The Wrong Boy (23 page)

I imagined him in the POW camp, alone and scared.

I fed another sheet of paper into the typewriter.

Dear Karl
,

The black-and-white keys thrummed when I struck them. There was so much I wanted to say, I didn’t know where to begin.

I’m in Debrecen with Erika
.

I stared at the keys, worrying over what to write next, wondering what Clara Wieck would have written to Robert Schumann.

I never told you the end of Clara and Robert’s story. They were separated for three years. They reunited in Paris and married against her father’s wishes
.

I pulled an envelope from the drawer and put it on the desk, next to my C sharp.

They can’t keep you forever. I’ll wait
.

I addressed the envelope to Karl, scooped up the C sharp and looked down at my hand. The note gleamed against my pale skin, blistered and splintering at the edges, but still whole. I slipped it into the envelope.

I want you to have my C sharp. You can return it when we see each other
.

Until then
,

Hanna

The Wrong Boy
is not a book about history. The characters in the novel are created from my imagination, but the Debrecen ghetto and the Serly brickyard, the cattle trains packed with innocent men, women and children, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where they were brought to die in the summer of 1944, existed. Dr Mengele stood on the ramp and sent the startled people who stood before him to the right or to the left; to the labour force or to the gas chambers. There was a commandant of Birkenau, every bit as cruel and sadistic as Commandant Jager, and an orchestra that was forced to play marches at the camp’s main gate.

Six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, over one million of them at the Birkenau death camp in Poland. The Nazis believed that Jews were racially inferior and a threat to their community. They also targeted Roma gypsies and the disabled, as well as those they considered political, ideological, or behavioral threats, such as communists, socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals. Of the 1.1 million Jews murdered at Birkenau, nearly half were Hungarian.

I learned about the Holocaust from my father, who was thirteen years old when he was loaded onto a cattle train bound for Auschwitz. My father didn’t tell me his story until I was an adult and he was diagnosed with a terminal illness. He was given six months to live, so we were running out of time. He hadn’t told me about his Holocaust experience earlier because he thought that the best way to move past the horror and build a new life in Australia was to put it behind him. I knew that the only way to ensure it wouldn’t happen again was to keep talking about.

And writing about it. I wrote his story down. Then I started reading other stories and watching movies about the Holocaust and reading history books. Then I wrote
The Wrong Boy
. I don’t pretend to know how it felt to be imprisoned in Birkenau. I don’t think anyone who wasn’t there can ever really understand. But it’s important to try. Reading history books and memoirs, talking about the Holocaust and writing about it is the best way to stop it from happening again.

My heartfelt thanks to my friends and classmates in the Professional Writing and Editing course at RMIT for their intelligence, support and advice. To Clare Renner for her encouragement and Olga Lorenzo for her honesty. To my writing group – Brooke Maggs, Richard Holt, Carla Fedi, and Deryn Mansell – for their enthusiasm and their time, and to Ilka Tampke, especially, for inspiring me with her writing and never tiring of mine.

Thanks to Andrew Kelly for believing in this story, to Maryann Ballantyne for her sensitivity and intelligence in helping me shape it, to Mary Verney for her brilliant copy edit and Suzanne O’Sullivan for her excellent proofreading.

Thanks also to Sue Hampel for allowing me to raid her library and to Dr Bill Anderson for his expert advice, guidance and generosity.

And finally, to my husband Shaun and our three beautiful children, Josh, Tanya and Remy, for loving me.

The Nelson Mandela quote is from
Long Walk to Freedom
by Nelson Mandela. Reproduced with kind permission from the publishers, Little, Brown & Company.

SUZY ZAIL was born in Melbourne, where she studied law and worked as a solicitor. She has written for magazines and newspapers and is the author of award-winning children’s books published in Australia, Canada and the United States. She has written a number of books for adults, including
The Tattooed Flower
, an account of how her father survived the Holocaust.
The Wrong Boy
is her first work of fiction for young adults and was short-listed for Book of the Year in the Older Readers category at the 2013 Children’s Book Council of Australia Awards.

For the children sent to the left
.