Hello, and thank you for listening to The History of World War II podcast.

Episode 370 interview with Peter Bradley about his book, The Last Train, a Family History

of the Final Solution.

Peter Bradley was a labor MP between 1997 and 2005.

More recently, he co-founded and directed Speaker's Corner Trust, a charity which promotes

freedom of expression, open debate, and active citizenship in the UK, and developing democracies.

He has written, usually on politics, for a wide range of publications, including The Times,

The Guardian, The Independent, The New Statesman, and The New European.

Thanks to Bradley, thank you for being with us today.

And not at all, it's a pleasure.

Absolutely.

One of the reasons I wanted to bring you on, besides your well-written book, was you talk

about your family's time during the Second World War in Germany, in Europe, but at the

same time, you use their story, if you will, as a way to kind of cover, in a broad sense,

a history of anti-Semitism, so was that your inclination when you first set out, or was

it mostly just to tell their story, but then you had to dig deeper to figure out why all

this was going on?

Yes, that's precisely the way the book developed is almost a mystery to me, because I didn't

start out the writer book.

I set out with a very limited ambition, I wanted to find out, I knew what had happened to

my grandmother in Latvia, which my grandparents were deported in 1941, but I didn't know

what happened to my grandfather, I wanted to see if I could find out more.

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