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.