Tanya Gold
Tanya Gold Interviews Lord Daniel Finkelstein on his new book ‘Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad’
Tanya Gold - Lord Daniel Finkelstein on his new book: “Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad”
- Good evening, everybody. My name is Tanya Gold. I’m a freelance journalist and it’s my great pleasure to be here tonight with Danny, Lord Finkelstein, the conservative peer journalist of the Times and author of “Everything In Moderation,” and more recently, the bestseller “Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad,” which in the US, where it will appear very shortly, it will be called “Two Roads Home.” “Hitler, Stalin, Mum, and Dad” is a book of extraordinary clarity and beauty, and it’s the story of Lord Finkelstein’s parents, Mirjam Wiener and Ludwik Finkelstein, who respectively escaped Hitler’s Germany and Soviet Russia. So really, that’s a summary of the book and good evening, Danny, welcome.
Thank you very much indeed. Welcome to everybody who’s online. You’ll have to excuse my slightly sort of odd background. I’m in Parliament, I’m in the House of Lords, which is also why this kind of slightly odd jacket and tie combo for the, for what is the Zoom. But apart from a few distant bells, there should be, they’ve got one little booth for doing Zooms. And I was very worried that Lord Griffiths was going to still be in it when the lockdown university began, but he has vacated the premises, so I’m left free to do it.
Danny, when I met with you to interview you about this book for the “Jewish Chronicle,” I rather impertinently suggested to you that I didn’t think that your grandfather, Dolu Finkelstein, would be at all surprised to see you in the House of Lords, despite everything that happened to your family in the middle of the 20th century. I’d like to start by talking to you about your father’s, your father, Ludwik’s family, the Finkelsteins of Lwow and specifically your grandfather, Dolu. Could you start by telling us about him and where he came from and who he was?
Absolutely. So when I was doing one of my talks on the book, somebody said to me, “Your family was quite well off.” And I said, “I think you’re missing the point, actually,” what they were was rich. And I really discovered this while I was doing the book, not having understood it completely as a child, because it wasn’t, you know, by the time they got here, their position at all. My grandfather was an iron and steel magnate whose nickname was the Iron King, and he owned a steel mill, a big iron and steel warehousing and retailing outfit, employed many people, was a member of the city council, was a leading figure of among the Jewish community in the city and was married, probably an arranged marriage to my grandmother, Lusia. She was actually, her formal name was Amalia, but she never could stand that name. So, she was known always as Lusia and Dolu and Lusia lived, first of all in the centre of Lwow in the sort of big commercial area where there were lots of other Jewish people who lived there. And eventually in 1938, they built this extraordinary art deco house on the hill in a place called Hebertov Street in Lwow. And they imagined, because the Finkelsteins have been there for hundreds of years, that they are starting the beginning of a journey that will last hundreds of years more in that city. But actually they lived there for only a year. And after they were expelled from it, they never went back.
And your grandparents were great Polish patriots, weren’t they?
Yes, so Lwow and that’s a very good, that’s completely correct, Tanya. Lwow was an area which had gone back and forward between different powers and, you know, it was the way of sophisticated, I suppose, Western-orientated people living in that area to learn German. But once the Polish nation had been established after the first World War, and the city had passed backwards and forwards between the Russians and the Ukrainians and the Poles and the Austria-Hungarian Empire, they were very committed to the idea of an independent Poland, a multi-ethnic Poland. And the emblem of that, he wasn’t a liberal by any means, but the emblem of that was Marshal Pilsudski. And when I was in my 20s, my father was given a clock with Marshal Pilsudski riding on a horse on the clock. And this used to play the brigade song on the hour unless he turned it off, which we always insisted he did.
I mean, I’m going to ask you later in the talk about the process of research and how you found out as much as you do about your grandparents. But is there any extent to which the Finkelsteins saw what was coming?
So, when you look at their house, the beautiful house that they built, you’re struck by a number of things. Obviously, their wealth and their progressive spirit, because it stands out from all the houses around them. But the other thing, you know, very much struck my wife, we talked a lot about it, is their confidence that they’re going to, that this, they built this house not knowing at all what was about to happen to them. It’s just slightly different from my, from the other side of the family. But as it, as what happened to them is something that people did not know even now, lots of people who’ve read my book said, “My goodness, I didn’t know anything about that.” You can’t really blame them not knowing before it happened. So just to briefly, what happens in 1939 is that Hitler and Stalin have a pact and part of that pact allows them, allows Hitler to invade parts of Europe, which include my mother, who was living in Holland at that time, because they knew that the Soviets flank was protected. But the main objective of it was to divide up Eastern and Central Europe between the Nazis and the Germans. And the Germans invade Poland. And then the Russians come up first. The Lwowians wonder whether they aren’t coming to sort of rescue Lwow, but in fact they’re coming to conquer and they take over the city and bring with them the economic system of the Communists. This will sound familiar to everybody. They create an election, which is essentially rigged.
As a result of that election, Lwow becomes Soviet Ukraine and it becomes Lviv and they then set about arresting everybody who’s got any sort of civic role or international contact, by which I mean yes, of course my grandfather, a very rich individual, a civic leader on the city council, but not just him. Head teachers, shop owners. I always say the Nazis arrested all the Jews who happened to be shop owners, some of them, whereas the Russians arrested all the shop owners, some of whom happened to be Jews. But it was a similar idea to decapitate the elite of Poland. And they, if you spoke Esperanto or you had, or you were a Philatelist and therefore were in correspondence with foreigners, if you were a Socialist, they were particularly keen to arrest other Socialists who might not be seized of the correct Socialist doctrine. All of these people were arrested. My grandfather loses all of his businesses, all of his savings, and ultimately they lose the house as well, they’re expelled from the house. And then in April 1940, so the Russians have then by that point, been in for about six or seven months in the city. One day, my grandfather is arrested, my grandmother’s told, “In a few days time, you’ll be able to see your husband. In four days time, we’ll explain where he is.” And after three days they arrested the families, hundreds of thousands in the city, tens of thousands. But hundreds of thousands of people end up with this fate and they are deported. My father and my grandmother to the, without any idea where Dolu’s gone, to Siberia and Kazakhstan.
I found the parts of the book where you deal with Ludwik and his mother Luisa’s exile is a polite word. You know, imprisonment is maybe a better one at a Soviet state farm. Some of the most astonishing in the book. I was particularly struck how she never neglected her, ‘cause of course your father was an only child. How she never neglected his education. Would you be able to tell us a little bit about their lives on the state farm?
Yeah, so my grandmother and father, it takes three weeks by in a cattle truck to get to this farm. By the point time they arrived, there are about 90 people. They’re the only Jews. My father’s the only child. And first they’re allocated, 'cause the cows are out on the pastures, so they can sleep in the shed, the cow shed. But eventually are, after the crops are called in, the winter begins, they have to take the cows back into their shed. So they then have to build a house out of cow dung bricks, which actually my grandmother was put to work making these cow dung bricks. And then they used some of them for their house. But obviously, you know, my grandmother not being any sort of architect or builder that the house was very rickety, bits of it fell down. And the winter begins and it is below freezing inside the hut for many months. And in order to get water, it was necessary for my grandmother to crawl out of the hut through a sort of hole that had been made in it, and then walk through the snow, wearing every kind of coat that she could, just to get water for the six of them that were in this little hut together. And they didn’t have any food except for this. The one difference between being in the Gulag and being in a state collective farm is that theoretically you were a free citizen in a state collective farm and you could therefore receive parcels. And after a short while, my grandmother’s sisters and brothers begin to send parcels of food accompanied by letters from Lwow, to the state collective farm, the Basca Malter Ranch. And I know this because my grandmother kept the letters, and so I was able to have those translated and I have some idea what the food was and a little of their exchanges as a result of that. But my grandmother said later, this was their great good fortune. And if it hadn’t been for that, they certainly would’ve starved to death.
How old was your father when he was taken to Kazakhstan?
- 10. So this is, it’s a very typically pertinent question. You know, the idea behind this was to was to do two things. Okay, so the first thing was they were going to destroy the elite of Poland politically. And my father was 10, but of course he wouldn’t always be 10. So he counted as a member of the elite because of his potential to grow into an adult. And they were going to forestall that because surely had this plan come to fruition, had they stayed there longer, they would’ve died there. It was only because Hitler invaded the Soviet Union that they did not. And the other reason they were expelled there was because they wanted to populate the interior. So the idea was that these people would be put to work as slave labourers. But the important thing was this idea that the Soviet Union would be undermined by the reactionary Polish aristocratic elites. And that this took in my father who was 10 years old and my grandmother who, you know, they had no reason to believe was part of that.
I’m sure I recall that your father was doing the books for the state farm in quite short order? Is that correct?
He was. Well, so what happens it, first of all, you mentioned while they’re in this, and I should have said this, while they’re in this little hut, my grandmother teaches my father languages. She teaches him Silla and therefore in this freezing, lying in this freezing cow dung shed. And she carries his education on, but he’s able to reciprocate a little bit. The Soviets are invaded by Hitler. And what happens then is that they have to send all the people who are running the farm away and they suddenly can’t run the farm. Those people are now going to fight in the war. So my grandmother is called in to do the books only because she was, she could speak Russian and she was literate, which most people were not. But while she was literate, she wasn’t really numerate, or at least she was, but she had a pretty creative approach to numbers and particularly to Soviet numbers. And I always used to say this, everyone loved my grandmother, sort of grand lady of Lwow and everyone loved having her over except to play bridge because she couldn’t understand the point of games. I remember this when I was a child actually, we were playing Monopoly and she would always be saying, “Have all my money,” and you would say, “Granny, you can’t, that’s not how the game works.” And she goes, “Well, I’m not going to sit here while my grandchildren don’t have any money.” She thought games were ridiculous. And she took the same view of the Soviet figures. And my father used to sit with her, essentially ensuring that her creative mathematics didn’t get her into too much trouble. And my father was good at it, because he later became a professor of measurement.
And is it all, is it also true and laughter in the dark that the Finkelsteins were so valuable to the state farm that when they were released, they were asked to stay?
Yeah, so one of the things that happens in all these in the Gulag as well as in the state farm is that 'cause life was so grim outside, it was thought at least possible that released prisoners or in this case, you know, freed slaves, which is what they were, would actually fancy staying. And my grandmother was told, you know, “At least here, you’ve got the status of this office, which you are working on the books and if there’s anything that came into the farm, we’ll sell it to you.” Not that anything did come into the farm. “In the city, you won’t have anywhere to live and you’ll even have to pay for water.” But she is determined that she’s going to try and reunite with her husband, that she wouldn’t stay in the farm a moment longer. She says to them, “You know, you think of me as a worker, but I’m actually the daughter of a land lord and I’m not, you know, you don’t want me to be here.” And eventually they do agree that she should go, it’s four days by horse and car, so they get to the city of Semipalatinsk and discover indeed the warning was correct. There really isn’t anything in the city and they haven’t got a home, they have to sleep in the streets. And then they get a piece of good fortune, Tanya, which is that, that the people in the street in which they’re living are all arrested themselves due to, for sort of obscure reasons, which were no more comprehensible than the reasons why my grandmother was being arrested. And that’s when they then do get both a, my grandmother then does get some sort of job sorting potatoes and a place to live in Semipalatinsk.
Would you be able to tell us a little bit about their story from there to the end of the war? Because of course your father did arrive safely in London.
Yes, they joined up with something called the Anders’ Army. I don’t want to to spoil for those who are going to read it, all of the twists of how they did that, because I think it would ruin some of the book when people read it. But they joined up with something called the Anders’ Army. So what the Soviets did when they took over Lwow is they arrested all the officers, lots of Polish officers and they held them in three different places. And then, due to a decision that they took consciously, they decide that all of them should, were reactionaries who represented a threat to the state and that they should all be convicted without trial, sentenced without informing them and shot, which is what happens to 20,000 people. And this, these are known collectively as the Katyn Massacres because some of the several thousand of the people who were shot are discovered later by the Nazis actually in the Katyn Woods. That was one of the places where they were. So when Stalin becomes an ally and promises that an army will be created from the Poles, he knows, ‘cause he signed the memo, that he’s actually shot all their officers. But there was one, there were a few, but there was one particular officer he had not shot. It was a man called General Anders who happened not to be with the main party, he was injured, he’d gone to hospital and he wasn’t with the main party of people who was sentenced to death, so he survived. And they, Barrier, Stalin’s KGB head, goes to see or startle Anders in the Lubyanka Prison, where they’re holding him and says, “You are now going to be freed and we’ve put you in charge of an army.” And they let him go, they give him his his luggage, which turns out in fact to be someone else’s case with someone else’s swimming trunks in it. And he has no shoes, and they walk him off to this chauffeur-driven car and he’s driven off to create this army. But he does create one and lots of the deported Poles manage, not all of them, because quite a lot of them never managed to leave their state farms or the Gulag never reached safety with the main party, but some do, including my family. So, they then are able to go with that army and that, Anders manages to negotiate that the army will leave the Soviet Union, it won’t fight for the Russians, it’ll fight for the British. And they come to Iraq and some of them fight in Monte Casino. My grandfather, as it happens, is now by this point to 50 years old, he goes to, becomes part of the administrative system in Palestine where the army is as well. And eventually it’s agreed that these people will be able to become parts of something called the Polish Resettlement Corps. And they come to settle in this country where they live, where they moved first to Golders Green and then to Hendon Central.
I mean, it is your subtitle is “A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival.” And it is miraculous. But what kind of impact do you think this had emotionally on your grandparents, your Finkelstein grandparents?
Well that’s, yeah, it’s interesting. So, you know, my, when I was a child, my grandmother whom I absolutely adored and who was the one of my grandparents that I knew, really, 'cause she lived 'til she was 98. Lusia used to go shopping in the express dairy in the high streets, in Hendon Central near the station wearing a beautiful cloth coat, white gloves, a lovely handbag, a hat. And she was known by everybody as the Lady of Hendon Central. You know, you mentioned earlier that my grandmother, my grandfather wouldn’t have been surprised at me being in House of Lords, I think it’s more my grandmother really. She kind of, that was her status in life. And when she ends up living in a small house in, you know, off the main road in the opposite Brent Cross Shopping Centre, but she’s always, in terms of her sort of bearing different to that, I realise now as an adult writing this, 'cause I never knew them as adult, that it was devastating what happened to them. That their entire life was destroyed. And I know that it brought depression and that, you know, once my grandfather died, my grandmother was really, she was lost completely and he died because of what had happened to him in the Gulag. And she was completely devastated by it. But she did recover from it. So by 1980, she had sort of recovered her poise and she was once more a social figure and, you know, people liked to invite her to parties and things. So she did recover from that. But she took a lot of solace in the fact that her son, you know, then became a successful professionally and, you know, that reestablished the family. So that gave her pleasure as well.
I mean, what’s extraordinary about your book is that the Finkelsteins are fascinating, but your maternal grandparents, the Wieners are, if anything even more fascinating. So we’re going to move from Poland to Berlin, and please, could you tell me about your mother, Mirjam’s parents, the Wieners?
Yes. Well, my, thank you. My grandfather Alfred comes back from the first World War in 1918 and lots of Jews are quite optimistic about completing the journey towards full civic equality that had begun towards the end of the 19th century. But Alfred is much more pessimistic. He’s very proud of having been a veteran. But he can see that the, that the result of the war has embittered his fellow officers. And he immediately sets down to writing, researching, and then writing a tract, which is towards pogroms question mark. And he says, “Unless we do something, people will talk to our descendants of Bastille murder.” In other words, he predicted pretty much what was going to happen. I think he more saw it as being organised riots, pogroms, that sort of thing, at that point. But he has claim, I think, to be among the very first people to warn of the coming of violent anti-Semitism to Germany. And indeed he then sets, goes to work for something called the Central Vine, which is the Central Association of Germans of Jewish faith. And he, in that role, he does a lot of public speaking, rebutting lies against Jews, he does a lot of research, he helps in lawsuits, they send Julius Streicher, the later hanged at Nuremberg to jail for religious libel. He also decides in the middle of the 1920s, rather against what other Jews are arguing, that the real danger is Hitler and the Nazis. And they ought to concentrate on that. And he’s allowed to establish an archive, which he begins in the middle of the 1920s, where they collect everything, every cutting, every leaflet, every photograph they can. So, you know, after the war, Alfred was the only person with a photograph of Mengalat, when anyone said that he was in Argentina. But no one knew what he looked like, so he couldn’t tell whether he was there. But Alfred knew what the uniforms were like and what the ranks were like. He was, you know, he had every copy of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” he had every copy of “Mein Kampf.” He really was, you know, the great expert and archivist. And in 1933, the Nazis get in anyway, and he is called to a meeting with Goring. And this meeting’s perfectly genial. He has the impression that Goring isn’t, doesn’t quite have a hold of himself, but he, but it’s reasonably genial and Goring is reassuring as long as the Jews aren’t, you know, unpatriotic, they won’t harm a hair on their head. And then as Alfred is about to leave, Goring says, “I do know about your archive and you have to destroy it.” And ultimately following another encounter with Goring, which was more menacing in tone altogether, Alfred realises he has to get out of Berlin. And that is the moment where my mother is born in June 1933, just as they’re poised between Amsterdam and Berlin. So he’s married at this point, Alfred to Greta, a professional economist. You know, she has a PhD in economics, despite being a woman in the 1920s, quite an achievement. She’s Alfred’s partner, not his equal because she’s a woman, but his partner. And they, she joins him and they set up a new life in Amsterdam. So all along Tanya, I’ve always thought of my mother as being Dutch because in 1933, when she’s only a few months old, '34, she was less than a year old, they moved to Holland. And therefore she was always brought up speaking Dutch. And she spoke German too, but speaking Dutch and you know, the talk of her youth was always of Holland. But actually she was really German and they were a family of German refugees. And interestingly, when we talk about Anne Frank, we always say the little Dutch girl. But Anne Frank was in fact a little German girl who’d been forced to be a refugee to Holland. We’ve just had this discussion in the family about where we should put the, you possibly, people have heard of this, Sulfastein, the stone that is placed in front of the last place where your family lived freely and whether that should be in Germany or Holland, really. 'Cause it was from Holland, they went to concentration camp ultimately, but they didn’t leave Germany voluntarily, even the first place.
Where do you think it should be placed? If it’s not too personal a question?
No, no, ultimately we’ve decided upon this, a place called 16 YanVan Trot. And the reason for that is when my grandfather and Greta re-establish a home in Holland, in Amsterdam, they next door create the what’s now known as the Wiener Holocaust Library. And this was restarting the archive that he’d been forced to destroy. And the our view is that, and it was there that they did much of the work, the eyewitness work on the Kristallnacht. The, my grandfather was involved in suing the publishers of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in Switzerland. He was going all around the world, trying to promote cases of antisemitic violence by Nazis and far-right organisations. And so our view is that was the iconic location of my family, really. 16 Yan Van Trot, it ought to be there.
And of course, when the Nazis came into Holland, am I right in my recollection that your father was not there, he was travelling?
My grandfather wasn’t there, no. So what happens-
Sorry, I beg your pardon, your grandfather. Sorry.
I do that all the time, don’t worry. I do exactly the same thing all the time. So my grand, my, the Jewish Central Information Office in Amsterdam had one big problem, which was that the Dutch were worried, or the Dutch were neutral. And they were worried always that the Dutch wouldn’t want this Jewish Central Information Office in the middle of Amsterdam. So they always kept everything very secret. But when Kristallnacht happens, they issue a book and it contains an imprint for some of the eyewitness comments on Kristallnacht. And the Prime Minister, Hendrikus Colijn calls in the head of the library, the chairman of the library, my grandfather was the head, but the chairman of the library, a man called David Cohen, a leading Dutch professor, and says to him, “You’re going to have to destroy this information and you can’t publish it in this form. And Alfred decides that he could only do this work out of Holland. Holland would stay neutral. The family stay in Holland precisely because it is neutral. So Greta thinks it’s better for the children to be in Holland. They’re being brought up, let’s not move them. And Alfred goes to London and re-establishes the library there, just at the moment where they’re declared stateless by Germany, at the point where the second World War happens, all of which happened within a few days of each other. The news that stateless and the second World War beginning. And my, so my grandfather is in London while Greta and the girls are at this by this point, trapped in Holland.
Could you tell us a little bit about what happened to them during the war? Again, some of the most sort of agonising and angry making parts of the book.
It is, yes. So look, I’m obviously, you know, there’s lots more in this book that I can’t say so I’m summarising it, but they were a relatively peaceful period in Amsterdam and before 1942, '43. So it begins to, begins over a period of time to be more in positions, for example, the Yellow Star. And you know, they’re all sent to Jewish schools. My aunt is in school with Margot Frank. The Franks disappear, you know, from the centre of which they’d shared with my parents and from school. My family’s still living, you know, but they can still live some sort of life. And then in 1943, like the arrests begin to come to, you know, a climax, and they are arrested and sent to a place called Westerbork, which was a refugee camp built with Jewish money, originally to house Jews who were escaping from Germany and coming to Holland. They needed a place to stay and the Jews paid for the camp, but then it got taken over by the Nazis. The problem with Westerbork wasn’t so much that it was a terrible life to lead, though it was, but it was just about a life. The problem was that every Tuesday, there was a transport that would go to the gas chambers. And my mother’s Aunt Lativ, who’s Greta’s closest friend and, you know, part of the family in every event up until that point, they’re among those people who were sent to Sobeport, where they were gassed. But this does not happen to my mother and her sisters or my grandmother. And the reason for that is they’ve become citizens of Paraguay. Essentially a group of Poles living in Switzerland had established a scam in which they paid the honorary console of Paraguay, a Swiss notary called Rudolph Ugle, a fee and he issued what were falsely issued, but genuine papers. The Germans knew that these papers were falsely issued. The Paraguayans spent quite a lot of time not even standing by these papers. And everyone knew they were fake or effectively not the true, valid object, but they had a value to Germany. And the reason for that is that Hitler had determined they might not win the war. So they should begin to think about exchanging Jews for money, for weapons or for Germans who were living in allied, occupied countries. And they think that, they began to collect together Jews who have some sort of paperwork suggesting they might be a value to some other country. And as long as the allies recognised these papers, they were a value to the Germans, and it didn’t matter whether they were a validly Paraguan or not. And so they created special camp to hold these people. And that camp is called Belsen. That’s the place to which my mother goes, rather than Soboport or Auschwitz. Belsen is synonymous with some of the worst excesses of the Holocaust, because people starved to death in Belsen, mainly because these exchanges really didn’t take place, except for a group of 136 people who actually did use their Paraguay passport become part of one exchange. And my mother was one of those. Now, it took me quite a lot of time to find this out, just because the exchange was so small that it’s hardly recognised in histories. But hopefully now that I’ve written about it, it’ll be better understood.
And how old was your mother when she was liberated?
So, 10 when she was arrested, and they spend it, and then she has her 11th birthday while they’re still in, while they’re in Belsen. So she’s 10 years old on the 10th of June, on the 20th of June, 1943, 10 days later, they’re arrested. She’s in Westerbork 'til the end of that year. In January of 1944, she’s taken to Belsen. She has her 11th birthday in Belsen. And then in the following January, she’s part of this exchange. So it’s during the age of 10 and 11.
What I found extraordinary reading about your mother’s family and their experiences during the war was how in defiance of everything that Hitler and the Nazis wanted for the Jews, they remained sort of luminously attached to each other. And I was also very struck, and I think I said in my book review-
Yes, so what you’re hearing very loudly-
In, um-
You’re about to see as well, come probably behind is the Parliamentary mace. It’s just about to, it’s coming from, that means the House of Lords is adjourned. So you can see now, just coming behind me any second. Now, there you go. So that’s quite slightly unexpected entertainment.
What would Luisa say?
Yeah, she would’ve liked it, definitely. So you’ll have to remind me the question, because the mace distracted me.
Well, I wanted to ask you about the impact it had emotionally on your mother and her sisters.
So yes, that’s, it’s good. They, my mother and my father basically made what must have been a conscious decision, but one made before I was born really, that they were not going to cast themselves as victims. My mother saw herself, wanted to be seen as a person rather than merely a survivor. She felt that was part of her life, but she did not want Hitler to ruin her life. I think it was made easier by the fact that it happened to her when she was very young. So she was definitely, when she got older, reflecting on it more, and it was clearly traumatic for her, but she was very determined that she didn’t, for example, believe in the second generation, right? So she did not want her whole, the trauma that she had suffered, she felt she had been there so I didn’t have to, and an example of her way of dealing with it was that when Ronald Reagan was going to Bitburg, and it was pointed out to his advisors that Bitburg contained SS graves, and there was quite a fuss about it. Ronald Reagan then decides that he’s going to go to Belsen in order to show, you know, their commitment to Holocaust commemoration. And he, and when I told my mother this, she’s downstairs doing the washing up, I come down from hearing it on the radio and I said, "Oh Mum, Ronald Reagan’s going to go to Belsen.” She replied, “So what? I’ve been.” That was the kind of, the way that she dealt with it. So she was quite extraordinary, really. She definitely wanted to tell the story. So later in her life, she tells the story very often. She definitely wants to tell the story, but she, but for all that she does that, she tries, she tried very hard and so did my dad to live a, she felt that was the triumph, if she could live, you know, a great happy life, which she did.
Did they talk about it to you when you were children? 'Cause you have a brother and a sister.
Yeah, if we asked, they did. So they didn’t, I only ever remember once or two times, really spontaneously, my mother bringing it up. And once was when I claimed to be starving. I remember before dinner at some point she did raise that, pointing out that I wasn’t. And then another occasion was just very late in her life, she sent me a, she sent all of the cousins a sort of email about all her children and our cousins an email about our aunt who died in Soboport, just bringing back her memory because it was, it was her birthday. And then she did that. But generally speaking, she wouldn’t talk about it unless I asked. And I do remember that she didn’t, she wasn’t asked to do speeches on it or anything early on. And at one point later, very later in her life, she’d begun to be asked to do these talks. And I remember her saying to me, “Do you think the children,” she was going to talk at my synagogue, “will be interested in the fact that I knew Anne Frank?” I said, “Yeah, I think they will be.” You know, she didn’t want to be a bore. I mean, I know that sounds a bit funny, but she, that was the way she, I had a couple letters from friends of theirs, somebody, it must have been in their 80s. And she was, they were friends of ours in the road. And then she said, “It was 40 years after I’d known your mum when we stumbled on the topic. And she told me what had happened to her. And I was absolutely stunned.” So she absolutely would talk about it, and I could indeed ask her loads of things about it. And she was, she’d have been super supportive about me talking about it and writing the book, because that’s the kind of person she was. And my dad was too, but she didn’t just bring it up, because she didn’t want to sort of go on about herself. Odd though, that may appear.
I mean, I’ve read you for years and I didn’t know either about this extraordinary family history. Was there any particular reason you decided to write this now?
Yeah, so they range from the less elevated to the more elevated reason. So less elevated reason and you’ll know this, 'cause you’re a professional writer, is somebody approached me and asked to be my agent and I said yes. And then I felt embarrassed that I hadn’t got a book project. And so he asked me to be my agent and I hadn’t provided him with anything from which he could earn commission. And so then I started think, “I must do a book.” And eventually just realised this was the best book. So that was the unelevated reason. The second sort of unelevated reason was COVID came and I stopped, you know, I spent a lot of my time in meetings with people who want to see me. I never like to say to someone, “I haven’t got time to meet up with you.” I’ve just, even in the last 24 hours agreed to have lunch with someone I don’t know, because I just didn’t feel I could say, “I don’t want to have lunch with you. I don’t know who you are,” so it’s like a quite, so I spent quite, I wasted, unfortunately, it’s not very effective, this embarrassment. I wasted quite a bit of my time on these and COVID came, I didn’t have, couldn’t do any of it. So I didn’t, that helped. But the more elevated reason was I’ve always known that I should tell this story of the, my sister’s a permanent secretary of Defra. So for those of you who aren’t British, one of the department heads in the civil service, my brother’s a senior scientist at Vice Chancellor City University, they’ve got lots of administrative things to do. So the three of us, it was going to be me who was going to be the writer who was going to do it, and it had to be done. And so that was, and it had to be done now, because I feel the moment to understand the dangers of the rise of extremism and populism of both left and right in Europe is, well the, the argument for that needs to be put, needs to be put now. And so that was the more elevated of the three reasons.
I’m glad you said that because I did want to ask you, I mean, you’re not just the child of two refugees. You’re also a British politician. And when you read about the politics at the state collective farm, when you read about what the Soviets did to Poland, I mean, what do you think?
Well, look, I, you know, I hope anyone who knows me who reads this will get a little bit more of an insight into my politics. I would think that possibly the most, you know, the kind of strongest criticism you could make of my politics if you were coming at me from externally, would be that it’s complacent kind of politics, 'cause I tend towards believing in the status quo. And anybody who thinks that or read this book and understand where that comes from, I think that I’m very cautious about radical change. And I’m very protective of a liberal settlement. I’m very defensive of the ways in which the great political liberal democracies have developed and become what they’re, and the, you know, and I very much resist two strands of thought, one of which is this idea that all politicians are corrupt and appalling. You know, when you can see what the alternative to politicians are, these ideas of kind of statesmen on great white chargers, cleansing the nation and you know, sweeping clean corruption and you know, who’s going to be doing the sweeping and who’s going to be the swept. You know, I definitely, that’s definitely reflected in my politics and a very strong feeling that we ought to have a balance of institutions, that we need to stay inside the rule of law, all of these things. And, you know, on a more concrete basis, my grandfather Alfred, as you’ll know from reading the book, he was opposed to the idea of creating a state in Israel before the second World War. He was an Arabic scholar. He loved Palestine as an area, he could see that there might never be peace there. The great tragedy for the Jewish people is that that was right, but so was the counter to him, which was, if you stay here, we’re all going to die. Your idea of simply settling here is an illusion. And, but after the second World War, my grandfather became a pragmatic and practical supporter of the estate, of the existence of the state of Israel. And so am I, that’s part of my politics too.
You have a, you went back to Lviv, you told me. I’m sorry, Lwow. Could you tell me a little bit about what, because I went to Poland recently and found it, I got very, very cross and I spoke to a woman who owns some property, whose family owned some property and she was very keen to get this property back. What’s your relationship to Poland now and I suppose also to Germany?
So I went, so obviously Lviv is in Ukraine rather than in Poland. And you know, due to the Jews were all, who lived there. My grandmother was one of seven and she’s the only one that survives the war, because she was deported. So she wasn’t in Lviv when the Nazis arrived. So my, the Jews are all, of Lviv are all murdered and the Poles are driven out, so it becomes a Ukrainian, you know, irrevocably a Ukrainian city. So it isn’t Poland, but it obviously in many practical ways is home. I went back there with Philippe Sands, who wrote “East West Street.” When I reviewed “East West Street” for the Times, my brother read the book. It was him who pointed out to me, 'cause at that point I didn’t really know our family history anywhere near as well, that we were also from the Landis family and so was he. So we were probably related and we, Philippe and I think we’re probably third cousins, maybe fourth. But we became good friends as a result of that discovery. And we went together to Lviv and he introduced me to a lot of people who do a lot of work on the history of the city. And one of the things that they were able to do is get me into my grandfather’s house, beautiful house that was used by the Soviet, by the Communist Party as this kind of home for people like Brezhnev to stay in when they were in town. And I was shown around it by this restaurateur who owns it. And when I spoke to my sister about it, she was a bit more angry about that, you know, 'cause it is after all a house that Dolu and Lusia built and now it’s owned by someone else without any recompense. But I know because, and I said this to Mara, I know my dad’s view was that we’re here and the properties there and it’s much better that way round. You couldn’t get property like that back without overturning the whole of the Soviet property system, which means the whole of the property system of Russia and all of the satellite states. So it’s just not a possible thing to argue for. And like lots of things, you know, you live with those things and you move on from them, but you never forget them.
I’d like to take some questions from the audience, if I may.
Q&A and Comments:
Q: Ina Stavinski asks, “Did your grandparents have any idea or ever speak about the reason for such a strong anti-Semitism in Lwow when the Germans came?”
A - So that is very, very interesting. So the answer to it is, on the specific question of the time of the Germans coming into Lviv. By that point, my father and my grandmother and my grandfather were no longer in Lviv. They were in the Soviet Union. They were in Siberia and Kazakhstan. So we didn’t, they didn’t talk much about that, even including, which I only really properly understood what must have been the murder of my grandmother’s siblings. And that was something, unlike everything else that’s talked about in my family, that nobody ever talked about. And I only really, it dawned upon me when I first, when I read “East West Street” and then that must have happened. And then, you know, during this research, I understood a little bit more about how it happened. So they didn’t talk about that period, I think partly 'cause it was very personally painful. My grandmother had been very close to her sister, and her sister was responsible really for the food that sustained them in Siberia.
So that was one of the reasons they didn’t talk about it. I think the other reason was that joining the Polish Free Army, my grandfather and my grandmother and my dad began to see the Polish state that they had, that they had signed up to as a tool of liberation. And as it got them out of the Soviet Union. And they definitely noted anti-Semitism, my father mentioned it. And when I’ve read about it, I understand it was much stronger than that. So I unearthed, for example, an article that my grandfather had written, addressed to the Jewish students of Lwow, of just before the war began, telling them not to despair, following a mass funeral after the murder of a Jewish student called Marcus Lamber. So they were completely aware of it, but the answer to your question really is they didn’t talk about that very much. And my father was quite protective of Poles and the Polish, because of his particular experience and even went as far as to press that upon me, when he knew that he was dying that, so he felt it very strongly.
Since we’re talking about anti-Semitism, I wanted to ask you what you thought and how you felt when Jeremy Corbin became leader of the Labour Party and brought, well, in my view, a torrent, certainly the only anti-Semitism I’ve ever experienced in my lifetime on the Jewish community in Britain.
So my view is that all philosophers that believe that an elite is standing between the people and governing in the spirit of the nation are hugely dangerous ideas. And it’s not surprising that because they are essentially conspiracy theories about how power operates, that they often coexist with anti-Semitism, which, because anti-Semitism is very closely related to conspiracy theories, it’s a theory about Jewish power, generally. Sometimes it’s about the, you know, my grandfather used to say, “Actually half the time the Nazis would argue that the Jews were the scum of the earth and the other half they were ruling the earth and they could never quite make up their mind.” But the problem, that one of the reasons that Jeremy Corbin could not see, which I genuinely think was the case, he could not see the anti-Semitism of the Corbin Heights is because it went, that kind of conspiracy theory, went right to the heart of his political idea. The problem with him began with the fact that he was an anti-Imperialist Leninist and that that led him into this era. And indeed interestingly, other intellectuals like Hobson who were anti-Imperialist Leninist also inclined towards anti-Semitism. They thought the banking glasses and then later the Zionists were engaged in propping up capitalism through Imperialist endeavour of which Zionism is one kind. So I think that it’s what happened to my father as much as what happened to my mother that made me worried about Jeremy Corbin. And it definitely, I was definitely worried about that force having, you know, a leverage on power. And I, as you possibly know, I was supremely unimpressed with, with Boris Johnson’s leadership of the Conservative Party. However much I’d always got on with him personally and I always felt that his, you know, some of his early political ideas were quite, I was quite sympathetic to him, but I was worried about it. But I absolutely celebrated his election victory because it meant defeating Jeremy Corbin’s brand of anti-Imperialist Leninism, which brought with it the anti-Semitic threat that you felt, and which he absolutely cannot see. And the reason he cannot see it is because to see it would be to drive really a stake through their whole political idea, not just through one little part of it.
Q - And you’ve been asked, what is your view on the Holocaust memorial outside Parliament?
A - Which is, I know it’s just hugely controversial and I’m sorry, 'cause some people don’t agree with me. I really, really approve of it and I think it’s great where they’re going to put it. I have to admit an interest, I was involved in the commission that David Cameron established, and I was then asked to be on the panel that helped choose the memorial. Actually, in fact, the one that was chosen was not my first choice, but I do like it. I think to argue that we don’t need really near Parliament to have a commemoration of the consequences of Totalitarianism, you know, what more, how much more reminding do we need? So this is the idea that people sort of already know this and therefore it’s a bit intrusive and gets in the way of people playing in the park, I really don’t accept it. And there’s also a practical argument, which is that the only time I ever go to that park, despite the fact that I’ve worked in this area for 40 years, is when I’m being interviewed by television programmes that want somewhere empty to interview someone in. And they interview people there because nobody is in it. And now suddenly, as you often find, whenever you plan to build on something, it’s the most beloved and popular area in the whole of Westminster. Well, I just don’t buy that. But I said at the beginning, you know, please forgive me, there are people on the call who will not agree with that. I totally understand and respect your position. I promise to listen to what you’re saying. And I hope you don’t be too irritated by me expressing it out of you.
No, gosh, not at all.
No, no, I just, I know that there are lots of Jews who think it’s, you know, a mistake to have it there or they live in Westminster and don’t want it, I know that, so.
Q - I think we probably have time for one more question, and I’m going to ask, Monty Golden asks, “How important is a Jewish identity to you?”
A - It’s absolutely central to me. And the, one of the things that I’m proudest of in the book is this extraordinary passage in the book from my aunt, written immediately after the war about what Friday evenings meant for them in Belsen. And anybody who reads that and think, “I can’t really understand the point of religion,” you know, you can, I’d love Richard Dawkins to read that. It’s so moving. And so I’ve never been someone, so lots of people have said, “How can you believe in God, given all the things that happened to your parents and how did they believe in God?” And my mother said, she never believed in the sort of God that finds your cat, right? She did however believe there was a spirit that united us all that was about more than we were. And my father believed very deeply, and I inherited this too, in the importance of tradition and learning and that, you know, that with Jews, with the Jewish tradition, you had thousands of years of Jewish literature and history and you know, obviously it being Jews debate where moral issues are discussed and we learn something the whole time. And, you know, maybe someone who looks, who looks at us, I don’t know, holding up a lamb shank on Passover will wonder what earth we’re doing. And we may even wonder it ourselves. But the wonder is the whole point. There’s some wisdom in these traditions and rituals, which is so vital and you know, it’s quite a nice thing to spend the whole of one’s life trying to work out what the wisdom is. And so, you know, so my family, we’re liberal Jews, but our Judaism is central to who we are. And you know, I love to be part of the community, which is very important to me.
Thank you very much, Danny Lord Finkelstein for that fascinating interview. And I, people who know me know I wouldn’t say this if I didn’t absolutely believe it. “Hitler, Stalin, Mum, and Dad” is a book you absolutely must read. It changed my understanding of European history in the 20th century and it was such an incredibly generous, generous book. And it’s coming out in America under the title “Two Roads Home” very soon. And I recommend it to all of you.
Thank you, Tanya.
Thank you so much for coming tonight, Danny.
Well, thank you to everyone for being on the call and you did a wonderful job. Thank you very much Tanya, for asking me those questions.
Thank you, Danny. Goodnight.
Goodnight.
Goodnight, everyone.