The Story of Mirjam Finkelstein (née Wiener) 1933 – 2017
Mirjam Finkelstein (née Wiener) was born in Berlin in 1933 to Margarethe and Dr Alfred Wiener, a Nazi resister, Jewish activist and future founder of the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide. Escaping from the Nazis, Mirjam’s family moved to Amsterdam in the year of her birth. Anne Frank was to become one of her childhood friends.
In June 1943, Mirjam, her mother and sisters were taken to Westerbork transit camp and then to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Her sister Ruth was later able to testify to the presence in Bergen-Belsen of Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, through notes she had made in a diary.
Mirjam’s father, who had managed to reach London in 1939, was able to obtain fake Paraguayan passports for his family, but the visas only arrived after the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940. However, the passports enabled them to be included as part of an exchange of Belsen prisoners at the Swiss border in January 1945. On the train journey out, all four of them narrowly escaped arrest by German soldiers who boarded the train. Once over the border, the very ill Margarethe tragically died. The three girls survived the war.
Mirjam settled in London, becoming a maths teacher and a Holocaust educator. She spent many years speaking in schools and elsewhere on behalf of the Anne Frank Foundation and the Holocaust Educational Trust, talking about her experiences during the Shoah. With her husband, Ludwik Finkelstein, she had three children, Daniel, Anthony and Tamara; she died in London in 2017.
Presented by Calum Isaacs
Calum works as a strategy consultant after graduating with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford. He is a grandchild of Mirjam Finkelstein, who passed away when he was 14 years old. While she was alive, he remembers Friday night dinners at his grandmother’s house and shared festivals and holidays together.
Mirjam’s story was and continues to be discussed and shared by Calum’s family, with his uncle Daniel Finkelstein writing a book about her and her husband’s respective stories of persecution titled ‘Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad’. Calum has learnt from his grandmother and his family the importance of keeping alive stories like Mirjam’s, and shares their view that it is important for maintaining a tolerant society.
Watch an excerpt from the story of Mirjam Finkelstein
