Description
Haunting Jonathan Freedland
Powerful Daniel Finkelstein
The profoundly moving and deeply intimate story of one Jewish familys fate in the Holocaust following the thread from Germany to Latvia and to Britain
In November 1941 Peter Bradleys grandparents Sally and Bertha Brandes were deported from their home in Bamberg to their deaths in Latvia
The Last Train is a profound and moving homage to Peters lost family and to his father who rarely spoke of the traumas through which he lived
It is also his attempt to understand through the prism of his familys story how the Nazis came to conceive and implement the Final Solution
Why did Sally and Berthas fellow citizens put them on the train that carried them to the killing fields
Why did the democracies which so loudly condemned Hitlers persecution of the Jews deny them sanctuary
And why when Peters father finally reached Britain after five terrible months in a Nazi concentration camp was he arrested as an enemy alien
The quest for answers led Peter to explore the origins and evolution of an ancient hatred and the struggles against it of each generation of his family from the Reformation through the Enlightenment and the Age of Reform to the catastrophe of the Holocaust
This is the powerful poignant story of Peters journey through family papers and archives through works of scholarship and the testimony of survivors and from Bavaria and Buchenwald to the mass graves of the Baltic
And reflecting on what he learned he asks in the events of our own times we are all perpetrators or bystanders or resisters which of those roles do we choose for ourselves
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