Michael, welcome back to Giant Ideas.
Good to be here after a week.
We've failed on the continuity. We're still wearing the same clothes as last week. Um we had a great chat last week about...
When you're in the dungeon of Giant Ideas, right?
We might never let you out. You better be careful. Um we're going to talk this week about your new book. The US edition is out today, this week. Um it tells just an incredibly powerful, pretty shocking story about your family history and the Holocaust. And also speaks very powerfully, I think, to the moment we're in today. But perhaps for people who've not yet read it, could you just describe the story?
For the people who were swept up in the incredible horrors of mid-20th century Europe, whether they're in Russia or Germany or elsewhere around Europe, all the people that were swept up in World War II, civilians and soldiers and airmen and everybody else. There I don't know how many people were affected, but maybe 30, 40, 50 million people. Every one of them has a story. And every one of them has a family story of some sort. And obviously, the story that resonates with an individual is their family story. I studied history a long, long time ago. And always felt that the way to write about history is through individual stories set against the fabric of the time, set against the background, the tapestry is the grand sweep of history, but that is brought to life through talking about the details and the particulars of how decisions made by politicians and war leaders then came to affect three or four or people or in my in the case of my book, you know, maybe half a dozen principal characters, but then a whole cast of other people that were associated in this case with my family.
And what was the I mean, the crux of it was essentially that your grandparents were murdered.
Well, a lot of So, the backdrop was quite simple. Um I started writing the book. My mother had died shortly before COVID and she lived in Wales until the last year of her life. And then my sister had cleared out the house and there are maybe four cartons of papers and few photographs and things that had been but, you know, this was not the Churchill archives or the French archives. It was four cartons of papers and I'd never really thought about writing a book about family, but then COVID broke out and I had a ton of time on my hands because I wasn't traveling, wasn't commuting, wasn't doing all the I started riffing through the stuff and I started to write. And then I got deeper and deep and then there were little things that I began to discover and figure out. And then I started doing deeper deeper research because you can do so much on the internet, particularly if you follow the all the little entries at the bottom of Wikipedia entries or on ancestry.com where there's a obscure reference and then you begin to follow that. And I had hired a couple of researchers and helped me because I don't really speak German or read it or understand it. She helped me with documents and then started being able to, you know, I never really thought about my grandparents generation or who these people were or how they became who they were and sort of seen some black and white photographs about them, but I never thought of them as real flesh and blood with brains and emotions and uh and so then I got utterly absorbed.
Must have been quite emotional then.
Uh Is that the right word? I don't know because I knew how the story ended. Yeah. It wasn't a happy end. Um but um there are a few things. I tripped across a photograph. My father was a had been an immigrant. He'd been sent by his parents when he was a 14-year-old to Britain where he had got a scholarship into school, which was the only way they could get him out of Germany.
And then in 1940 after the Germans had swept through France and the Netherlands and Belgium and Luxembourg. Um the British in a panic rounded up every quote enemy alien who tended to be Italians and Germans. So, suddenly the restaurants in Soho closed because they're all Italian waiters and they're all rounded up irrespective of the fact that they may have spoken pretty good English and have been here for 20 years as being the close confidant of Benito Mussolini. And my father was swept up in that dragnet as well, and my uncle and a whole bunch of other family members. And then they were sent to the Isle of Man where they were interned. And the thing that surprised me most in all of this was talk about the obscure back alleys of the internet. I found a trove of photographs of all these internees or many of the internees taken on the Isle of Man. And I of course I'm going through the photographs in a sort of morbid fashion seeing if I recognize anyone. And then I find two photographs. I said, 'I know that guy.' It was my father as a young man lined up with a whole bunch of prisoners behind barbed wire.
And he never talked about it.
Huh. So, did either of your parents talk about what happened?
Uh my father began a little bit towards the end of his life. My uncle talked about it much more. He had after he was interned on the Isle of Man because the Isle of Man was full of Italians and Germans and they had to take a load of those people and send them to Canada. Which was very very hazardous undertaking because of the U-boats and all these ships were getting sunk and so my uncle was they had to put barbed wire down the middle of the ship that my uncle was on because the British in their zeal hadn't really distinguished between refugee Jews and ardent Nazis. And there were a whole bunch of ardent Nazis that swept up as well. So, they had to separate the two. Um and my uncle got shipped off to Canada there. So um and then eventually came back. And um
The book is called Outsider.
Yeah, Outlander. Outlander, outsider, stranger, foreigner.
Because a lot of the book is about being an outsider.
About coming to a country where enemy alien is put on your passport even if you're fleeing or your papers even if you're fleeing oppression. Um and then trying to assimilate into a society and never quite being able to do that.
And did you retain that sense of being an outsider?
