The Sixth Lamentation

Author s Note

This novel weaves fact and fiction. The historical framework of the trial and the details of life in Paris during the Occupation are all (I hope) accurate. The Vél d’Hiv round-up occurred as described but I could not replicate the horror of what actually transpired.

The progress of judicial retribution after the war causes pause for thought. It was not until 1980 that Herbert Hagen, Kurt Lischka and Ernst Heinrichsohn, three Nazis closely involved in the deportation of Jews from France, were brought before a court in Cologne. Only two out of the thirty or so convicted in their absence by the French authorities had served a sentence (Karl Oberg and Helmut Knochen). Numerous alleged war criminals settled in Britain, but legislation enabling prosecutions to take place was not passed until 1991 (the War Crimes Act) . Three hundred and seventy-six suspects were investigated. A third of them were dead, and twenty-five were innocent. The first trial took place in 1995 after a £5.4m investigation and collapsed due to the defendant’s ill health. A second (and probably the last) prosecution was concluded in 1999. Anthony Sawoniuk was convicted of murdering two Jewish women in 1942. The name of one was unknown.

The reader wanting to better understand the previous paragraph, and the purging of Nazi Germany in general, could profitably consult Blind Eye to Murder by Tom Bower, cited below.The Round Table did not exist, although monasteries throughout France were involved in similar activities. The idea was prompted by an event in the life of my mother, Margaretha Duyker. As part of a smuggling operation she took an infant by train out of Amsterdam to Arnhem but was arrested by the Gestapo. The child was taken away. She was imprisoned and eventually released. She died of motor neurone disease in 1989.

The Gilbertines never came to France. That is an invasion of my own making. They were the only English-born religious order and did not survive the Dissolution. At their foundation, the monks (canons, to be precise) followed The Rule of Saint Augustine and the nuns that of Saint Benedict. For simplicity I have opted for the latter.

For the purposes of the plot I have taken small liberties with the manner in which deportation records and other formal documents were compiled during the Occupation of France. I have rather ignored the security arrangements of the Old Bailey.

The facts in this novel were harvested from a variety of sources that traverse this tragic period of French history. It would be impractical to list them all but I record my debt to the following:

Blind Eye to Murder, Tom Bower (Warner Books, 1995)

Die Endlösung der Judenfrage in Frankreich, (Dokumentationszentrum fur Jüdische Zeitgeschichte CDJC Paris, Deutsche Dokumente 1941—1944), Heransgegeben von Serge Klarsfeld, Rechtsanwalt (Published 1977)

France: The Dark Years, 1940—1944, Julian Jackson (OUP, 2001)

French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial, Serge Klarsfeld, (New York University Press, 1977)

The Holocaust, The French, and the Jews, Susan Zuccotti (BasicBooks, HarperCollins, 1993)

Le Syndrome de Vichy: De 1944 a nos jours, Henri Rousso, (Editions du Seuil, 1990)

Occupation, The Ordeal of France, 1940- 1944, Ian Ousby (John Murray (Publishers) Ltd, 1997)

Paris after the Liberation: 1944—1949, Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper (Hamish Hamilton, 1994)

Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, edited by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (Continuum by arrangement with University of Leicester, 2002)

The Sacred Chain: A History of the Jews, Norman F Cantor (HarperCollins, 1995)

The evidence of Mine Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, given at Nuremburg, 28th January 1946