Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad: A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival
496 pages
Tearless
This is both a tough read and an easy read: tough because of the accounts and easy because the accounts are so fascinating, so well researched and compellingly written and because the book has short-ish chapters.
Highly recommended: lest we forget.
But in the light of current events in the Middle East, is now the time for readers to feel empathy with Judaism, Zionism and the Jews? Yes, indeed, we must because there is nothing new about Man’s Inhumanity to Man: the Old Testament, of which Christians share part with the Jews, is full of blood, slaughter, intrigues, betrayals, wars – and miraculous survival.
The author continues to write for The Times and his writing is masterly. The sub-title of the book tells us what to expect. And we should all read it simply to be reminded of the misery that Man continues to wreak upon the World and our duty to strive for Peace.
So this is a book about WW2. I remember WW2; its beginning, its middle and its end. Knowledge of WW2 by most NRmembers will have been gleaned from lectures, books and war films; and the latter where men die suddenly and the wounded die painlessly; not like real war at all, where the wounded cry out in agony, whimper or call for their mothers. Yes, I warned you it is a tough read.
And we should remember too that every atrocity perpetrated by the Nazis was mirrored by the Soviets; the only difference being that the Soviets, as victors, were never arraigned for their war crimes. Nazi goods wagons crammed with prisoners shipped to Auschwitz or Sobibor: Sobibor was more efficient; expectation of life there only three hours. And then gassing and burning. And the Soviets? Goods wagons crammed with prisoners shipped to the Gulags. And then starvation and freezing. Same results.
So this is a story and indeed it is miraculous story about a Polish Jewish boy and a German Jewish girl, the author’s parents. They marry and live happily ever after but, my goodness, their childhood journeys are tough. The author relates their stories.
The Polish boy. Poland invaded simultaneously by Germany and the USSR, the latter ostensibly to save the Poles but actually to exterminate the cream of Poland’s society and ship the rest to the Gulags. But then Germany attacks the USSR: suddenly the remaining Poles are on the Allies’ side. Create a new Polish Army. Ship any survivors from the Gulags to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, across Persia, and then join British forces fighting in Iraq; thence to Palestine and, in 1947, to Southampton.
And the German girl? Father alert from the 1920s to the dangers of Nazism and begins to document a record, later the Weiner Holocaust Library, shipped first to the Netherlands, then London, and finally New York. Family seek refuge and live contentedly in neutral Netherlands. But too late in 1940 to escape to England. Gradually conditions for Jews in the Netherlands toughen. Remember the Diary of Anne Frank? All confined in a concentration camp in the north from which a goods train departs every Monday, crammed with Jews for extermination. But somehow the family have acquired dubious Peruvian Passports. Himmler recognises that Jews with foreign passports might be exchanged for Germans. Family therefore transported and in a carriage train to Belsen, but then newly built and not the grotesque mockery of humanity which I personally remember as a boy from radio and newsreel reports when liberated by the British. Family, by now not much more than living skeletons, shipped to Switzerland for exchange. To New York, to join their father, in January 1945.
So that’s about it. This is both a tough read and an easy read: tough because of the accounts and easy because the accounts are so fascinating, so well researched and compellingly written and because the book has short-ish chapters.
Highly recommended: lest we forget.
Footnote: My Term Officer at Dartmouth, who had served in WW2, advised us “Survival in War is a complete lottery: Don’t try too hard. It won’t save you.” So most of us didn’t; and none were killed in War!
