Timetable

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385157959 ISBN 13: 9780385157957

Publisher: Doubleday, 1980

From Kirkus Review - "Non-fiction writer Elon (The Israelis, Herzl) has made a barely fictionalized novel out of an agonizing chunk of history: an attempt to buy freedom for Hungarian Jews under the Nazis. Joel Brand, a courier for the Jewish Rescue Committee, is flying from Budapest to Istanbul when he is rerouted to Vienna and a meeting with Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann, rounding up Hungary's Jews in preparation for administering the Final Solution, has an offer for Brand: Germany will spare 100 Jews for every truck (loaded with coffee and some other commodities) that Brand can deliver. For a few million dollars, hundreds of thousands of Jews Will be shipped to safety, and the trucks in turn will not be used on the Western front but only against the Russians. Will the Allies agree? While Eichmann arrests Brand's wife and keeps his children as hostages, he is flown to Turkey to meet with ineffectual Jewish leaders. Time is running out as he vainly tries to contact some top figure who will help move mountains. And when Brand seeks help from the British in Cairo, he's arrested! The problem: the Arabs won't permit such a vast migration into Palestine; Churchill and the Americans throw up their hands; the deal collapses as Brand attempts suicide in a British jail. No full-fledged fiction values--but a harrowing slice of dramatized history."