Customer Reviews

In Lands Not My Own: A Wartime Journey

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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.

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.

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!

I am writing this in response to the reviewer from Bloominton.

First , let me correct an inaccuracy. Reuven married Pat after the end of the War (I believe in the late 40's/50's). The cover details are incorrect in suggesting he was married in 1941 but this was simply not picked up at the time. Apologies.

Reuven wrote the story in the late 60's and tried to get it published - we even have the envelope in which it was returned from a prospective publisher. We do not know why but perhaps there was less interest than there is today. When Reuven died his obituary in the London Times (of which we have a copy) makes specific mention on the unpublished manuscript and an excerpt was actually published in the Sunday Times at around the same time.

After he died, no-one tried to get it published and the typescript remained with Pat. Following her death several years, it passed to her niece, Janet. It was only after Janet's death that my wife and I (my wife is Janet's daughter)found the typescript when clearing out the family house for sale. We then contacted a literary agent and eventually signed a publishing contract.

I cannot tell you exactly when each page was written but I can swear that the document we found is the document that was published. We still have the original typescript - it is all on similar paper and on the same typewriter. There is no evidence to suggest anything suspicious at all.

The value of first hand memoirs is unquestionable. The author's long voyage through occupied Europe and later his service in the British Army elevates this book to a testimony of a hero. Yet, one wants to be sure that it is a true and real testimony.

The first doubt about the book's completeness as a testimony is a fact that the author did not mention his wife throughout the work. Only the biographical note on the cover states, to a complete readers' surprise, that he married Pat Kearey (a British national?) in 1941. One starts wondering in what circumstances was he married and how that marriage influenced his citizenship status in the Nazi occupied Europe. We the readers are left to believe throughout the book that he was a Polish citizen and his only connection with Britain was a letter from a British diplomat in Belgium confirming his intention to join the British army...Another serious doubt in the reader's mind arises when the author tells us about his conversation with a ""young, fairish, slender" German soldier in France (p.54).

That occurrence is simply very hard to believe - Ainsztein was a fugitive not only with false papers but also with a letter from a British consul, and, as he himself says, he looked "unmistakably Jewish" (p.56). Furthermore, looking at the construction of the book, one notices certain changes as the book progresses. The times when the author lived in Brussels are full of detailed information, including last names of friends. Full names disappear completely in the part of the book which talks about the Spanish prison. And then, after the author joins the Air Force, the language of the memoirs changes to the point that to a suspicious reader it looks like a different person writing.

It is possible that Ainsztein kept writing these memoirs over a 30 year period after the war. Unfortunately, the editors don't provide us with even a hint of an explanation what was happening with the manuscript during the 20 years after the author's death. It is somewhat puzzling that Ainsztein has not published this book during his lifetime - after all, he was an accomplished historian with several publications to his credit. But there are also several places in the book that will raise eyebrows of serious historians.

To use one example, already on page 5 Ainsztein says: "by applying discriminatory laws they (the Poles in the pre-war Poland) prevented Jewish youths from obtaining a technical or university education and closed all government, army, state, and municipal careers to them". A brief consultation with works of such historians as Joseph Rotschild ("East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars"), and Ezra Mendelsohn ("The Jews of East Central Europe Between the Wars") shows that 10-20% of all students in Poland before the war were Jewish.

There were also several Jewish officers in the Polish army, some of them decorated with highest honors, or even in the rank of a general. And, there were absolutely no discriminatory laws against Jews or any other nationality in pre-war Poland... Here, the reader is obviously left with a serious neglect on the part of the author, who could have simply done his research before putting on paper statements that have been long proven untrue.

Overall, with all its serious faults, this book is certainly of interest for anybody studying the darkest periods in Western history. Personally, I am left with an impression that there is a "story behind the story" and that it shouldn't be the case...

The editorial reviews shown at this website accurately summarize the book, and I will not rehash them. I just want to add my strong personal recommendation. Ainsztein's odyssey/exodus was of particular interest in light of my recently having seen Polanski's "The Pianist". I found the book to be compelling reading, and believe that Jewish readers would find it even more so.

This is a fascinating book to those familiar already with WWII literature and autobiographies. Ruben Ainsztein is born in Poland, but grows up to hate his homeland in the prewar years, based on his sense that the gentiles are anti-Semitic. Unable to attain a place in medical school in Poland, he gets into a school in Brussels, with very little money to scratch by on; his parents think his long and expensive, difficult foreign endeavor is absurd, as they haven't got the money. To me, the story is gripping because this young Ruben is one determined fellow. Twisting and turning through the hardships of low income, bad housing, sleep deprivation, poor nutrition and hard luck generally, he keeps pursuing his goal, learns French well enough to be a university student, makes friends, becomes a tutor, and focuses in addition on learning English.

He dreams of England and its great heritage and high moral character (as portrayed in his childhood reading, not based on real contact of any kind). He loves comparing his dream of this sceptred isle, its noble-hearted people and lifestyles, while he wallows in psychological misery in prewar Poland.

For a very strong-minded lecture on ethnic intolerance, his views of the Poles will certainly amuse, if not infuriate, the reader. I found it entertaining, that he so freely pronounced them insufferable in almost every way, strongly linked to their Catholic heritage. If the reader has been to Poland, or knows its people, then certainly the first chapters are interesting to read: uneditted ethnic hate-blast!

His education is interrupted by the war, and he winds up wandering desperately through southern Europe trying to get to England, so he can join them in the fight against Germany. Not so lucky! He winds up in a Franco Spanish prison for 14 months, which again is very interesting to read: how did they eat, sleep, bathe, kill time, live with rain and mud, overcrowding, ethnic tensions. He gets thrown in with the Poles again and again, for that is indeed his citizenship (passport). He hates them, hates listening to them in the "bunks" they arrange, hates their drunkenness and intolerance and ignorance. A pity he knew their language, I thought once - imagine, if he couldn't, they could prattle away and he'd not get it!

The book continues rolling through one fiasco and near-death escapes as he finally gets to England, gets himself into the RAF as a gunner, goes through very expensive training (enough money to send a student three times through Oxford, as they say!)

He proudly manages to bomb Nuremberg and survive many other raids, until finally his plane gets a hit, they can't carry on, the crew jumps by parachute, and he breaks his ankle on a road in Belgium. There at 3:00AM he's hopping down a road until he finds a house, then another, where an elderly lady has been hiding Jews in the attic throughout the war, while housing a German officer downstairs to allay suspicion. Unbelievable!

It does cross one's mind that the intense detail could not be retained that long, such as people's names, etc., however, it is not just that detail-mindedness that arouses a question as to this author's complete truthfulness. As one other commentator wrote, it seems to be three novellas strung together by different writers. With all the hoopla in the 1980's about fake-Holocaust literature, one would have to be more alert as to truth, but on the other hand, who could verify or deny what he has written at this point in history? Certainly the genre sells well around the world, so it's worth inventing trainrides, nasty landlords, antisemitic encounters, poor food, hitchhiking adventures and prison stories. Does anyone from that prison remember him, if he were there 14 months, giving language lessons to others? Do some of his fellow Poles remember a Jew bunking with them? What can they say about him, his attitude, behavior, etc?

For a good, fast and entertaining read of a quick and clever Polish Jew, who lands on his feet and manages to kill Germans with bombs, this is the best. Accuracy? Does it matter at this point? Mentally, this man remained homeless, a sad ending.

Enjoy!