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HarperNorth has landed "a profoundly moving and deeply intimate" account of former Labour MP Peter Bradley’s family’s fate as Jews during the Holocaust.
Jonathan de Peyer, senior commissioning editor, acquired world English language rights for The Last Train: A Family History of the Final Solution from Doug Young of PEW Literary. The book will publish in hardback, e-book and audio in May 2022.
De Peyer said: "This is a heart-breaking story of betrayal, prejudice, perseverance and survival. Combining first person travelogue with historical insight and witness testimony, it is at once deeply learned and incredibly touching. Readers will emerge with new insight into an episode of history that has much to teach us. It stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the work of Philippe Sands, Timothy Snyder, Timothy Garton Ash and Hadley Freeman."
It was only by accident that as a child, Bradley discovered that his father, Fred Bradley, was in fact born Fritz Brandes. Following his father’s death in 2004, he was able to begin uncovering the details of their family history and set out on the journey that forms the basis of his book.
Bradley's family were German Jews living in Bavaria. In 1938, his father was imprisoned in Buchenwald in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, but released the following spring when he was granted a temporary UK visa and arrived in May 1939, aged 24, penniless and alone. As the Nazis invaded France a year later, he was arrested by the British as an ‘enemy alien’ and shipped to an internment camp in Canada. His parents’ fate was to be very different: deported by train to Latvia, to the Riga ghetto and nearby camps, where they were murdered.
The ex-MP said: "I wrote this book because I wanted to know more about the fate of my grandparents and to understand better the awful accumulation of ideas and events which led their neighbours to put them on that train. What I learned compelled me to challenge the notion that the Holocaust was an historical aberration and, at a time when so many are turning from democratic principles, to make the case that none of us can escape responsibility for the people we are and the choices we make."