When Gill Thompson’s publishers gave her a deadline for her second novel, she reached into her emotional response to a historical event in order to find the spark that ignited The Child On Platform One. My first novel, The Oceans Between Us, came out of a chance discovery about the child migrant story whilst listening […]
Torn from home
2019 marks the 80th anniversary of the start of World War Two. The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day (held every year on 27 January) is ‘Torn from Home’. Jason Hewitt considers these two facts, and why we must not forget them, for Historia. Reflections on the holocaust seem particularly relevant in today’s troubled […]
Auschwitz: the Biggest Black Market in Europe
Our guest this month, Chris Petit, filmmaker and author of The Butchers of Berlin, on life in the German garrison at Auschwitz. There were the Nazi death camps, where people were exported to die, and there was Auschwitz, where the choice after selection was immediate gassing or death deferred through forced labour. Then there was the […]
Three White Pebbles
Wendy Holden’s latest book, Born Survivors, tells the true stories of three young mothers who hid their pregnancies from the Nazis and gave birth in unspeakable conditions in concentration and slave labour camps. Here, she explains how reconnecting with Nature helped her get through the harrowing research. Anyone watching us during those breezy Spring days would […]
The Paradise Ghetto
If you are going to write a novel about the Holocaust you have both a responsibility and a challenge. The responsibility is to the six million who were murdered. If you are bringing the Holocaust into your work merely to add some extra tragedy or to tug at the reader’s heartstrings then, at best what […]
The Picture Tells the Story
In 2002 my first novel, Call The Swallow, was published. Set before, during and after the Holocaust, it tells the story of a man’s search for his sister who disappeared during World War II. When I was on the publicity round for the book, the question that kept cropping up again and again was how […]