Invisible Walls: A Journalist in Search of Her Life
By Hella Pick
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20
Reviewed by Daniel Snowman

Hella Pick has lived an extraordinarily rich life. A Jewish girl born in Vienna in the spring of 1929, she arrived ten years later in England on a Kindertransport. She was soon joined by her mother (her parents had divorced) and in due course they found themselves, with many other refugees from Nazism, in the Lake District where the young Hella went to school.

Later, she attended the LSE, going on to become one of Britain’s most highly respected journalists, a woman whose articles, primarily for the Guardian, revealed an authentically global perspective. Whether she was reporting from Africa, China or the USA, or from Paris, Belgrade, Geneva, Warsaw, Sardinia, Vienna or London, Hella Pick’s life seemed utterly without walls.  The world was her oyster and Hella was its pearl.

But there were walls, however invisible they seemed. And, alongside her almost interminable work schedule, Pick found herself seeking answers to those fundamental questions: “Who am I? What am I?” And, “What am I not?’ How could she be a committed globalist, she would ask herself, while also a responsible and aware (if non-observant) Jew? An Austrian-born Jew, moreover, keen to reconcile herself to her homeland while deeply aware of its longstanding refusal to acknowledge its collaboration with Nazism when she was a child. And why, keen to conform to her ageing mother’s wishes and settle down to a comfortable home with husband and children, did she find herself resisting such opportunities when they occasionally arose?

Hella Pick is a brilliant narrator and, in the course of an action-packed book, we encounter distinguished figures from across the world, among them top journalists, such as Alistair Cooke; leaders of various African territories approaching national independence; Pope John Paul II and his Polish compatriot Lech Walesa; Willy Brandt; Mikhail Gorbachev, and his Foreign Secretary Eduard “Shevvy” Shevardnadze as the USSR worked its way through Glasnost. And she gives us close-up portraits of the Aga Khan and Simon Wiesenthal, whose biographies she wrote; the Wiesenthal was duly published but the Aga Khan book was summarily rejected by its subject on completion.

Not one to retire, after several decades with the Guardian, she went to work for another highly cultured, globally-minded, Jewish-born refugee from Vienna, George Weidenfeld (whose company has published this memoir). And, like Weidenfeld, Hella Pick has striven throughout a long life to bring the widest perspective to all she has undertaken. With her restless, rootless spirit, she has constantly sought to identify where, if anywhere, she fundamentally belongs. She has tried to avoid these ultimately unanswerable issues by marching resolutely yet again through those invisible walls and back to work — which she acknowledges is her regular mode of escape.

Daniel Snowman’s books include a study of the cultural impact of the ‘Hitler Émigrés’. His own memoir will be published later this year