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.

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!

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.