The List

By Martin Fletcher

Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2011.

Reviewed by Helen Schary Motro

Martin Fletcher’s The List is a fast-paced historical novel of wartime drama, suspense and love. Encompassing the final months of the iconic year, 1945, from the day of the Allied victory in May, it describes the characters who live, love and fight against the backdrop of the Nazi Holocaust, the Zionist attempts to overthrow British rule in Palestine and the rocky road of refugee absorption into England.  Martin Fletcher’s background as a British-born author, a former long-serving NBC News Middle East correspondent and a Tel Aviv bureau chief, well equip him to weave his story. The interesting story line, which the author emphasizes is faithful to actual events, delivers history on a platter. “Nothing is invented,” he declares in his epilogue.

Heroes draw the reader into the twists and turns of the plot – the young couple, Edith and Georg, Viennese refugees who make a life in a boardinghouse on Goldhurst Terrace in London during World War II, and then search out and embrace the survivors who emerge from the ashes. It chronicles the hard times they face in England, local sentiment against aliens, wartime internship on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea, and endemic anti-Semitism.

Edith, expecting a baby, is torn by grief at the news which dribbles in of family members lost in the war. Miraculously, one survives. Anna, now 22, had been a girl of outstanding beauty and lustrous hair who lived with the family before the war. Edith and her husband bring Anna to postwar England, but the emaciated woman with dead eyes and colorless hair who shows up at the train station looks closer to 40 than to 22.  So poor that they must all three share one bed, Anna slowly breaks her shell of pain to tell Edith about the deportation from Vienna, the horrors of the Lodz ghetto, the train to Auschwitz, and the death march on the eve of the Nazi defeat. Edith’s mother and sister have perished, but in a somewhat far-fetched coincidence, Anna’s father is saved during the intake selection by Dr. Mengele. Standing at the back of Mengele is an SS man who recognizes her father as the army doctor who selflessly and valiantly saved his life on a German medical train in World War I. The SS man intervenes with Mengele, and for the rest of the stay in Auschwitz Edith’s father is accorded passable conditions. Hearing the story, Edith tortures herself, wondering if her father survived and how she can find him, mirroring a central theme: “Old people worry about losing their memory; the true tragedy is when you can’t forget.”

In the meantime, Edith and her family must contend with with xenophobic attempts by local people to deport the aliens to make room and give work to the returning British troops.

Edith and Georg cross their relatives’ names off their list as bitter news reaches them about the fate of one after another. But in the midst of the tragedy, they focus on the new life they are creating. Even as she is hounded by terrible memories, Anna finds redemption in an unlikely love story.

The British plot is juxtaposed with the adventure and suspense of the Zionist struggle taking place in Palestine where the Jewish underground is fighting the British. Fletcher describes in vivid detail cruel terror incidents. A member of the Jewish terrorist organization, Lehi, is caught and imprisoned by the British in Atlit, where his death is made to look like suicide. Fletcher describes the Zionists’ bloody retaliation: the abduction, savage beating and ultimate murder of a random British soldier. The body is dumped in Dizengoff Circle, with photos of the ravaged body sent to the press. The cycle of violence and intrigue escalates. The Lehi execution triggers an extensive manhunt, with confrontations between British police and Jewish extremists.

The two plots intersect when the novel incorporates a true historical event – Lehi crossing the continents in a plot to target Ernest Bevin, the British foreign minister, in London itself. In the nail-biting denouement, characters in the refugees’ circle become implicated in the scheme, and must choose whether the goal of an independent Jewish state justifies any means.

In a moving epilogue, the author reveals how he combined fact and fiction to weave his book. Just like the novel’s heroes, Fletcher’s own parents were Austrian Jewish refugees in England. They had the same name as the protagonists in this novel. They too moved into Goldhurst Terrace in London where they stayed, the author confides, “until they died almost 60 years later. They lived through the events described, but this is not their story.” Maybe not, but the story Martin Fletcher has created in The List is a terrific read.