In Lands Not My Own : A Wartime Journey

Rating:
Summary: Response
Review: 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 When Reuven died his obituary in the London Times (of which we have a copy) makes specific mention on the unpublished manuscript and an excerpt was actually published in the Sunday Times at around the same time.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.

Rating:
Summary: Prejudicial,historically inaccurate, but interesting.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: History or Fiction?
Review: 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...