TWO ROADS HOME

Two progenitors survive the Holocaust, against all the odds, in this extraordinary narrative.

“Fascists and communists both believed…that the individuals who made up the elites needed to be eliminated by force,” writes Finkelstein. His mother’s side of the family was afflicted first by the former, forced into exile from Germany in the rise to power of a Nazi Party that paterfamilias Alfred Wiener foresaw after returning home from World War I. His father’s side of the family, meanwhile, was similarly exiled from their home on “one of Lwów’s most prestigious and expensive streets, forced on Stalin’s orders onto the steppes as agricultural laborers. Wiener organized and edited the largest Jewish newspaper in Germany before Hitler rose to power. When the Third Reich emerged, he traveled to England and the U.S. to continue his campaign, trying desperately to secure exit visas for his family. As Finkelstein writes, grimly, of Wiener’s children’s playmates in Amsterdam, most died in concentration camps far to the east. That the Wiener family survived involved moments of good luck coupled with small acts of defiance. The same was true of Finkelstein’s forebears in the east, whose paterfamilias joined a Polish contingent of the Red Army. Stalin tolerated but mistrusted the surviving Poles and finally allowed them to travel to Iran and there join forces with the British. “The problem was that the British didn’t really want them, certainly not all of them,” writes the author, adding, “especially those who weren’t soldiers.” Nonetheless, all were eventually evacuated to England or the U.S. even though neither government wanted them until Henry Morgenthau convinced Franklin Roosevelt to establish the lifesaving War Refugee Board. Finkelstein’s text, richly detailed and full of explorations of little-known corners of history, closes with an unlikely denouement given the slaughter he grimly recounts: “In the battle with Hitler and Stalin, the victory belongs to Mum and Dad.”

An excellent contribution to the literature of the Shoah and a moving homage to the will to endure.