Guest post written by The Hidden Book author Kirsty Manning
Kirsty Manning is the bestselling author of The Paris Mystery, The French Gift, The Lost Jewels and The Jade Lily (published in North America and UK as The Song of the Jade Lily). Her historical novels have been published in Australia and New Zealand, North America, UK, South Africa and translated into several languages including German, Dutch, Hebrew, Russian and Serbian.
Kirsty grew up in northern New South Wales, Australia and has degrees in literature and communications. A country girl with wanderlust, her travels and studies have taken her around the globe.
About The Hidden Book: From the bestselling author of The Jade Lily comes a compelling novel based on a true story of a WWII European heirloom that brought down war criminals and travelled through history … to be found in an Australian country shed in 2019.
I write Historical Fiction and my latest book focuses on a little-known true story from WW2. While I have written in this era, and around this topic in both The Song of the Jade Lily and The French Gift, each novel presents a fresh challenge. I never want to glorify or romanticise the horror of war. It took me four years to work out the best way to tell this particular tale.
In The Hidden Book, I wanted to honour the people involved with saving clandestine photos of Mauthausen that were used to convict Nazi war criminals. Part of that story is a secret photo album owned by Bogdan Ivanovic, originally from Zagreb. The book now resides at the Sydney Jewish Museum.
Nobody knows how Ivanovic came to own the album, only that it came to Australia via a relative in the 1970s. We do know that a Mauthausen local, Anna Pointner, hid thousands of photographs in the stone wall of her garden, and there is a memorial to her in the town.
As I write novels, I never lean too far into a real person’s story. As such, Lena, Roza, Mila and Nico are all entirely fictional. The clandestine photo album in my novel is an imagined album. I do feature real memorial sites and museums in this novel, but these too have been fictionalised for the purposes of the story.
My job in writing this book was to bring to life the horror, injustice and intolerance of the Nazi regime onto the page.
My starting point for this novel was the Sydney Jewish Museum. I honour all those people with a connection to the Holocaust. Of the real-life photo album the Museum says:
The shocking photographs within this album were taken by the officer in charge of the SS Erkennungdienst: the photographic laboratory and identification service. These photographs were taken with the order to record all prisoners’ identities upon arrival and to note all visits to the camp by dignitaries. Five copies were made of each photograph and distributed to the high-ranking SS officer Karl Schutz, and to the SS headquarters in Berlin, Oranienburg, Vienna and Linz.
There was, however, a prohibited sixth copy of each photograph printed by prisoners working in the lab, two of whom are identified as Antonio García Alonso and Francesco Boix Campo. Toward the end of the war, these prohibited images were smuggled out of Mauthausen by a communist network of young Spaniards in the false bottom of a food hamper. These images were later used in the prosecution of war crimes trials in Nuremberg in 1946, in which Francesco Boix Campo gave evidence.
We still cannot be entirely sure of how Ivanovic Bogdan came to be in contact with the syndicate who smuggled out the photographs. Regardless, his collection of photographs, hidden for over 70 years and donated to the Sydney Jewish Museum by Bogdan’s family, will be preserved as photographic evidence of the Holocaust and as a legacy to those who risked everything to reveal Nazi atrocities.
Unanswered questions are catnip to a novelist. The gap between the Mauthausen photo album being made and its journey to Australia is so large that I have completely fictionalised it. As with all my books, I’ve taken some liberties with the historical record and places, shifting events and combining others to serve the story. Some war timelines have been condensed or changed. Questions of war and conflict, unfortunately, reappear for every generation and we must listen, learn and lean into history to find new paths for reconciliation and peace.
Interlaced with the true story of Mauthausen is the story of Hannah. I’ve always wanted to write a coming-of-age tale for a contemporary woman, and this storyline grapples with questions of how to write and present history, how to be a student, a daughter, a mother and still have academic and professional goals that are never sidelined or minimised. There are questions I’ve often asked myself over the years as I’ve tried to squeeze every inch out of a very full but at times, very messy life. Fiction is a great vehicle to throw questions of modern motherhood and generational trauma into the mix … and every reader will find their path to different answers. That is part of the magic of novels.
My work as a novelist is to hold space, ask why these horrors happened, and ask how we can ensure they never happen again. Wars persist, people can be monsters, but The Hidden Book is for the big-hearted, loving and kind. We can never have too much hope, or love, in the world.
