[2] It is an account of his Jewish parents' persecution during the Second World War, how his mother survived Hitler's death camps and his father endured slave labour and starvation in Stalin's Siberian Gulag.

When Hitler came to power in 1933 and it became clear that Jews were no longer safe in Germany, Alfred relocated his family to Amsterdam in the Netherlands, close to where Anne Frank lived.

In London in 1944, Alfred managed to secure fake Paraguayan passports for Grete and their daughters, and in January 1945, they were released from Bergen-Belsen as part of a prisoner exchange with the Germans.

"In a review in The Guardian, Rohan Silva called Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad a "powerful and beautifully written … book".

[12] He said Finkelstein explores themes that lift the memoir "to the status of a modern classic", alongside Philippe Sands's East West Street and Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes.

[13] He said "powered by a sense of filial duty", Finkelstein has produced "an exciting story of courage and persistence" that is "engagingly sustained" from start to finish.

[13] Reilly opined that just as Philippe Sands and Jonathan Freedland have returned to the Holocaust to write books "full of emotive colour", Finkelstein has done the same, delivering "an elegy for the past, and a hopeful call for the future.

[14] In a review in The Irish Times Hughes said he found parts of the book almost "unbearable to read", including the accounts of how most of the children who played together in the streets of Amsterdam in the early 1940s ended up being killed in Nazi death camps.

[15] Varadarajan wrote that Finkelstein "is firm in his own conviction that [Hitler and Stalin] were peers in the annals of evil", and added that it came as "no greater blessing" to the author that by surviving, his mother and father had beaten both dictators.

"[16] Reviewing Two Roads Home in The Washington Post, Cole said it "tracks each family member’s physical passage through the inferno alongside the soul-scarring cycles of doubt and despair".