Hitler, Stalin, and a Jewish Couple Who Met After Surviving Their Extermination Programs

Hitler, Stalin, and a Jewish Couple Who Met After Surviving Their Extermination Programs

About four years ago Times of London journalist Daniel Finkelstein undertook an effort to tell his parents’ stories of survival in WW2 Europe. They met at a Jewish youth club in London in the Spring of 1956. He was twenty-six years old and she was twenty-two. Between them, they had lived in ten countries and survived years of hunger, disease, and the barest of survivals.

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 recognize 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.

Daniel’s father Ludwik was born in Lwow, (now Lviv) 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 labor in a Siberian gulag. Working as slave laborers on a collective farm, his father survived the freezing winters in a tiny house they built from cow dung.

Finkelstein is today’s guest and he’s here to discuss his new book “Two Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin, and the Miraculous Survival of My Family.” It is both a family story and a larger exploration of how an entire continent came apart.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jaksot(1078)

How Would Nixon Have Handled the Cuban Missile Crisis?

How Would Nixon Have Handled the Cuban Missile Crisis?

The "Madman Theory" was Richard Nixon's foreign policy strategy during the Vietnam War era, where he deliberately cultivated an image of being unpredictable and irrational—hinting he might escalate to...

30 Joulu 202528min

Diogenes, the Father of Ancient Greek Stoicism, Loving Trolling His Audience and Could Out-Shock Borat

Diogenes, the Father of Ancient Greek Stoicism, Loving Trolling His Audience and Could Out-Shock Borat

The famous street artist Banksy shocked the art world in 2018 when his painting, Girl with Balloon, partially shredded itself moments after selling it for over a million dollars. at a Sotheby's auctio...

25 Joulu 202549min

Blown Off Course: How History’s Windy Turning Points Sank the Armada and Saved Japan from the Mongols

Blown Off Course: How History’s Windy Turning Points Sank the Armada and Saved Japan from the Mongols

The greatest energy source for civilization before the steam engine was wind. It powered the global economy in the Age of Sail. Wind-powered sail ships made global shipping fast and cheap by harnessin...

23 Joulu 202546min

Maps Have Bigger Problems Than the Mercator Projection. They Invent Mountain Ranges and Usually Eliminate New Zealand

Maps Have Bigger Problems Than the Mercator Projection. They Invent Mountain Ranges and Usually Eliminate New Zealand

Maps have always had problems. Five hundred years ago, maps were wildly inaccurate simply because cartographers were drawing the edge of the known world, limited by slow ships and nonexistent satellit...

18 Joulu 202545min

The Great Mathematicians of the Early 1900s Ran into an Unsolvable Problem. They  Realized Math Made No Sense

The Great Mathematicians of the Early 1900s Ran into an Unsolvable Problem. They Realized Math Made No Sense

In the 1800s, it seemed like mathematics was a solved problem. The paradoxes in the field were resolved, and even areas like advanced calculus could be taught consistently and reliably at any school. ...

16 Joulu 202545min

The American Revolution was a World War in All but Name

The American Revolution was a World War in All but Name

The Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, known as the "shot heard round the world," marked the first military engagements of the American Revolution. Ralph Waldo Emerson named it that becau...

11 Joulu 202556min

How Napoleon and Churchill Used Neuroscience to Make a Better Soldier and More Loyal Public

How Napoleon and Churchill Used Neuroscience to Make a Better Soldier and More Loyal Public

The brain acts in strange ways during wartime. Even in active combat situations, when soldiers are one mistake away from death, many can’t fire on their enemies because their brain is triggering comp...

9 Joulu 202545min

William F. Buckley JR.'s Guide to Friendship in a Polarized Era

William F. Buckley JR.'s Guide to Friendship in a Polarized Era

William F. Buckley Jr., the charismatic intellectual who defined modern American conservatism, was famously skilled at forging friendships across the ideological divide, a talent that helped him both ...

4 Joulu 202539min

Suosittua kategoriassa Yhteiskunta

sita
olipa-kerran-otsikko
kaksi-aitia
siita-on-vaikea-puhua
i-dont-like-mondays
hupiklubi
ihme-ja-kumma
uutiscast
poks
gogin-ja-janin-maailmanhistoria
antin-palautepalvelu
kolme-kaannekohtaa
mamma-mia
rss-murhan-anatomia
aikalisa
yopuolen-tarinoita-2
meidan-pitais-puhua
rss-palmujen-varjoissa
naakkavalta
loukussa