Mondays are good. I have the day off, and I spend the earliest part of it in the bookshop. Today I came away with From the Holy Mountain (William Dalrymple), Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors (Lisa Appignanesi), The Book Thief (Markus Zusak), and a slim volume with a haunting photograph on its cover - the shape of a woman, her back to the camera, walking down a black-and-white street that fades away into an unknown grey. This is Journey to Nowhere: One Woman Looks for the Promised Land by Eva Figes.

In one of her earlier books, Figes regrets sharing such intimate tales of her Holocaust childhood with her grandchildren. Her own aloof mother sent her alone to the local Odeon to watch newsreels from Bergen-Belsen at the age of twelve (”Go and see what they have done”), but her grandchildren were less resilient. Used to her mother’s ways, the young Eva accepted this grisly command as normal; it was only through the consternation of others that she discovered that there was something not quite right about it.

Journey to Nowhere is pervaded by this uneasy sense of not-quite-right, of painful secrets and truths best avoided. There is one starkly painted scene in which Edith the housemaid greets Eva, her mother, and her brother at a Berlin tram stop, looking characteristically grave:

She wore no coat, although it was winter, just her black-and-white uniform. I do not know how long she had been standing there, because she seemed to have turned to stone. If she heard the tram she gave no sign, just continued to stare straight ahead, at nothing in particular. The immobility of some sort of questioning obedience.

We got off the tram, spoke to her.

Take the children to their grandparents, she said, as though coming out of her trance. They must not come into the house.

When Figes and her brother returned home they simply found that their father had returned from his extended ‘business trip’. It was only later that Figes would connect his emaciated appearance and hair loss with the whispers that she had sometimes heard the nanny exchange with the housemaid, and realise that the story of the business trip had been designed to protect her and her brother from the truth - her father had been sent to Dachau in the wake of Kristellnacht, and on his release he was seriously ill with scarlet fever.

Figes is uncompromising in her search for the truth, something that caused serious tension between her and her mother. Once they had taken refuge in England, her mother would have preferred to blot out the past, including the line of figures who had waved goodbye at the edge of the airfield - relatives whom Eva would never see again. All of them Jews. “My need to know what had happened to my maternal grandparents was matched by my mother’s need not to know.”

Her determination to know led her into the sparsely furnished bedroom that her mother had set aside for Edith, who had written to the family after the war to request her old job back. Figes’s mother saw the return of the housemaid as a sign that the world was putting itself to rights; Figes herself realised that nothing could ever be the same again. She took to having long illicit conversations with Edith about Edith’s wartime experiences in Germany. Although once arrested by the Gestapo, Edith managed to melt away into the streets of Berlin and survive the war. Afterwards, when the lists of the dead and the missing were growing longer every day, she realised that there was nothing and no one left for her in Germany and was persuaded by a charismatic Zionist recruiter to move to Palestine. Figes tells the story of what happened to Edith there - and how she came to leave.

Figes’s critique of the manner in which Israel was established and the nascent state’s poor treatment of Holocaust survivors may be an eye-opener to people who have not read much on the subject, but I was already familiar with most of it. (New to me was the information that in the mid-1930s a special fund was set up by Zionist community leaders in Palestine to pay for the repatriation of incurably ill German Jewish refugees to Germany and death, on the grounds that they could make no worthwhile contribution to the Zionist project.) Figes concentrates on the role played by the Truman administration in the foundation of Israel, regarding the British Mandate with rather more sympathy. She is not a historian, and her brief account of Israel’s history is the weakest part of what is otherwise an extraordinary book - it lacks depth. Although centred around Edith, what emerges is a troubling and nuanced portrait of Figes herself: a young girl growing up in difficult times, unwilling inheritor of a stolen legacy. “I suddenly knew what to do with my anger. Tell the truth.”

Edith vanishes in the last page of the book, being admitted to the Samaritan Free Hospital for an operation and then, by some tacit agreement with Figes’s dissatisfied mother, disappearing from the family’s life. Figes visited her once, but never heard from her again:

Now that I have attempted to tell her story the lack of a proper ending troubles me profoundly. The word that springs to mind is verschollen, which so often appears by the names of Jews who died in the Holocaust. Disappeared, missing, lost. But not forgotten.

Other reviewers have expressed frustration at Edith’s disappearance, stating that it makes it difficult to care about her as a narrative figure, but I find it one of the most engaging and poignant aspects of the book. Edith’s abrupt departure not only brings home a sense of the Holocaust’s aftermath, but is a subtle reminder of the other hidden history that this book touches upon: that of 750,000 Palestinians who, like Edith, had no choice but to leave their homeland and vanish for good into other people’s largely unsympathetic memories. Interestingly enough, Edith the Holocaust survivor has come to share the fate of the Palestinians - more ardent supporters of Zionism have responded to Figes’s memoir by claiming that Edith could not have existed.

The same claim is made about the people who once lived in the area around Mount Carmel in Israel, which is now heavily forested. I have been there. If I had known about it at the time, a short walk into those strategically planted woods might have led me to the ruins of their houses. The realisation is painful, and it is because of Figes’s ability to make absence present in the reader’s mind and heart that Journey to Nowhere is such a remarkable achievement.