Goodbye, Mr Hitler
Page 16
All said it was not easy to forgive. Some said that every day they had to forgive once again, put aside hate and take up love.
Forgiveness can be the hardest thing in the world. But it must be done, for your own sake, as well as for your family and the world, even if it must be done again every day of life.
You must forgive.
For years I thought I could not forgive the terrors of the past. Now that I have been taught, by those people who return love to a world that gave them so much hate, that forgiveness may need to be redone time and again, I know that you haven’t failed if you find you must forgive over and over again. But if you don’t forgive, the ogres — those who have hurt you — have won, because the fear and hatred they bred is part of you.
The crafting of this book is, in large part, a gift from Lisa Berryman, whose insistence on publishing only the best of what I am capable of with every book has made me a far deeper writer than I could have imagined. In a world where publishing so often focuses on the facile, the genre that sold best last year, Cristina Cappelluto and James Kellow of HarperCollins have created a team that produces not just their bestsellers, but works they believe are important. When writing this book I never once had to think, ‘Will HarperCollins reject this because it might not sell?’
Both Cristina and James also fight for the existence of the Australian book industry, currently under threat from government and Productivity Commission ‘reforms’ that might drive us back to the days of only decades ago when Australian writers could only survive by publishing and even living overseas while writing books for international audiences, not ones that spoke specifically to the people of this land.
It is perhaps not a coincidence that my character Johannes was sent to a camp that was first established to imprison, silence and eventually kill Polish writers and intellectuals who spoke out against Hitler. You do not have to kill writers to silence them these days, or even burn their books. All you need to do is destroy the industry that publishes them.
To the two Kates, Kate Burnitt and Kate O’Donnell, once again more thanks than I can say, and to Angela Marshall, who, as always, takes dyslexic gibberish and returns a readable manuscript, matched with an encyclopaedic knowledge of history and natural history that does not match my own, so that we each contribute to a decades-long dialogue and friendship. This book is hers as well.
It also belongs to Father Peter Day, who, when I was faced with tragedy while writing this book, showed me that loss must always be the other face of love, and love the other face of loss.
‘Hold loss gently,’ he told me. ‘Hold it out in front of you, so you can see around it, and see the beauty and love in the world too.’ Without Peter, I could not have continued writing this book.
Those who identified themselves as Christians during the Holocaust behaved in many ways. Some came to a convenient agreement with fascist authorities. Others looked away. Some fought evil in small ways, or large. And many died, in concentration camps and elsewhere, because they acted upon one of the inexorable tenets of Christianity: ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’.
This book also is about some of those, as well as people like Johannes’s family, and Georg’s, who were sent to concentration camps not for being Jewish, or even for opposing fascism, but simply because their labour was needed.
It is important to remember that using race or religion as a scapegoat for our secret fears or anguish is evil. But it is also important to remember that the worst evils of the Holocaust could only happen once the fascists had removed most of those who had the insight and the courage to speak out against them.
As a quote attributed to philosopher Edmund Burke states, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’
We can change the world. I’ve seen it happen in my lifetime. People of goodwill work till change comes slowly — change for good is never as fast as you would like.
As Johannes says in this book, my tools are words. Yours will be different. He also acknowledges it is not easy to slay ogres either. But I do believe this: if you stand up for what is right, in small things or in large, slowly others will stand beside you . . . and then others too. Perhaps all change for good begins with one person.
Perhaps that person will be you.
About the Author
JACKIE FRENCH AM is an award-winning writer, wombat negotiator, the 2014–2015 Australian Children’s Laureate and the 2015 Senior Australian of the Year. She is regarded as one of Australia’s most popular children’s authors and writes across all genres — from picture books, history, fantasy, ecology and sci-fi to her much loved historical fiction. ‘Share a Story’ was the primary philosophy behind Jackie’s two-year term as Laureate.
jackiefrench.com
facebook.com/authorjackiefrench
Also by Jackie French
Australian Historical
Somewhere Around the Corner • Dancing with Ben Hall
Daughter of the Regiment • Soldier on the Hill • Valley of Gold
Tom Appleby, Convict Boy • A Rose for the Anzac Boys
The Night They Stormed Eureka • Nanberry: Black Brother White
Pennies for Hitler
General Historical
Hitler’s Daughter • Lady Dance • How the Finnegans Saved the Ship
The White Ship • They Came on Viking Ships • Macbeth and Son
Pharaoh • Oracle • I am Juliet • Ophelia: Queen of Denmark
The Diary of William Shakespeare, Gentleman
Third Witch
Fiction
Rain Stones • Walking the Boundaries • The Secret Beach
Summerland • A Wombat Named Bosco • Beyond the Boundaries
The Warrior: The Story of a Wombat
The Book of Unicorns • Tajore Arkle
Missing You, Love Sara • Dark Wind Blowing
Ride the Wild Wind: The Golden Pony and Other Stories
Refuge • The Book of Horses and Unicorns
Non-Fiction
A Year in the Valley • How the Aliens from Alpha Centauri
Invaded My Maths Class and Turned Me into a Writer
How to Guzzle Your Garden • The Book of Challenges
The Fascinating History of Your Lunch
To the Moon and Back • The Secret World of Wombats
How High Can a Kangaroo Hop?
Let the Land Speak: How the Land Created Our Nation
I Spy a Great Reader
The Animal Stars Series
The Goat Who Sailed the World • The Dog Who Loved a Queen
The Camel Who Crossed Australia
The Donkey Who Carried the Wounded
The Horse Who Bit a Bushranger
Dingo: The Dog Who Conquered a Continent
The Secret Histories Series
Birrung the Secret Friend • Barney and the Secret of the Whales
The Secret of the Black Bushranger
Copyright
Angus&Robertson
An imprint of HarperCollinsChildren’sBooks, Australia
First published in Australia in 2017
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Jackie French and E French 2017
The right of Jackie French to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
French, Jackie, author.
Goodbye, Mr Hitler / Jackie French.
ISBN: 978 1 4607 5129 9 (paperback)
ISBN: 978 1 4607 0594 0 (ebook)
For children.
Hitler, Adolf, 1889–1945 — Juvenile fiction.
World War, 1939–1945 — Germany — Juvenile fiction.
Refugee children — Australia — Juvenile fiction.
Cover design by Hazel Lam, HarperCollins Design Studio
Cover images: Boy by Nicola Smith / Trevillion Images; (from left to right) Migrant
Arrivals in Australia, NAA: A12111, 1/1954/4/53; Fairsea by Graeme Andrews
Collection — Sydney Heritage Fleet; paper texture by shutterstock.com