Daniel Finkelstein – Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad

A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival

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.

Danny’s mother Mirjam Weiner was the youngest of three daughters born in Germany to Alfred and Margarethe Weiner. 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 Holland. Before long, the family was rounded up, robbed, humiliated and sent to Bergen-Belsen.

Danny’s father Ludwik was born in Lwow, the only child of a prosperous Jewish family. In 1939, after Hitler and Stalin carved up Poland, the family was rounded up by the communists and sent to do hard labour in a Siberian gulag. Working as slave labourers on a collective farm, his father survived the freezing winters in a tiny house they built from cow dung.

Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad is a deeply moving, personal and at times horrifying memoir about his parents’ experiences at the hands of the two genocidal dictators of the 20th century. It is a story of persecution and survival; and the consequences of totalitarianism told with the almost unimaginable bravery of two ordinary families shining through.

Daniel Finkelstein is a British journalist and opinion writer. A former executive editor of The Times, he continues to write for the paper. He has been Political Columnist of the Year four times and recently joined the board of Chelsea Football Club. He was appointed to the House of Lords in 2013.

Daniel Finkelstein will be in conversation with Danny Danziger

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

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(Julian Bunkall, Simon Conibear, James Emson, Nick Harland, Anthony Parson, Kim Slowe, Jonathan Walsh)