With Author John Simon

Caught between a rock (the Soviet Union) and a hard place (Nazi Germany) as the Second World War approached, Finland chose to side with Germany. Despite the presence of over 260,000 German soldiers on Finnish soil, not a single Jewish citizen of Finland was sent to a concentration or extermination camp or harmed in any way by the Germans. How was this possible in the midst of the Holocaust, and what lessons does this unique story have for us today? Simon answers these and other questions by combining detailed research and dramatic fact-based fiction to tell this extraordinary, little-known and gripping story.

JOHN B. SIMON, an American Jew residing in Finland, grew up in Pleasantville, NY. After graduating from Hamilton College, Simon earned an M.A. from Cambridge University. He also studied at the Sorbonne and the University of York. In the early 1970s, he founded The DOME Project, a community-based program on Manhattan’s Upper West Side dedicated to providing opportunities for marginalized youth in New York City. His 1982 book To Become Somebody: Growing Up Against the Grain of Society (Houghton Mifflin) tells the story of some of the program’s early participants. Nearly fifty years later, The DOME Project is still running. Simon moved to Finland in 1984 and began working for KONE Corporation as a communications officer. After publishing KONE’s Prince (Otava, 2009), a best-selling biography of one of the company’s legendary owner-directors, he was named the country’s 2010 Communications Professional of the Year. Strangers in a Stranger Land was first published in Finnish in 2017 as Mahdoton sota. It was among the four books short-listed for the 2017 History Book of the Year. Simon and his wife Hannele have two children, Mikko and Elina, and four grandchildren, Stella, Daniel, Kira, and Oliver.

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