The Wiener Holocaust Library is delighted to host this hybrid in-person and virtual event in celebration of Karina Urbach’s new book Alice’s Book as part of our Excavation-Confrontation-Repair? Family Histories of the Holocaust events series.

Alice Urbach had her own cooking school in Vienna, but in 1938 she was forced to flee to England, like so many others. Her younger son was imprisoned in Dachau, and her older son, having emigrated to the United States, became an intelligence officer in the struggle against the Nazis.

Returning to the ruins of Vienna in the late 1940s, she discovers that her bestselling cookbook has been published under someone else’s name. Now, eighty years later, the historian Karina Urbach – Alice’s granddaughter – sets out to uncover the truth behind the stolen cookbook, and tells the story of a family torn apart by the Nazi regime, of a woman who, with her unwavering passion for cooking, survived the horror and losses of the Holocaust to begin a new life in America.

About the Speakers:

Dr Karina Urbach is both a historian and prize-winning novelist. She took her PhD at the University of Cambridge and since 2015 researches 20th Century History at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and the Institute for Historical Research, University of London. Bismarck’s favourite Englishman was Urbach’s first book and is now out in paperback. In 2015, her monograph Go-Betweens for Hitler triggered a campaign for the release of interwar material from the royal archives. Her latest work Alice’s Book (Das Buch Alice, Berlin 2020) illustrates for the first time how German publishing houses turned Jewish non-fiction books into ‘Aryan’ ones. Urbach worked on several documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4, ITV and in the US – for PBS and has written for several newspapers.

Lord Daniel Finkelstein OBE is a leading political journalist and prominent media commentator on both TV and radio. A former politician himself, he is currently Associate Editor and Political Columnist for The Times.

Event guidelines for those joining online:

1. The Library will send you a Zoom link and joining instructions via email prior to the event. Please check your junk email folders.

2. Please try and join 5 minutes before the event start time and we will let you into the room (do try and bear with us if this takes a few minutes).

3. If you would like to ask a question during the event, please type your question into the chat function, and we will endeavour to answer as many questions as possible during the Q&A. Your webcam will not be seen during this event.

4. The event will be recorded for the Library’s YouTube channel and will be shared at a later date.