The River of Angry Dogs: A Memoir [Hardcover]

N.B: SOME READERS MAY THINK THIS REVIEW CONTAINS TOO MANY SPOILERS.

In 1939, when the Germans had invaded Poland and had begun to impose all kinds of restrictions on the Jews, 15 year-old Mira and her elder brother decide to leave their home in Lodz and somehow to make their way to join their elder Zionist sister who in the previous year had gone to Palestine. They would never see their parents again: her mother would die in the Lodz ghetto, her father in Auschwitz..

Mira and her brother set off for the part of Poland seized by the Soviets. They had to get past both the German and the Soviet border guards. They were indeed interrogated by both, but with luck and guile they eventually managed that, and made it to the home of Mr Silverstein, a business associate of their father's in Lwow.

Mr Silverstein was optimistic about life in the Soviet Union. He persuaded Mira's brother to volunteer for work in Ukrainian coal-mine, and urged Mira to go to a local school; but Mira simply left Lwow and decided to continue her journey. At Lwow railway station she met a young kibbutznik from Palestine who had been visiting his family in Poland and had been trapped there by the war. They planned somehow to cross the river of the book's title into Romania, but the Jewish-run inn near the border in which they were staying was attacked by a Ukrainian nationalist gang, and the exchange of fire between the gang and the well-prepared inn-keeper attracted the local Soviet militia. They were arrested and interrogated; the young kibbutznik was sent to a penal colony in Siberia, and Mira was sent back to Lwow.

No sooner had she got back there than she set off for Vilna, the formerly Polish city which the Soviets and the Nazis had allowed the still independent Lithuania to annex: perhaps she could reach Palestine from there. Half a kilometer from the border, she and her guide were caught by Soviet troops; but again she was lucky and, after a few days in detention, was allowed to cross.

In Lithuania she was again helped by someone she met at a railway station, and there had always been a large Jewish community in Vilna. She was lodged in a "hostel-kibbutz" in Vilna and attended school there for a time. Unbelievably, she received letters there from her parents in the Lodz ghetto, from her sister in Palestine and from her brother, who had run away from his colliery and planned to join her in Lithuania (but was caught by the Soviets and deported to Siberia).

In June 1940 the Soviets annexed Lithuania; but they made a deal with the American Joint which paid $500 for each exit visa that enabled Jews to go to Palestine. The British were severely restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine, but the restrictions were not so strict with regard to minors, and Mira was still only 16. Her sister in Palestine managed to get her on the list sponsored by the Youth Aliyah, and Mira left Vilna in February 1941, and arrived in Palestine, via Moscow, Odessa, Varna, Istanbul and Damascus in March.

So far, the book has been utterly gripping: one is one edge, and amazed at how this determined teenage girl survived so many dangers. Now, a third of the way through the book, the main drama for her is over; but of course those experiences never left her.

In Palestine she came across the dramatic stories (and some almost incredible reunions) of other survivors - both from Nazi and Soviet persecution. These latter included her brother, who had arrived in the Middle East as one of the Polish deportees who had been allowed to join General Anders' Polish Army.

Mira was a talented artist, had exhibitions in Palestine, and in 1947 was sponsored by the British Council for a scholarship at the Slade School of Art in England. The next dozen years or so are skated over. She married an Englishman. She had a child. She repressed memories of the traumatic past. She developed psychological and marital problems for which she went into a Jungian analysis. She initially resisted her analyst's suggestion that she might consider going back to Poland to let the banished ghosts of the past gather around her. But in the end she went. She duly went through much sorrow; she was shocked by the antisemitism which still manifested itself in Communist Poland; but finally it turned out to be a healing experience - in part because here again, as during her escape from war-time Poland, she chanced upon a number of extremely empathetic individuals and heard stories of the enormous risks that Polish Christians had run to save Jews during the Nazi period. Many Poles of a younger generation tried to memorialize the sufferings of the Jews.

Among these were two film-makers, and Mira conceived the ambition, not only to work in that medium herself, but, after her return to England, to enrol in the National Film School in Lodz, which was responsible for the remarkable renaissance of Polish cinema at that time, associated with Wajda, Polanski and others. This also changed her life: in due course she would become an acclaimed film-maker herself. Her first three short documentaries were freighted with evocations of the Holocaust, and it sensitized her to the racial conflicts in other parts of the world (South Africa, Israel, India) that will be the subjects of her later films.

The Jungian analyst figures early on in the book, and she helped Mira, not only to get in touch with her inner self, but also, perhaps, to see deeper significance in the hallucinatory experiences she had in Poland, in dreams, in coincidences and even in encounters with a gypsy fortune-teller.

A well-written memoir of a Jewish girl from Lodz, Poland, whose life was scattered by the large-scale forces of the 20th Century. Invasions, deportations, the creation of new states. She escapes Poland and then the Soviet Union and spends WW2 in Palestine. After WW2, she sees not entirely happily the creation of the Jewish state of Israel and is saddened when she realises that the flat offered to her sister had been the home of a middle-class Palestinian Arab family, chased out by Jewish ethnic cleansing and leaving even their childrens' toys on the floor of one of the bedrooms.

Unable to stomach ethnic cleansing and Zionist war crimes, she marries a man from a Jewish family long-embedded in the UK, but feels drawn back to her roots in Poland, attending as a mature (and well-off) student the famous Lodz film school known for such luminaries as Wajda and (though not mentioned here) Polanski. She has an affair, bats away both Polish security and British MI5 and carries on being a film-maker for British Channel 4 and other organizations.

The weakest point about the book is the imagined-by-her gassing of her father, deported from the Lodz ghetto in 1943. Better to stick to the historical facts.

In the end,m the book finishes quite abruptly, in a bitter-sweet but more bitter than sweet way.

Worth reading.

The River of Angry Dogs is a passionate, lyrical and often heartending book. It reads like a novel, and it is chilling to realise that the often quite extraordinary, quite horrific events are real and not the figment of sombody's imagination. Having said that, the book is often funny and always humane. It gives hope that whilst so many could commit so many terrible deeds, there are also those who lived through those times and can still find it in their hearts to try to bring understanding and healing.