Two Roads Home

This special event hosted in partnership with The Wiener Holocaust Library, London, will see British journalist and politician, Daniel Finkelstein OBE, in conversation with Prof Debórah Dwork in celebration of Two Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin and the Miraculous Survival of My Family, Daniel Finkelstein’s remarkable new book. Learn more about the legacy of the Wiener Library and the tragic personal histories embedded in its founding. Hosted by the US Friends of the Wiener Holocaust Library, the talk will be followed by a light drinks reception.

Special guests Chief of Staff to His Majesty's Trade Commissioner for North America and Consul General to New York Rian Matanky-Becker and renowned journalist Sarah Wildman will open the event.

Note: This event will take place in-person at the Center for Jewish History, and will be live streamed online.

About the Speakers

Daniel Finkelstein is the grandson of the German Jewish scholar activist Alfred Wiener, who founded the Wiener Library in 1933 in order to warn the world of the Nazi threat. He is weekly political columnist at The Times of London. Formerly an adviser to Prime Minister John Major, he was appointed to the House of Lords in 2013.

Professor Debórah Dwork is the Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at The Graduate Center–City University of New York. She is renowned for her scholarship on Holocaust history and her pathbreaking early oral recording of Holocaust survivors, weaving their narratives into the history she writes. Her award-winning books include: Flight from the Reich (W.W. Norton, 2012); Auschwitz (W.W. Norton, 2006); Holocaust (W.W. Norton, 2002); and Children With A Star (Yale University Press, 1991). Debórah Dwork is also recipient of the International Network of Genocide Scholars Lifetime Achievement Award (2020) and the Annetje Fels Kupferschmidt Award, bestowed by the Dutch Auschwitz Committee (2022).

About the Book

In Two Roads Home (Doubleday, September 2023) beloved British journalist Daniel Finkelstein tells the extraordinary story of the years before his mother met his father—years of war and trials they barely survived. Daniel Finkelstein's grandfather was a German Jewish intellectual leader who tolled an early warning of the impending Holocaust and became an archivist of Nazi crimes. He relocated his family to safety in Amsterdam, where they knew Anne Frank. But in those years safety was an illusion: Anne Frank famously went into hiding and Daniel's mother, Mirjam, also still a child, was sent to Bergen-Belsen with her mother and sisters.

Finkelstein's father, Ludwik, grew up in a prosperous Jewish family in Poland where his father, Dolu was a patriotic hero of the Great War. But when Stalin took control, Dolu, was deported to Siberia and Ludwik and his mother were sentenced to forced labor in Kazakhstan, starved and housed in a stable in freezing conditions.