From One Generation to Another: Gratulacje to Daniel Finkelstein on the Accomplishment of Two Roads Home

Two Roads Home by Daniel Finkelstein
Doubleday, 2023; 416 pp., $32.50

Intergenerational trauma studies have described how the intensity of one ancestor’s experiences may influence their descendant’s genetics by the impact on cortisol. For example, medical studies on the children of pregnant women who lost husbands during the 9/11 attacks show that those children later manifested the stress their mothers felt during gestation. Similar studies speak to a cohort much closer to my own experience and to that of Daniel Finkelstein, the author of the groundbreaking new book Two Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin, and the Miraculous Survival of My Family. These studies follow the children of women who have survived Nazi concentration camps during World War II—such as Finkelstein’s parents and my grandparents.

Finkelstein’s book took me through time and space, dropping me right in the middle of pre-war Europe and dragging me through the blood, grief, and sacrifice his family experienced. While reading, I envisioned my own family’s struggle during the war. The Banasikowskis may have practiced different faiths than the Finkelsteins and Wieners—we are Catholic, and they are Jewish. They may have been from different parts of Poland—we are from the northeast, while they hailed from part of modern-day Ukraine. They may have ended up immigrating elsewhere after the war—Milwaukee versus London. This book’s author and I are quite different personally, too—separated in time by a few decades of age and in space by the Atlantic Ocean. We share a bond, though, in our respect for our family history. Two Roads Home carries the raw, yet researched, evidence of that respect.

Perhaps this shared passion for family history, which Finkelstein so intricately and deftly describes and weaves within its larger contexts, is more than just an interest. Perhaps it is encoded deeply into our DNA. Whether Two Roads Home simply brought Finkelstein satisfaction or whether it was an expression of something more innately, even biologically, ingrained, my review of his book remains the same: he is bringing a momentous story into the world, and he has written it masterfully.

The parents and forebears of Finkelstein, who is now a Member of the United Kingdom’s House of Lords and a journalist for London’s The Times, were victims of the two most oppressive governing bodies of the twentieth-century: the Nazis and the Soviets. Throughout Two Roads Home, Finkelstein sews his family’s personal tales into the vibrant cloth of the German and Polish political and social landscapes. The Finkelsteins and Wieners were well known in their local and even international Jewish communities. Their fates crossed paths with many notable historical figures: Margot and Anne Frank, Nikita Khrushchev, Hermann Göring, and Albert Einstein, just to name a few. Even more impressive than their connections and these encounters, however, is the families’ survival. His grandmothers clung to their children—the author’s parents and aunts—and always protected them first, whether they found themselves in Siberian collectivization farms or Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. His grandfathers, even if separated out in London or a Soviet gulag, ensured they did all they could to support their displaced families from afar. Finkelstein honors the miracle of their survival with his diligent research and balancing his family’s experiences with the relevance of their witness to Nazi and Soviet persecution of Jews during World War II.

I feel particularly responsible for honoring that history because of my own family’s experience. My grandmother was a survivor of five different Nazi forced labor arrangements, and my grandfather fought against both the Nazis and the Soviets as a decorated officer in the Polish Home Army. Polish history is not just an interest; it is revered in my family. I’ve studied and written about the war almost my entire life, until World War II has become commonplace to me. It takes a certain kind of book to stop me in my tracks and remind me—a millennial distracted by a young family, a fast-paced career, and the concerns of my local Polish community—that this topic can’t be commonplace. This topic, and the way Finkelstein wrote about it, is exceptional. Finkelstein’s story of his family is a testament to the rightful respect that descendants should carry towards the suffering and strength of their ancestors and all survivors of World War II atrocities. He is proof that the next generation cares deeply for this history and will work towards preserving it. Finkelstein and I share this reverence for our family’s World War II stories.

Among the stories I feel most responsible to tell is my grandmother’s survival of the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, the most notorious women’s camp during World War II. Hearing my own grandparents’ witness of persecution by both the Nazis and Soviets allows me to attest to the authenticity of the details Finkelstein included. Other readers may skim over some of these minutiae, but I reveled in every reference. He wrote of fabricated passports and bribes paid along the way towards freedom. He cited songs like “Lord Who Has Saved Poland in Ages Past” (“Boże! coś Polskę przez tak liczne wieki”), which his grandmother sang when arriving in Iran and my grandmother sang at Mass in thanksgiving for surviving the war. He explained the importance of General Władysław Anders, someone whom my grandfather knew, and the army of tens of thousands of Poles, including the Finkelsteins, who he persuaded Stalin to release from the Soviet Union. He emphasized how relevant the Katyn Massacre, the greatest war crime ever perpetrated by the Soviets and a topic I’ve written about time and time again, is to the Russia we know today. I can corroborate the importance of so many of these details with my own family’s experiences. Aside from his brilliance in storytelling, Finkelstein paints a credible and compelling picture of what our grandparents’ lives in captivity and under oppression truly looked like.

From Berlin to Lwów to Siberia, from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to Operation Barbarossa to the Nuremberg Trials, readers may find this book’s true story at times stranger than fiction. Against all odds, people who were once thought dead are resurrected, places that seemed impossible to enter are reached, and families who are torn apart are mended back together. Two Roads Home is richer than any mainstream book—fiction or nonfiction—of the same genre that readers will have recently read. Perhaps it was in the author’s blood to write it that way.