WWII was started by Hitler and Stalin, both killed millions of people, both deported millions, and this is the story of a girl who survived the Holocaust and a boy who survived deportation in Siberia. This is the type of book I always choose to read - WW2, Nazis and anti-Semitism, but I found this book over-long.

e. the author's grandparents) were truly remarkable people, including Alfred Wiener, founder of the renowned Wiener Library (and from there, the Wiener Holocaust Study centre in Tel Aviv), Grete Wiener from Hamburg who in the 1920s obtained a PhD in economics, Adolf Finkelsein, the "King of Iron" in Poland and his society wife Lusia who turned out to have a backbone of steel and an indomitable spirit. But there are bigger themes running through Finkelstein’s writing, elevating Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad to the status of a modern classic – and just as deserving of acclaim as Philippe Sands’s East West Street or Edmund de Waal’s The Hare With Amber Eyes, both of which used inventive ways to examine the Holocaust afresh (using the unlikely prisms of jurisprudence and ceramics, respectively).Finkelstein's narrative is nothing short of epic, chronicling the harrowing experiences of two families uprooted by the horrors of World War II. But later in the book comes the good parts where you learn of all these families were able to accomplish, despite what they had been through. It is a story of persecution; survival; and the consequences of totalitarianism told with the almost unimaginable bravery of two ordinary families shining through. The author skillfully weaves together the stories of his grandparents, Alfred Wiener and Ludwik, highlighting their resilience and strength in the face of unimaginable adversity.

There is a moment in that when Ruth is getting 16 years old and there is a very poignant conversation between mother Grete and Ruth. It is an important book and joins the contemporary Holocaust books of Philippe Sands and Jonathan Freedland.PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio. The author, the grandson and son of the protagonists, narrates their survival against a historical backdrop of major events of WWII. Today: after a harrowing journey across the Soviet Union, Daniel's father and grandmother find themselves in the freezing Siberian wastelands, trying to survive as slave labourers on a collective farm. Meanwhile, in Poland, Finkelstein’s father’s family had built a hugely successful iron business, and lived a settled, happy life in a peaceful multicultural city. I imagine this book will become important to the further teaching of the Holocaust on both an individual human level, and on a more socio-political one too.

A collection of letters written by prime ministers, for example, which I began when I was reading a biography of each one. Photograph: Michael Kooren/Reuters A father and son at a commemoration of the liberation of Westerbork camp in the Netherlands. This truly remarkable book brings vividly home the horrors perpetrated against one family by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, serving as an indictment of their crimes against millions. Many characters and events throughout the book will aowstruck you but there is one character who shook me the most, whose name is Vera Ivanovna whose sympathy for Ludwik was very obvious.If like Finkelstein’s mother’s family, for example, you’ve fled Berlin because it’s no longer safe to be Jewish there, and you’re in Amsterdam, living close to Anne Frank, once war breaks out, are you better off in the Netherlands or in Britain?

There are not too many whys either in Daniel Finkelstein’s powerful and beautifully written new book, which tells the story of how his Jewish parents lived through the Holocaust, as European civilisation was ripped apart by nazism and communism in the 1930s and 40s. Or the dining room coupons from the liner that took my mother and her sisters on the last leg of the journey from Belsen to New York.They ended up, through circuitous means, in Britain, met, married and lived a blissfully quiet life in Hendon. Such a brilliantly written book about how Hitler’s and Stalin’s appalling states ripped two families apart, and how they - somehow - managed not only to survive WWII but produce such a remarkable family at the end.