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b'About four years ago Times of London journalist Daniel Finkelstein undertook an effort to tell his parents\\u2019 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\\u2019s 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\\u2019s 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\\u2019s guest and he\\u2019s here to discuss his new book \\u201cTwo Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin, and the Miraculous Survival of My Family.\\u201d It is both a family story and a larger exploration of how an entire continent came apart.'