I am again going to inflict my literary tastes on you. I have just read Danny Finkelstein’s family history - Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad. As anyone who reads his regular columns in The Times will expect, it’s well-written, in an informal, engaging style, which pulls the reader into the story.
And it’s the story which is the important bit. Danny’s mother’s family were German Jews, and his father’s Polish Jews. Affluent, middle-class families, well integrated into their communities, and with no expectations that that status was about to be radically changed. But then politics - and crazed politicians - began to cast their poisonous shadows.
The mother’s family moved in the mid to late 1930s to Holland, as the persecution of Jews began to become more and more a part of German life. The father’s family remained in Lvov (then in Poland: now Lviv in Ukraine, and back in the news); the threat for them only really became clear with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which was the agreement made between Hitler and Stalin to partition what was then the independent, free nation of Poland between the two totalitarian dictatorships.
The story is told in alternating blocks, describing the various ways both families tried to avoid what was in fact the inevitable - imprisonment in a concentration camp on one side and in the gulag on the other. Sure enough, the German family ended in Bergen-Belsen and the Polish one in a gulag camp in the far reaches of Siberia.There is lots of harrowing stuff about ill-treatment, hunger, cold, starvation and death. Nobody comes out of this unscathed, although in the end, Danny’s parents meet, marry and raise their family in suburban London.
What’s special about this book? How does it differ from other holocaust and/or gulag horror stories? Well, it’s because it demonstrates how the two regimes - nominally from opposite ends of the political spectrum - were in fact mirror images of each other; there wasn’t the thickness of a cigarette paper between Stalin’s marxist terror regime and Hitler’s nazi one. They were both totalitarian states run by murderous cliques. For me, this is one of the two important messages of the book. Now, in the 2020s, “fascist” and “fascism” are vogue words to hurl at those with whom the speaker disagrees; “communist” and “marxist”, by contrast, are regarded as more of a cuddly mindset, thoughtful of one’s fellow men. Well, as the events of the 1940s demonstrate, that is a fallacy; both doctrines lead to the same place - state control, and the subjugation of any form of individuality in the interests of, precisely, the state and the party. This is a lesson we need to learn.
On a more optimistic note, however, is the message of the last few paragraphs of the book, which I shall quote here:
“ When my parents died they left us with each other, a family tied strongly together, the greatest gift they could bestow……
Our family has survived. Love has conquered hate.
In the battle with Hitler and Stalin, the victory belongs to Mum and Dad.”
Read this book. Despite the horror of the desperate times of the twentieth century, individuals can overcome the monolithic state; to me, that seems an important lesson to learn right now. Family and individuality trump totalitarianism.
Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad, by Daniel Finkelstein, is published by Willian Collins, in hardback and paperback.
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