Gianfranco Moscati Collection

This is housed at the Imperial War Museum, London. Fortunately for me, most of the documents are displayed online and they are all described.
I am finding this a most useful and a most interesting collection. It contains some of the documents that one of the main characters and her friends and family would be familiar with at the time the story took place. We have a few of my mother-in-law’s papers and they tell their own story. They look very similar to the ones in the collection.
Naturally, it’s not quite the same looking at the collection on line as it is actually seeing the papers for real. The actual papers speak to the other senses as well. I guess to handle the papers in the collection, one would need white gloves. We never use white gloves at home. Maybe we should.
On a more general note, I’m observing how revisiting my fictional text has raised dozens more research questions.
Bottom line, I guess, though still is: How did teenage German girls understand the Holocaust?

Gianfranco Moscati Collection

School visits offered

I am offering school visits to do with The Potatoes in Spring project. There is a two-fold purpose to this:
- To raise funds to help me complete the project
- Disseminate knowledge gained from the research to date
Cost is whatever the school can afford, and as long as that at least covers my travelling expenses I’m happy to come to your school. No amount is too small, once expenses are covered but bear in mind that the Society of Authors recommended rate is £350 a day.
You may be interested to know that:
- I have public liability insurance up to £10,000,000
- I am CRB checked (enhanced)
- I am an experienced teacher and workshop provider
- I write for children and young adults.
The talks / workshops on offer cover:
- The viewpoint of 13 year old German girls during World War II and about the Holocaust (based on letters written between 1941 and 1943) We shudder at the Holocaust but here we might find some explanation of how it came about even though people are basically and usually big-hearted
- The extraordinary story of a Catholic woman, Jewish by nationality, who helped to keep a school for disabled children going. This woman was later forced to sell her home, was moved to a ghetto, then to Theresienstadt and was later killed at Treblinka
- The story of her granddaughter who was one of the first to arrive on the Kindertransport. This young woman had to endure a break-down as her mother was being bombed by the Germans in London and her father by the Allies in Berlin, before she began to recognize Britain as her home.
If you are interested in booking me for any of these talks please contact me via comment box or email me. 

Inspection Copy Offer

If you are interested in one of my workshops based on The House on Schellberg Street, I’m offering you a copy of the book. If you go on to book a workshop, you may keep the book free of charge.  Otherwise, you may return the book or if you decide to keep it but not book a workshop, I’ll invoice you for the book.     

 

A new approach to funding

Although I am resigned to the fact that I will now have to be self-funding, I am still looking at other opportunities. My strategy is, therefore, to:
Continue to look for new funding streams
Offer school visits for donations
Monetize this site – something I’ve been unwilling to do, but will for a while at least.
I’ll also set up a page that gives all of the terms and conditions about the school visits.

Disappointment re Funding

I did not get the British Academy grant I applied for. 1,500 people applied for them and only 25% were successful. They had to turn down some very strong applications, they said.
Was mine one of those? Or did it continue to fall between two stools? It is a creative project yet it includes some rigorous historical research. It’s always quite difficult to get funding for that sort of project.
Well, I’ll just have to look elsewhere. Time is rolling by, however. It is generally more difficult to get funding. More people are chasing fewer pots.
The British Academy said that they had turned down some projects in areas that have been well researched. Well, yes the Holocaust had been investigated over and over, but I think this project differs in two ways:
- It gives an unusual German point of view - a genuine innocent one.
- I have such a good primary resource – the letters the German girls wrote 1941-1943.
It is extraordinarily relevant today. Many Germans, including these 13-17 year old girls, found what was said to be happening so terrible it couldn’t possibly be true.
Like I find myself thinking that the present government has got it so wrong they can’t possibly last. Yet I have a fear that they will. Because look what happened in the 1930s and 1940s in Germany. Amongst other disturbing actions, our government is getting rid of libraries in towns and schools and humanities form the universities. Isn’t that the equivalent of burning books? Possibly even worse because it’s more subtle. And now they’re talking of refusing work to non-British people. What next? Isn’t that how it started with the Jews? Let’s hope we remember. I’m trying to work out why ordinary people could have done that.
So, the project must go ahead.
I’ll try microfunding. I’ll even put a donate button on this sight.
One intention anyway is to do a series of school visits. I’ll offer these for a donation.
I’m looking to raise just under £5000. If I raise more, it can go to one of the Holocaust charities.
Please let me know if you come across any likely funders.

Some Useful Connections – Great Writing 2011

The Great Writing conference was as intriguing as ever. I gave out a lot of business cards this time. One of the highlights for me was chairing a session by Moy McCrory, Liz Cashdan and Helen Brunner. All three sessions were very relevant to this project.
Moy talked about work of Primo Levi. We have to suppose that Levi’s death was suicide. Was it living daily with the horror of the Holocaust that would not go away or the knowledge that he was suffering from prostate cancer that prompted this action?
Levi’s stories do not have happy endings or even particularly conclusive ones. The Holocaust just was. Is there a danger that we sanitize a little too much if our Holocaust story does have an escape at the end?
I guess in Potatoes in Spring the main character in the one strand of the story has hope at the end. Her grandmother, though she lived an impeccably good life, always giving to others, died eventually in Treblinka after being interned for some time in Theresienstadt. That strand does not have a good outcome. The third strand’s outcome is mixed: the German girls realise the horror of what has been going on and have the grace to realise it is wrong.
Liz Cashdan’s story does have a good outcome: the Polish girl is rescued and comes to live in England. She has conducted role plays in schools on this and has even cast some of the children as Nazi officers. This is important. We need to unpick where the cruelty came from and why. The Holocaust, just like the Slave Trade before it, has now become history. Although my generation are still touched by the Holocaust, today’s schoolchildren can gain enough objectivity to step back and ask what happened and how it happened, hopefully with the aim of learning from past mistakes enough to avoid them in the future.
Helen Brunner asked the question of whether there is only pleasure in creative activities. Clearly there can also be pain – there certainly was for Primo Levi and whatever the good outcome in Liz’s story and one strand in my story, we both have to face some painful moments. In fact, I’m very aware that I’m going to have to look after my own mental health as I complete this project.
What is certain, however, is that we must express the truth as we see it – it may kill us if we do not – and that we can, even when dealing with the gruesome, feel a certain satisfaction about having conveyed our version of the truth clearly to others.

Starting the Research

I’ve started doing a few bits and pieces now. I’ve been looking for extra funding but not yet even found anywhere to apply though I’m not too worried yet. There is still much I can do without funding.
I was very excited today to stumble across a story I had heard but no one seemed willing or able to confirm: that a school that was ordered to close by the Nazi regime actually went undercover and carried on operating. I’m using this as one of the strands in my novel. In fact, it was one of my background characters Clara Lehrs, who took it upon herself to house some disabled children who had been taught at the local Waldorfschule.
Clara Lehrs, a Jewess who became catholic, offered her home to these children. She now had two reasons for the Nazis to dislike her: she was technically Jewish and she was harbouring disabled people.
There is a Stolperstein on her old house in the Schellbergerstrasse in Stuttgart. Her life did not end happily.

What Needs to Happen with the Novel

I have now finished reading the first 110 pages of the novel. I realise I need to do some serious restructuring. The way it is now, we will only get through the first two years of the war and the story needs to cover all of the war so that all of the threads can conclude and draw together.
This in turn may mean a rewrite of the girls’ letters. That sort of makes sense anyway because I’ve been using the letters as if they start at the beginning of the war. The girls in fact wrote from 1938 to 1946 but we only have the letters 1941-1943. I’ll have to either find more letters or make the earlier section up and move some of the material form that section into the later one.
But that’s workable and I think I can now see what I need to do at least. Next I’m going to plan out the three story threads to cover the whole of the war. I’ve looked at that quite a lot to day and now feel confident that I can do that.