The last train : a family history of the final solution

Bradley, Peter, 1953-2022

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Summary

The profoundly moving and deeply intimate true story of one Jewish family's fate in the Holocaust, following the thread from Germany to Latvia and, ultimately, to Britain. It was only by accident that Peter as a child discovered that his father, Fred Bradley, was in fact born Fritz Brandes. And it was only after his father's death in 2004 that Peter was able to begin uncovering the shocking details of this story and set out on the journey - literally and figuratively - that forms the basis of his book. Peter's family were German Jews living in Bavaria. In 1938, his father was interned in Buchenwald in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, only to be released the following spring and allowed to settle in London before the outbreak of war, aged 24, penniless and alone. There he awaited the arrival of his parents and other family members. But their fate was to be very different: shipped by train to Latvia, to the Riga ghetto and nearby internment camps, they were murdered. Peter was struck by the desire to not only to find out what had happened, but also to try to understand why. Of course antisemitism was at the root of this. But where did antisemitism come from in the first place? And why did it continue virtually unabated after WW2 despite such graphic evidence of the horrors it had caused? Such apparently intractable questions led Peter to travel to the forests of Latvia to see where his grandparents died and to dig deeply into the roots of this prejudice. This book tells that story.