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My father never talked about the Holocaust. There was the past - the camps, the loss of his family and his home – and then there was us. We didn’t talk about before. We focused on now. And that suited me fine. I didn’t want to invite death into our home either.
But then my father got sick and everything changed. Suddenly he wanted to talk. This is the story of what he told us, and what I learnt while watching him die. Nearly all of what you’ll read is true. My father was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease and given six months to live. He told us his Holocaust story and I wrote it down. Everything in this book that happened to him as a child, everything he witnessed in the camps, on the ship and in the refugee camp, mirror events in his real life. I’ve rounded out the facts and added dialogue. My father had only told us what he thought we could bear. He used the word hunger, not starvation and death, instead of murder. He never talked about being beaten or hopeless. The challenge was to convey everything he left out, all the silences and empty pauses, the tears he blinked back and the stories he never told. The challenge was revisiting the feelings his death had stirred in me twenty years ago. My father had raised us to build walls. To let go of pain, disappointment and sadness, and cling to hope. So when he died, I looked for him in the clouds and the sky, newly-freed from his disease; and it made me smile. This book was my chance to dig deeper and examine my own personal hauntings. To imagine my father’s pain and the weight of his buried memory, and let myself grieve. To be the same age as he was, when he lost his father. To be a Jew in hiding, a girl with her own secrets. That’s where I blended truth and imagination. I didn’t go to Glenrock Secondary or have a boyfriend called Adam. I didn’t have a best friend like Bec. I wasn’t seventeen when my father died. I was thirty-seven with a child of my own. I worried these small embellishments would obscure the truth, but this story is more personal, more true, than anything I’ve written. I’m younger on the page - angrier and more unsure of myself - but it’s me. I left out one thing - the vow I made just before he died. I promised my father I’d use his past to rewrite the future and pass on his warning that we mustn’t forget, and that difference should be celebrated. I’ve written three books set in Auschwitz so I kept that promise but something keeps drawing me back to the past. My father taught me that we have to to talk about the things that scare us before we can change them. He’s gone now and soon there won’t be any survivors left to say ‘I was there, it happened’. Maybe that’s why I can’t let it go. Because with racism, anti-semitism and hate crimes on the rise, we’re still hurting each other and because, like my Dad said, we have to continue the conversation, continue reading and learning about the past so one day we might understand how to treat each other. It’s been twenty years since my father died. I wrote his story because I felt it needed to be written, and because now more than ever, it needs to be told. Thank-you for finding out more about the book. On this, the 20th anniversary of my father’s death, it feels like a beautiful tribute x |