"It was the misfortune of the main protagonist in this story to live through one of the most catastrophic events in history and survive." In the spring of 1939, six-year-old Eva Unger (later Figes) came to settle in London. Born in Berlin, her middle-class Jewish family managed to bribe the Gestapo into letting them escape Nazi Germany, leaving behind friends, relatives and their penniless, orphan housemaid, Edith. Ten years later, with Eva happily assimilated into post-war British society, word arrived from Edith in Palestine, asking for her old job back in the bosom of the only family she ever knew. In London, however, she was isolated by her inability to speak English, and by the scorn of Eva's mother, badly damaged during the war and unable to feel empathy or show affection. "Journey to Nowhere" is Edith's account of her miraculous survival in wartime Berlin, and her tragic post-war experience of the Zionist movement in Palestine, as told to the schoolgirl Eva. Initially forced to labour in munitions factories, Edith went underground in 1943, moving from place to place in an attempt to stay one step ahead of the Gestapo.
Protected by non-Jewish sympathisers, and shielded by Nazis who, sensing the end of the war, sought to protect themselves by associating with a Jew, Edith led a terrifying existence. After the war, she lived in the ruins of Berlin, anxiously avoiding the occupying Russian troops and their indiscriminate campaign of rape, until she was persuaded by a Zionist recruiter and taken to live in Palestine. Here she found herself treated with bitter contempt as a despised German Jew, and at the centre of another war, this time one of aggressive Zionist expansionism, the original Jewish settler population apparently keen to use the European Holocaust as a convenient front to further their own nationalist aims. "Journey to Nowhere" is a profoundly disturbing story of personal tragedy, but also an account of how international complacency at the end of the century's worst catastrophe has led first to making the lives of thousands of displaced European Jews infinitely worse, and then to the devastating repercussions felt today.
Eva Figes controversially argues that the Zionist state has been a disaster born of the treacherous, often anti-Semitic agendas of the post-war powers, and warns that history must be divorced from the mythology of nationalism if we are to learn from the tragedies of the past. This is a highly charged and profoundly moving account of the Holocaust and its personal and global aftermath. It is highly controversial - an unprecedented attack on the state of Israel by a highly respected writer, historian and literary critic.
- ISBN10 0413776549
- ISBN13 9780413776549
- Publish Date 10 August 2007
- Publish Status Cancelled
- Out of Print 25 June 2007
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Methuen Publishing Ltd
- Format Paperback
- Pages 226
- Language English