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?
