For Doug Gold, his focus has always been on ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Which is why the story of a little girl called Elli captivated him so much.
Saving Elli tells the story of Elli, a little girl whose father has been executed at Mauthausen concentration camp and whose mother has just escaped from Amsterdam to Switzerland, placing her daughters in safer hands. Elli’s sister Leny is sent to the Dutch underground. Elli is taken in by the family housekeeper Jo Hakkens and her husband Frits. Elli was just 14 months old when the couple risked everything to keep her safe.
Gold, who previously penned The Note Through the Wire and The Wolf Hunt, received an unexpected email while working on another project.
“I was actually working on another book when I got an email from Gloria Hakkens, who is the daughter-in-law of Frits and Jo,” Gold told The AJN. “She was congratulating me on my last two books, and at the end of the email, she said something like ‘by the way, our family has quite an interesting story. My parents in law had a Jewish child in Amsterdam in World War II’, and that sort of piqued my interest. So I emailed it back and said, ‘thanks very much for your kind comments about my book, but I’m more interested in learning about your story.'”
Gold explained that the more he delved into the research that Gloria sent, the more he realised it was a remarkable story and one that simply had to be told. And it’s a story that aligns with his previous books.
“My focus has always been on ordinary people who led ordinary lives before and after the war, but did extraordinary things during it. The bravery and the courage just really blew me away,” he said.
What makes Saving Elli especially poignant is that Elli herself is still alive, now in Brazil. While she has no memory of her earliest years in hiding, she has researched her parents’ story and added her own perspective to Gold’s project. “I had a nice balance of information from Frits and Jo’s side of things, as well as information from Elli,” Gold explained.
Gold was candid about the difficulties he faced transforming years of research into a compelling narrative. He explained that for him, there were two main challenges – trying to imagine what people felt and how they reacted, and trying to project a sense of what life was like in Amsterdam through their eyes. It wasn’t only about reconstructing the terror of Nazi occupation, but also capturing the texture of daily life.
“It’s not just about war and oppression. It’s also about how ordinary people lived and what they did. Trying to get that balance in there, you know, that was a challenge,” Gold noted, explaining that while the story is about little Elli being saved and then reunited with the people who saved her, there are also other threads going through. Included in the story is how Elli’s father was deported to Mauthausen, how her mother escaped through Belgium and France and then into Switzerland, and then Elli’s story too which, for Gold, is the anchoring tale.
And he did, indeed, conduct a lot of research. Gold travelled to Amsterdam and Mauthausen, exploring the city with the help of a historian and visiting the places where the events of the book occurred. And of course, he immersed himself in hundreds of written accounts.
“I love research,” he laughed. “I enjoy the research almost as much as the writing. I had to try to distil that down and work out what’s relevant to the story versus what might be interesting but doesn’t advance the story. I didn’t know a lot about the history of Amsterdam or Holland in World War II. And the more I got into it, the more I realised how terrible the conditions were. There was a lot of information that I gleaned from my research in a straight, factual, historical way that can be used, but not in the context of this type of writing.”
Gold said though that he recognised the information was important, he just had to present it to the reader in a way that made sense in the narrative. So, he decided to build the facts into the dialogue, making it feel more natural for the reader.
So what’s the central message of Saving Elli? It’s about memory and moral choice, and the extraordinary actions we can all do.
“The central message is remembrance. Number one to remind people of how horrific conditions were, particularly in the world today, when you’ve got some almost parallel events starting to unfold,” Gold reflected. “You wonder why people, why countries and leaders haven’t learned from history.”
But equally important is the quiet heroism of those who chose to resist.
“The other one is just how ordinary people showed extraordinary courage, bravery. They just did what was right,” Gold said, before sharing the story of how his own mother-in-law, a Slovene partisan who inspired his first book, used to dismiss talk of heroism. “She used to just say, you know, we just did what we had to. We didn’t think it was heroic.”
As shown in the book, Frits and Jo shared this same attitude.
Gold recalled speaking to their son Marcel, who said that his parents weren’t particularly strong people when he was growing up.
“They weren’t outspoken or didn’t have particularly strong views. And yet during the war, they stood up against one of the most oppressive regimes in modern history,” he explained.
And ultimately, for Gold, Saving Elli is part of a larger mission. To preserve stories that might otherwise vanish.
“If these stories aren’t told now, they’re going to be lost to future generations,” he stressed, encouraging others to record family histories, however modest.
“I always say to them, just get it recorded. Just get it written down, or record it in some way, because if you don’t, it will be lost to future generations. And it’s part of people’s heritage.”
Saving Elli is published by Allen & Unwin, $34.99
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