Finkelstein is Jewish; [1] his mother, Mirjam Finkelstein, was a Holocaust survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, [5] while his father Ludwik Finkelstein OBE was born in Lwów (then in Poland but now in Ukraine), and became Professor of Measurement and Instrumentation at City University London. Particular and specific as his mother’s story is of domestic life under the Nazis, then in concentration camps followed by an almost absurdly unlikely release through a prisoner swap, the broader themes of the Nazis’ wanton barbarity and the Holocaust are familiar through literature, documentaries, history and education. The new arrests of 5,542 people meant that more than 100,000 Jews had now been taken captive in the Netherlands.

First, the author's grandparents and other relatives on both sides led extremely storm-tossed lives.If like Finkelstein’s mother’s family, for example, you’ve fled Berlin because it’s no longer safe to be Jewish there, and you’re in Amsterdam, living close to Anne Frank, once war breaks out, are you better off in the Netherlands or in Britain? But his father’s story of internal exile in Siberia under the Soviets (internal in the sense that his home city of Lvov in Poland was transferred almost overnight to the Soviets) is less familiar and less often told, despite there being nothing between the brutality and criminality of the two regimes. Cal Flyn, our deputy editor, takes us through the seven books that are set 60+ years in the past and yet speak to the present.

And Newt Gingrich’s revolution, and the anti-Washington sentiment, has echoes in British Conservatism but it’s not the same because Britain isn’t the same. It’s a departure for British politics, which spent decades transferring power between parties, but maintaining a centrist stance.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. Ludwik, who grew up in Poland, was exiled to eastern Kazakhstan by the Soviets with his mother, where they lived through a Siberian winter with little food and no shelter.