego

Book Talk featuring Daniel Finkelstein. The event will be moderated by Mateusz Fałkowski. 

"Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad. A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival" 

Book Talk featuring Daniel Finkelstein. The event will be moderated by Mateusz Fałkowski. 

11.04, 18.00 | Pariser Platz 4A, 10117 Berlin | Registration: https://forms.gle/JrFCr2N9QpAtHxdT7

THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR

Winner of the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2023

From longstanding political columnist and commentator Daniel Finkelstein, a powerful memoir exploring both his mother and his father’s devastating experiences of persecution, resistance and survival during the Second World War.

Daniel Finkelstein´s mother was a recipient of a fake Paraguay passport issued by the Ładoś Group:

"Aleksander Lados saved my mother and numerous others from the Holocaust and deserves recognition for his bravery."

Daniel’s mother Mirjam Wiener was the youngest of three daughters born in Germany to Alfred and Margarete Wiener. Alfred, a decorated hero from the Great War, is now widely acknowledged to have been the first person to recognise the existential danger Hitler posed to the Jews and began, in 1933, to catalogue in detail Nazi crimes. After moving his family to Amsterdam, he relocated his library to London and was preparing to bring over his wife and children when Germany invaded the Netherlands. Before long, the family was rounded up, robbed and sent to starve in Bergen-Belsen.

Watch Roger Moourhouse´s lecture about the Lados Group:

Daniel’s father Ludwik was born in Lwów, the only child of a prosperous Jewish family. In 1939, after Hitler and Stalin carved up Poland, Ludwik’s father was arrested and sentenced to hard labour in the Gulag. Meanwhile, deported to Siberia and working as a slave labourer on a collective farm, Ludwik survived the freezing winters in a tiny house he built from cow dung.

Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad is a deeply moving, personal and at times horrifying memoir about Finkelstein’s parents’ experiences at the hands of the two genocidal dictators of the twentieth century. It is a story of persecution; survival; and the consequences of totalitarianism told with the almost unimaginable bravery of two ordinary families shining through.

Read Daniel Finkelstein´s article published in "The Jewish Chronicle":