Daniel Finkelstein’s family experience at the hands of the two genocidal dictators of the 20th century is one of miraculous survival. His new book ‘Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad’ is published on 8 June and this is your chance to hear and meet the author.
There will be a book signing following the main event, with copies of the book available to purchase.
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's mother Mirjam Wiener was the youngest of three daughters born in Germany to Alfred and Margarete Wiener. 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. His 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.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist and former foreign correspondent. He is the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s contemporary history series, The Long View, as well as two podcasts, Politics Weekly America for the Guardian and Unholy, alongside the Israeli journalist Yonit Levi. He is a past winner of an Orwell Prize for journalism. The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World is his twelfth book. He is the author of nine thrillers, mostly as Sam Bourne, including The Righteous Men which was a Sunday Times number one bestseller.
In June 2022, Jonathan was interviewed by Daniel when his book The Escape Artist was published.
