The Last Train

A Family History of the Final Solution

By: Peter Bradley

Narrated by: John Sackville

Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

‘Haunting.’ Jonathan Freedland

‘Powerful.’ Daniel Finkelstein

The profoundly moving and deeply intimate story of one Jewish family’s fate in the Holocaust, following the thread from Germany to Latvia and to Britain.

In November 1941, Peter Bradley's grandparents, Sally and Bertha Brandes, were deported from their home in Bamberg to their deaths in Latvia.

The Last Train is a profound and moving homage to Peter’s lost family and to his father who rarely spoke of the traumas through which he lived.

It is also his attempt to understand, through the prism of his family’s story, how the Nazis came to conceive and implement the Final Solution.

Why did Sally and Bertha’s fellow citizens put them on the train that carried them to the killing fields?

Why did the democracies which so loudly condemned Hitler’s persecution of the Jews deny them sanctuary?

And why, when Peter's father finally reached Britain after five terrible months in a Nazi concentration camp, was he arrested as an 'enemy alien'?

The quest for answers led Peter to explore the origins and evolution of an ancient hatred and the struggles against it of each generation of his family, from the Reformation, through the Enlightenment and the Age of Reform, to the catastrophe of the Holocaust.

This is the powerful, poignant story of Peter’s journey through family papers and archives, through works of scholarship and the testimony of survivors, and from Bavaria and Buchenwald to the mass graves of the Baltic.

And, reflecting on what he learned, he asks: in the events of our own times, we are all perpetrators or bystanders or resisters; which of those roles do we choose for ourselves?

©2022 Peter Bradley (P)2022 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

"Peter Bradley ponders in his introduction to this wonderful book whether 'there has been so much remembrance that one more family’s cannot really be required'. As this beautifully written account demonstrates, it’s not the remembering that we should be worried about but the forgetting." (Alan Johnson, author of This Boy)

"A beautifully written, moving account that situates Bradley’s family and their war experiences in the long sweep of European anti-Semitism. Although this is a book about the past, it never ceases to bring readers’ attention back to our troubled present, reminding us that 21st-century politics and culture carry disconcerting echoes of the 1930s and 1940s." (Rebecca Clifford, author of Survivors: Children's Lives After the Holocaust)

Terrible to listen to but necessary

Sometimes I got lost with who the narrator was following. Perhaps if I was not listening to all audio I would have had a map. I can barely believe the evil of man. I found it interesting when the author was examining how some countries did not follow the Jewish genocide.