This week, I’ve been reading Daniel Finkelstein’s brilliant new memoir, Two Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin and the Miraculous Survival of My Family (Doubleday 2023), which deals with his Jewish family’s life in Nazi death camps and in the Gulag. The “miraculous” in his subtitle seems no exaggeration.
I’ve been taking notes on Two Roads Home in one of the blue chemistry notebooks I use for such purposes — which I like because they give you 40 lines per page instead of the 32 for college-ruled — and in a few days, I’ve filled eight pages with facts and ideas from it. Some of the most memorable involve the Sobibor extermination camp in German-occupied Poland.