Finkelstein's narrative is nothing short of epic, chronicling the harrowing experiences of two families uprooted by the horrors of World War II. This book is plethora of events which compelled and usher you towards the places where holocaust took place. And the fact (which Finkelstein makes explicit) that although the Nazi crimes recounted in here are well-known, the Stalinist atrocities are a lot less so (I learned a lot of things that I didn’t know about the scale of the transports to gulags in Eastern Russia, and just how obsessed Stalin was with destroying Poland). During the Bolshevik revolution, both her parents had been shot in front of her, and later her daughter had died of starvation during the famine caused by stalin’s policy of farm collectivisation.

I came to know more about the sympathiser’s life and their circumstances in which they have bengined towards the jews,whether it will be Lados group,Camille and Hugli's local people. Poignant personal details help remind the reader that each one of the millions exterminated by both Hitler and Stalin had a story, a family, a future taken away in horrific circumstances that must never be allowed to happen again. It was poignant moment while i was reading about Katyn massacre, during the stalin's regime almost 22000 murders took place of polish officers. and on occasion unbearably moving, this is a powerful moral work about political extremism and the importance of bearing witness, but at the heart of it is love.I am certain that this is an interesting story for the author’s family to read, but I didn’t find myself becoming involved with the characters at all. 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. But that faith in rationality was what Finkelstein’s grandfather, Alfred, believed in too, and it didn’t change a damned thing. e. the author's grandparents) were truly remarkable people, including Alfred Wiener, founder of the renowned Wiener Library (and from there, the Wiener Holocaust Study centre in Tel Aviv), Grete Wiener from Hamburg who in the 1920s obtained a PhD in economics, Adolf Finkelsein, the "King of Iron" in Poland and his society wife Lusia who turned out to have a backbone of steel and an indomitable spirit. It is impossible to find words adequate to describe the demonic and barbarous brutality meted out to the extended family and to the millions of other Jewish people .

I found it gripping, moving and emotional and I am full of admiration for the resilience, fortitude and humanity of its central characters. If I learned anything about them from this book, it’s that they would be tremendously proud of the job their son has done in telling their story. Or the dining room coupons from the liner that took my mother and her sisters on the last leg of the journey from Belsen to New York.Finkelstein’s story of his parents’ struggle captures the immensity and the intricacy of the Second World War. That this even happened is the result of tricks, coincidences, and narrow escapes, with so often a hair's breadth between survival and death.

Today: after his arrest, Daniel's grandfather is transported to a gulag on the edge of the Artic Circle. The author tells us that the global turmoil of the last decade has shaken his former confidence that we are perpetually safe from the fate that befell his parents.The reading experience: It's an astonishing survival story - or rather two, one of the Nazi holocaust and one of the Soviet gulags - that converge into one family's origin story - which had me enthralled from beginning to end.