Novel twist to Auschwitz love story

COULD a young Jewish girl enduring the horrors of Auschwitz fall in love with the son of the concentration camp’s commander? That’s part of the canvas of author Suzy Zail’s new work of young adult fiction, The Wrong Boy, covering love, hate, survival and identity against the backdrop of the Holocaust.

The book grabs you with its opening: “They came at midnight, splintering the silence with their fists, pounding at our door until Father let them in.”

Readers are taken on a harrowing journey set around the fate of the Jews of Hungary under Nazi occupation.

The Wrong Boy is told from the perspective of Hanna Mendel, a bright middle-class Hungarian teenager who is also an exceptional pianist.

In Auschwitz, 15-year-old Hanna is forced to come of age as she watches her mother sent to the “infirmary” and her sister languish in the quarry as she fights for her survival.

The story takes a sharp twist when Hanna is appointed as the camp commandant’s pianist and falls in love with the Nazi’s son.
Questions of identity, integrity and loyalty shake Hanna’s existence.

Zail, a former solicitor who has a degree in writing and editing, is author of All You Need is Love: 15 Journeys to Motherhood and Smitten: 12 Stories of Enduring Love, plus a number of children’s books and the memoir The Tattooed Flower, an account of her father’s reflections of his Holocaust experience in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The Melbourne mother of three says The Wrong Boy is partly a testament to her father, Emil Braun, who disclosed his experiences only after he was diagnosed with a terminal illness, motor neurone disease.

“It became important to him [Emil] to tell us his story, which he kept hidden from us for most of our lives,” explains Zail.

“He wanted to teach us not only to never be victims, but never to be in any way a part of it, whether as bystanders or perpetrators.”

At its essence, Zail’s work is a pursuit of the legacy her father has left. It involves the transmission of history – with a focus on the Holocaust – in the hope that it will benefit future generations.

“I guess I hadn’t let my father go and I was looking for a way to bring back his story of Auschwitz and to pass on all those lessons he taught me,” she says.

“I feel that as survivor numbers dwindle, it’s really up to us – our generation – to educate the ones that come after us.  Otherwise, the story dies with them.”

While researching The Wrong Boy, Zail trawled through libraries in Hungary for information ranging from Debrecen and the Serly brickyards to the women’s orchestra of Auschwitz.

“Even though I was imagining the characters, the setting was real. Real people had died and I wanted to portray the story sensitively and get the setting accurately so that it might have happened, so that kids could learn something from it. It wasn’t just going to entertain – it was going to educate,” she says.

So how do you educate younger minds about the Holocaust without, in Zail’s words, beating them over the head with it?

One answer rests with fiction writing.

“Children need a character they feel for. History is largely inclusive of numbers and while the numbers are terrible, they don’t affect you in the way, perhaps, as relating to one person and following their intimate story.”

Despite Zail’s contribution to Holocaust literature, the author is sensitive to the issue. “There’s definitely an argument that with any form of art – whether its printing or sculpture or books – that it does a disservice to the Holocaust and minimises it,” she says.
“But memoirs and novelists … we’re just coming from a different route. We all want to educate, we all want to make people feel that when they come across intolerance in today’s world, that they can recognise it and then act on it.”

Zail poses the question of whether any good Germans existed during the period of Nazi rule.

“I wanted to explore whether it was possible for an inmate to befriend a German. Could that have happened? Is it possible to look beyond titles?” she asks.

“I suppose I wanted to explore some of the other themes, such as the good German and how we stand up to authority, because it’s a time when young readers are really exploring their identities.”
The landscape of The Wrong Boy, while shrouded in darkness, follows the resilience of its characters, who manoeuvre through a nightmarish spectre.

Zail, in the mould of authors such as Jackie French and Morris Gleitzman, artfully renders the horrific subject matter poignant for young, curious readers.

“This story is about history and about Auschwitz, and about the things that I wanted to talk about, which was loyalty, fear, love and hate,” she says.

Suzy Zail’s The Wrong Boy is published by Black Dog Books. $18.95 (rrp).

REPORT by Timna Jacks
PHOTO of author Suzy Zail by Peter Haskin