Jewish journalist Miklós Nagy stands in a grand room overlooking the Danube, quaking in front of Hitler’s most notorious henchman, Adolf Eichmann.
It is 1944 and he is brokering a deal: trucks for the Nazis in exchange for Jewish lives. He knows what many do not; that Hitler is about to put his Final Solution into action, and exterminate the Jews of Europe, finishing with Hungary.
Across that year and into 1945, 20,000 Jews would be shot dead on the banks of the Danube River. Official figures estimate that in the course of six years, Budapest’s 200,000-strong Jewish population was halved through extermination, escape and deportation.
So how will Nagy satisfy Hitler’s architect while securing his people’s safety?
This is the gripping story behind Sydney author Diane Armstrong’s heartrending new novel, The Collaborator — in which she plumbs the depths of the human condition.
Polish-born Armstrong, 80, is a child of the Holocaust and arrived in Australia with her parents from Poland in 1948. At seven years of age she decided to become a writer, and displayed an early passion for telling stories before she was first published in the Australian Women’s Weekly in 1965.
Since then, she has published a further six books and worked in journalism, specialising in travel writing and amassing more than 3000 articles in her career.
Read the article by Amy Lees in Perth Now.