Thank you: Ed Wilson, Anna Kelly, Helen Garnons-Williams, Alex Gingell, Naomi Mantin, Franciska Fabriczki, Jo Walker and all the brilliant team at 4th Estate.
Thank you, as ever, to my wonderful family and friends, and especially to my dad for not being annoyed with me for pillaging and mangling his family stories.
I’m grateful to Arts Council England for funding a research trip to Kraków in 2016 to see the real painting on which this work is based: Portrait of a Girl in a Red Dress (Józefa Oderfeldówna) by Józef Pankiewicz. Many thanks to Robert Kotowski, director of the Muzeum Narodowe in Kielce, for kindly meeting with me and sharing his vast knowledge of the painting and its subject. Józefa is my great aunt, and I’d like to thank her and my grandfather, Jerzy, for seemingly not minding that I have changed her name and her story as I pleased, since they have not haunted me about it. I’d also like to thank Janka Wasserberg, and Anna and Pietror, for being so generous with their time and stories.
Arts Council England also kindly funded a week at an Arvon writing retreat in Devon in 2016, where I wrote thousands of words, few of which have actually ended up in the book you have just read, but which sparked its story. Many thanks to the lovely writers I met there, and particularly to Laurence Scott and Romesh Gunesekera.
I’m grateful to everyone who read early drafts of this book and helped me batter it into shape, particularly my workshop group: Richard Lambert, Vicky Rangeley, Alex Ivey, Tom Benn, Tim Sykes, Gordon Collins and Birgit Larsson. Thank you also to Georgie Codd, Armando Celayo, Ruth Weyman, Leander Deeny and Kate Deeny for reading early drafts and giving me feedback, and also to my eagle-eyed parents for the same.
Thank you to Kate Muirhead at UEA Live, Martin Figura and Peter Goodrum at Café Writers, and Keith Packer at Future FM for opportunities to do readings of the novel in progress.
I’d like to thank my brilliantly supportive colleagues at Norwich School, and especially Maria Brown for discussing Polish swear words with me over morning break coffee.
The detail of Frank and his sister hiding behind the oven in Lwów is borrowed from the family history of my friend Emma Phillips. Sammy’s beating, and the sign he is forced to wear, was inspired by the treatment of Dr Michael Siegel. For many other details and stories, I’m indebted to the Schindler Museum in Kraków, the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive and Slawomir Grünberg’s film Saved by Deportation.