Introduction

On Christmas Day, 1986 a seventy-year-old widow’s body was discovered inside a wheelie bin in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney, Australia. Despite a long and intensive investigation, the police fail to unearth a motive or identify a suspect. Lacking any clues, the police file it as a cold case. Some half a century earlier the Third Reich ramps up its offensive to arrest and deport to the East the Nazi regime’s classification of undesirables. As part of the sweep, a young girl is arrested along with her parents. They are placed in a box car and forced to endure a three-day harrowing train journey. The final stop: Auschwitz. On arrival she is separated from her parents to never see them again and is forced to suffer years of punishing labour, near-starvation and daily horrors. She is freed six years later when the Russian army invades Poland and liberates Auschwitz. Vindicated by her survival she sets out on a journey all the way around the world to Australia, in search of the one person that she blames for her ordeal in Auschwitz. Is that the clue that the police missed in trying to solve the crime?

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Excerpt

BERLIN
Winter 1941
I would have died when I was ten. But I didn’t, and you would think that that was my good fortune. Except other people that I hold dear died and another paid dearly in my stead for that stroke of luck. And, well, it is a strange and bewildering memory to behold, but back then, as I think of it, and I do think of it often, the shards of a shattered past that reflect on my life today are a constant reminder of how an orderly, ordinary life unravelled violently. It did so with such ferocity, and that may be the salve that quiets my troubled conscience; that no one, least of all me, had time to prepare or plan. The irony is that had my life not imploded I would not be here and the events that unfolded would have never happened. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

1. Do you feel that Ruth’s role in keeping silent all those years about evading being arrested by the SS and Helga being taken instead was moral and ethical? Or does survival during wartime trump all.
2. In considering the overall role of Friedrich Becker, do you feel that he acted selflessly firstly enrolling into the SS to obtain a university degree and then to avoid being conscripted and sent to the Eastern Front to fight against the Russians – an almost certain death – deserting to Holland?
3. Again, how do you view Friedrich Becker’s role:
* in saving Emma’s life when she was critically injured as a member of the resistance;
* helping the surviving group of resistance fighters to escape;
* then hiding under the postwar cloak of a Jewish person while living cheek-by-jowl as a neighbor of Ruth, and even befriending her and ultimately becoming her lover;
* but at the end fearing for his life, he helped Helga dispose of Ruth’s corpse
4. Helga survived the camp and the war. But then she became hellbent on finding out how she ended in the camp in the first place. Once she learnt of her fate and how she became entrapped in
Questions from the author:

1. Ruth’s identity she set about finding Ruth and exacting her vengeance. Accepting that being incarcerated in Nazi camp left her traumatized for life, but then again at the age that was released, sixteen, ought she have gone about rebuilding her life rather than wasting it to exact her revenge?
* Or viewed another way, was seeking and finding Ruth was central to who she had become?
5. Taking the broad view of hostility against all Germans post WWII casting them all as barbaric and heartless Nazis, does Helmut Jodl’s compassion and concern for Ruth Lipschutz in saving her Jewish life above a non-Jewish one, Helga Dreschler, moderate your view that a great many Germans took life threatening risks to save Jewish lives?

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