In Lands Not My Own: A Wartime Journey [Hardcover]

Reuben Ainsztein (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 4, 2002

Reuben Ainsztein fled the pogroms of Wilno, Poland, when he was only sixteen. Matriculating at a university in Brussels, Ainsztein was again confronted with the virulence of anti-Semitism when the Nazis occupied Belgium in 1940. In search of freedom and a role in the defeat of Hitler, Ainsztein applied to and was accepted by Britain’s Royal Air Force. Visa in hand, he embarked on an extraordinary journey across war-ravaged Europe, seeking safe passage to London.

Ainsztein chronicles his stunning odyssey with absorbing detail and luminous reflection on the horrors of war and the unspeakable evil that was the Holocaust. Denied egress first at Calais and then at Marseilles, he crossed the Pyrenees into Spain on foot, and was immediately apprehended by Franco’s guards and incarcerated in Miranda de Ebro, a concentration camp, where he was interned for fourteen months. Miraculously, Ainsztein survived and eventually made his way to Britain and then to Scotland, where he trained for the RAF as a turret gunner on a Lancaster bomber.

In Lands Not My Own is one man’s personal testimony to the horrors that gave birth to war and were nurtured by it. Along the way, cast in spare, elegant prose, are the musings of a poet and philosopher on the goodness of man, the nature of evil, and the moral underpinnings of humanity. With great eloquence, Reuben Ainsztein tells a tale of heartbreaking sorrow, unfathomable courage, and the defiant resilience of the human spirit.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This memoir by the late Ainsztein, the author of the classichistories Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe and TheWarsaw Ghetto Revolt who died in 1981, is an honest, compelling set ofrecollections. A self-avowed Marxist, early in his Polish adolescenceAinsztein eschewed the Communist movement: "The moment I saw Communismas a religion, I was lost to it." Denied entry to Polish universitiesas a Jew, Ainsztein emigrated to Belgium before the war and studiedmedicine. Caught up in the German blitzkrieg of western Europe in1940, he eventually evaded the German noose tightening and escaped toSpain, where he was interned for more than a year, hearing, amongother things, the applause of fellow Polish prisoners when theylearned of the number of Jews killed in 1942. (Asides throughoutremarking on Polish anti-Semitism can make for difficult reading.)Upon arriving in England in 1943, Ainsztein pointedly refused to servewith the Polish exile armed forces, insisting instead on joining theRoyal Air Force, believing his own combat flying "allowed me tofalsely claim the credit for having risked my life at a time when myown family had known every possible terror and death itself."(Ainsztein had learned by then that his family had perished in thecamps.) Tales of combat flying, including parachuting from hisstricken bomber and downing a German jet as an upper gunner, are vividand more thoughtful than most others in the genre ("I... took forgranted the long silences, unuttered hopes, clumsy curses, andswearwords that were meant to replace terms such as death, terror,determination, and hope"). The book closes at war's end, withAinsztein returning to Dieppe, "treading unclean soil soaked withJewish blood."
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

From Library Journal

Ainsztein (The Warsaw Ghetto Revolt), a BCC researcher specializing in Eastern Europe who died in 1981, was born in 1920s Wilno, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania). Although his early childhood was happy, as a Jew he soon experienced persecution by the Polish Catholic majority. At 16 he left his family (whom he never saw again) for university in Brussels but was forced to flee in 1940 without graduating when the Nazis occupied Belgium. This memoir is an account of his wartime experiences, often on foot, as he tried to elude capture by the Nazis or their supporters; he spent 14 months incarcerated in the Miranda de Ebro concentration camp in Fascist Spain and eventually saw wartime action as a turret gunner in a Lancaster bomber for the British Royal Air Force. A keen observer of human behavior, Ainsztein probes how we cope with extreme adversity and struggle with our seemingly innate need to subjugate one another. Although he experienced the worst in humanity, he also experienced the best. Ainsztein's eloquent account makes World War II very real; it is also unusual among Holocaust memoirs in recounting movement through Europe instead of life in the camps. Recommended for public libraries and military history collections. Ruth K. Baacke, Woodbury P.L., Highland Mills, NY
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1St Edition edition (June 4, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375507574
• ISBN-13: 978-0375507571
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,249,394 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The personal memoir of the greatest ever Jewish historian, June 5, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: In Lands Not My Own: A Wartime Journey (Hardcover)

Reuben Ainsztein was a legend in his lifetime. The first historian to argue that Jews did not go to their deaths like lambs to the slaughter. He devoted his life to a study of Jewish Resistance and wrote the seminal work Jewish Resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe.

But his own life story was equally dramatic - and now, some 20 years after his death, his story is told following the remarkable discovery of his lost manuscript in a London attic.

Reuben's ambition was simple. He just wanted to leave the antisemitic Poland of his birth and to become British, like his heroes Dickens, Darwin, Livingstone and Conrad. To achieve this goal he crossed Nazi-occupied Europe firstly from East to West and then from North to South until he finally managed to escape via Portugal. His amazing journey is a story of tenacity, single-minded determination, love and heroism.

Having reached Britain, he immediately joined the RAF and flew numerous bombing missions until finally being shot down back over the Belgium, from where he had escaped some 3 years earlier.

Reuben Ainsztein was a hero amongst men. That so few of us (other than serious historians of the period) have ever heard of him says much about his unassuming ways and modesty. But make no mistake - much of our thinking about the holocaust (including the roles of Roosevelt and Churchill in not doing more to help the victims of the holocaust)would be very different had it not been for the pioneering work of Reuben Ainsztein. Reuben was the first to document Jewish Resistance and probably did more than anyone to encourage Jewish pride and self-belief through highlighting the role of the Jew as fighter rather than as victim.

Amnyone interested in this most tragic episode of human history, must read "In Lands Not My Own", the personal memoirs of the greatest historian of the holocaust that ever lived.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Prejudicial,historically inaccurate, but interesting., August 5, 2003

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: In Lands Not My Own: A Wartime Journey (Hardcover)

I found the story fascinating and certainly worth preserving for future generations. After having read many of such publications, what strikes me in this one is a straighforward hate towards anything Polish. Germans seem to rate much higher on the author's personal scale than the Poles. Author's prejudice can be seen especially in those places where physical characteristics of a nation are used to "prove" its moral decay etc. Germans might be more appealing physically to the author than Poles, but it is still them who murdered 6 million innocent people of Jewish origin.
Certainly, the situation of Jews in the pre-war Poland was not heaven, but it was not hell either. Their situation was pretty much the same as that of their fellow countrymen in the United States of that time.
If Poland was such hell, how could one explain that Wladyslaw Szpilman (the hero of the movie "The Pianist") was an official pianist of the Polish Radio and after the war he made a brilliant return to the National Philharmonic in Warsaw?
It is not up to me to judge the author's personal experience. It is only puzzling that he claims to be a historian, and as such he should have taken a more professional stand in these matters.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is a must !, June 15, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: In Lands Not My Own: A Wartime Journey (Hardcover)

In Lands Not My Own is unassuming and modest but all the more powerful for its understated charm.

Ainsztein was clearly a thoughtful but heroic man. His book chronicles a most incredible flights across war-torn Europe. Written with all the elegance of a Conrad novel, this book takes us right into Ainsztein's own personal heart of darkness.

In many, many ways , this book is as important as Anne Frank's diary. It should be compulsory reading on evry high school history, and indeed English literature, booklist.

It is rare to find a historical memoir that is so well written, so well observed and so elegantly portrayed.

If you buy only one book today, make sure it is this one!