Fleeing Hitler

Book Review by Daniel E. Levenson

There are many stories of hope and desperation, of luck and despair that arise out of the Shoah. We have seen these tales in books and on film, and although with each passing day we move further and further away from the tragedies of the Holocaust and World War II, there are still new stories emerging. Some of these stories are captured in journalist Kati Marton’s book “The Great Escape, Nine Jews who Fled Hitler and Changed the World,”(Simon & Schuester, New York, 2006) in which she chronicles the difficult journeys of nine men who found themselves uprooted and adrift as a new tide of anti-Semitism, and then Nazism, began to spread in eastern Europe.

While there are some noteworthy professional and philosophical differences between the men she chooses to profile, they also share much in common. One thing they all shared was a terrible sense of being adrift, and an almost desperate sense that in order to survive they would have to transform themselves in some way, sometimes by changing their names, and at other times seeming to assume entirely new identities which held the promise of possible fame and fortune, and perhaps, most important of all, a measure of personal and financial security.

It is interesting that many of the Jews profiled in her book, who found themselves suddenly and rudely uprooted as Hitler rose to power, did not feel any particularly strong connection to Judaism. Marton notes of Leo Szilard, a gifted physicist and a key actor in the evolution of the atom bomb, that “Leather-bound copies of Goethe, Schiller and Heine filled his parents’ library. In common with Budapest’s Jewish Middle Class, Leo never learned Hebrew, and considered organized religion irrelevant.”

One of the many prominent Hungarian Jews featured in the book is the author Arthur Koestler, who also did not grow up with a strong sense of Jewish identity, but was excited by his first encounter with Zionism. His actual experiences in pre-state Israel were disappointing however, and he ended up back in Europe. As Koestler tried to make his way ahead in uncertain future, he gathered the material that would become his influential written cry against Communism and totalitarianism, Darkness at Noon. Marton does an excellent job of describing this evolution, and as we see Koestler traveling throughout Europe and the Soviet Union and meeting a wide variety of people from Langston Hughes to Jabotinsky, she provides fascinating glimpses into his thought process.

Another riveting portrait is of the photographer Robert Capa, who rose to prominence as a war photographer after his coverage of the D-Day invasion at Normandy received world-wide attention. And yet another is that of Michael Curtiz and the story behind the film “Casablanca,” one of the most enduring film classics of all time, which he created.

While Marton’s book is interesting and does give a comprehensive view of the lives of these men, there are points where she seems more focused on explaining the context of the times in which these men lived and their drive for success, than in their own personal reactions to events in Europe. As she portrays them, they do not seem to feel a particularly strong sense of Jewish identity or a connection to other Jews in the Diaspora, and although there are moments when awareness of their ethnicity comes into play, by and large the picture she paints is one of a collection of brilliant, unsettled artists and scientists, who because they were Jews, were forced to flee Europe. As a group, they certainly seem to be aware of anti-Semitic attitudes both on a personal and a political level, but they also seem almost completely divorced from any knowledge of Jewish cultural history.

Like all books about the Holocaust this book is not just a work of history, but a text that raises questions as well, because implicit in any exploration of the horrors of the Shoah, and perhaps especially those which look at how some escaped while others perished, the question of what the world lost in the near-destruction of Eastern European Jewry, confronts us. Marton’s book, like all thorough books about these issues, asks us how many other artistic and scientific titans might have been lost in the murderous Nazi fog of hate? Of course we can never know for certain what might have been if European Jews had not been the target of such massive violence, but in giving us a glimpse of a few who were saved, she reminds us of what was lost.

This review originally appeared in the Jewish Advocate newspaper in 2006.