EDGE Interview: Author Wendy Holden on "The Teacher of Auschwitz"

Wendy Holden was a journalist for eighteen years, including a decade at the Daily Telegraph. She is the author and coauthor of more than thirty books, among them several internationally acclaimed wartime biographies, including Born Survivors, as well as the New York Times bestsellers A Lotus Grows in the Mud (with Goldie Hawn) and Lady Blue Eyes (with Frank Sinatra's widow, Barbara). She lives in Suffolk, England, with her husband and two dogs, and divides her time between the UK and the US.

The Teacher of Auschwitz is a novel inspired by the powerful true story of a man who risked everything to protect children in Auschwitz.

Fredy built a wall against suffering in their hearts . . . Amid the brutality of the Holocaust, one bright spot shone inside the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. In the shadows of the smokestacks was a wooden hut where children sang, staged plays, wrote poetry, and learned about the world. Within those four walls, brightly adorned with hand-painted cartoons, the youngest prisoners were kept vermin-free, received better food, and were even taught to imagine having full stomachs and a day without fear. Their guiding light was a twenty-seven-year-old gay, Jewish athlete: Fredy Hirsch. Being a teacher in a brutal concentration camp was no mean feat. Forced to beg senior SS officers for better provisions, Fredy risked his life every day to protect his beloved children from mortal danger. But time was running out for Fredy and the hundreds in his care. Could this kind, compassionate, and brave man find a way to teach them the one lesson they really needed to know: how to survive?

The Teacher of Auschwitz shines a light on a truly remarkable individual and tells the inspiring story of how he fought to protect innocence and hope amid depravity and despair.

EDGE sat down with author Wendy Holden:

EDGE: What first drew you to the story of Fredy Hirsch?

Wendy Holden: I was writing a book about a woman named Susanna Kova, who was a Holocaust survivor. She survived three camps with her mother as a teenage musical prodigy. She'd had a very harrowing time and lost pretty much every member of her family. We had a few somber and long interviews in Prague and Czechoslovakia. During those times, she began to speak about a young man named Fredy, and she changed. She had a completely different attitude and demeanor, and I realized that he'd made her incredibly happy. He'd probably given her some of the happiest moments of her life in the darkest of places. And from then on, I just had to find out more about him. 

EDGE: What was your research process like for this novel?

WH: I'd already written a few books about the Holocaust and World War II, and I'd been to all the relevant camps featured in this book. To a certain extent, I was plagiarizing my thoughts and memories. I was able to go back through the archives that I'm pretty familiar with, looking for his name and the names of people he'd been close to or involved with. And of course, the show foundation videos are phenomenally helpful to a historian like me because almost all of them are no longer with us, but they were able to give their testimonies. It was incredible because, once again, Steve, I found that they lit up immediately, as if a candle had been lit inside them, every time they spoke about him. I was just absolutely intrigued. I thought, what is it about this young man? He was only in his early twenties when they first encountered him, and nothing in his life had led him to believe he would become this remarkable human being, who was also a gay hero of World War II. I became absolutely fascinated by him. Initially, I intended to write it as a nonfictional biography, but then I ran out of material. There just wasn't any more material because he was denigrated by the communists after the war for being homosexual and a so-called collaborator, even though he'd only ever collaborated with the Nazis for the benefit of the children. They may have destroyed information about him, and that's when I decided to switch it to fiction, but rigorously true to the facts. It's critical to be true to the facts when it comes to writing about the Holocaust.

EDGE: How do you balance historical accuracy with narrative storytelling when writing about such sensitive and tragic events?

WH: I decided right from the start to be completely transparent, and at the end of the book, there are two lists: one for the fictional characters and another for the real-life characters, so that readers will know. Every single fictional character came from some mention in the archives. So, there was a mention of an old granny who Freddy enlisted to come in and sit with the children in the children's block that he created in Auschwitz and read stories to them, I gave her a name, I gave her a face, I gave her a character, but she was based on fact. Almost all of the names were original names derived from archival material related to Fredy. I was very conscious of that, and I then sent it to the chief historian for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. They verified it as historically accurate and rigorously researched.

EDGE: How did Freddie’s identity as a gay man impact his experience in Auschwitz, and what kind of risks did he face within the Nazi regime because of it?

WH: Well, he was in double jeopardy. He was Jewish and gay. He was really at double risk. When he became aware of his sexuality in his mid-to-late teens, I think, to be honest, he was in denial. I don't believe he'd had the sort of family upbringing where he could have come out or he ever come into contact with anybody who was gay, so he probably didn't understand what he was feeling. He was perhaps feeling anxious because he was, by then, a youth leader, a scout leader, an inspirational figure to hundreds of boys and girls, and he didn't want his sexuality to be known in case it impacted the way other people viewed him, especially other adults. Throughout his time there, whenever people suspected him, it unfairly influenced their attitude in each case, and he felt unjustly vilified as a result. It also seemed to be an open secret in the camp, and certainly amongst his fellow prisoners, but it never seemed to come to the attention of the Nazis, fortunately. He wasn't imprisoned for being homosexual. He was imprisoned for being Jewish, but the risks were enormous. I'm sure your readers know that if you were caught being a homosexual at that time, the consequences were dire. They were sent to concentration camps, some were forced to be castrated, and some were tortured. It was an enormous risk he took, which makes it all the more incredible that he refused to be a bystander to evil and kept standing up again and again and defying the Nazis for the sake of others.

EDGE: Did you encounter challenges in researching this aspect of Freddie’s life, given the lack of historical records or the silence around LGBTQ+ victims of the Holocaust?

WH: Yes, very much so. It wasn't something that was ever in the records. And incidentally, there are zero records about the children's block at all. Nobody ever seemed to have written anything down, not even the Germans. We are aware that Fredy was asked to write a report about setting up a children's block in Birkenau, which was intended to be sent to Adolf Eichmann, but it was never found. There are certainly no records of him being there, nor any records of anything relating to the children's block. All the information about it comes from survivor testimony, and there are so many of those that it's undeniable. Additionally, there is no information available about his personal life beyond a few mentions of the two characters with whom he has had relationships. One called Gender, whom he met in Bruno in Czechoslovakia as it was then, and had a relationship with a student doctor, and another man whom he met in the ghetto, who also then went on to Auschwitz and with whom he continued a relationship. They were all just more hints and suggestions from the survivors who were all teenagers or small children - although they understood he was gay, they didn't know what it meant, and they didn't know exactly what the relationship was. They just knew that he had a special friend.

EDGE: How did writing this book affect you personally? Were there moments where you had to step away due to the emotional weight of the material?

WH: Yes, indeed. This is my fourth or fifth book on World War II and the Holocaust. Telling these stories carries a heavy burden. You can't write about these things, and you certainly can't read about things that happened and then decide which part of those you're going to put in your book without a little piece of you going with it. My father had fought the Japanese in Burma, and my mother's fiancé was killed at age 18 while parachuting into Holland. So, I grew up knowing a great deal about war and having a healthy respect for it. I was a journalist for 18 years, and for 10 of those years, I worked for The Daily Telegraph in London. I served as a foreign and war correspondent, covering wars and witnessing some truly terrible things firsthand. I saw a lot of dead bodies, torture chambers, and I saw people blown to bits. I was always respectful, but also aware of the inhumanity that can be found. My ethos has always been, from the start of all this writing, even when I was a war correspondent, to seek out the humanity in the inhumanity and the glimmer of light in the darkness. For me and many others, Fredy was more than a glimmer; he was a beacon.

EDGE: How do you think readers—especially queer readers—might find meaning or representation in Fredy’s story today?

WH: I don't believe there were many gay heroes of World War II, if there were, they weren't written about, and I'm not aware of any. To have somebody like Fredy, who came from a completely unremarkable background, the son of a butcher from Aachen, Germany, whose father died when he was 10. He sought refuge in nature, where he learned about meditation and the value of physical exercise, and aspired to become an Olympian one day. He was very meticulous about his appearance and physical well-being, and passed all that on to the children. There was nothing to indicate that he would step up in the way he did daily. He was in a place where even looking at an SS officer could result in you being shot or beaten to death. And also, he was clever because he used his good looks to his advantage. On several occasions, he was told that if he weren't Jewish, he'd have made a marvelous member of the SS because they admired his militaristic bearing. They admired his stern posture. They admired the fact that he looked them straight in the eye, clicked his heels, and saluted them while demanding what he wanted. 

EDGE: How do you hope this book contributes to Holocaust education and remembrance for younger generations?

WH: I think people must talk a lot about the Holocaust, in terms of the loss to the Jewish population, the Jewish race, and the 6 million dead. So many other people were victims of it: the literati, professors, Catholic priests, the Sinti, the Roma, and the homosexuals. Anybody who was disabled or undervalued in any way, physically decrepit or too young to be of any use in slave labor. They were all either murdered or victimized and treated appallingly over a long time by a regime that had absolutely no respect for human life. It's so inspirational to find somebody who happened to be Jewish, gay, and who was the voice for many, because there are very few things written about people like Fredy who, apart from their sexuality, were terrific. I don't mean apart from his sexuality, I mean as well as their sexuality, which was incidental. They were just wonderful, humanitarian, compassionate, kind, and enormously brave.

EDGE: Fredy is?

WH: Well, I think I'm a little bit in love with him. He was very beautiful. I found on the internet a whistle, just like the one that is in one of the photographs of him. It's an Acme, it's like a scout's whistle. It was the whistle that scouts in the 1930s used, and it hangs on a lamp that sits on my desk. Sometimes I blow it and think about Fredy, and he somehow feels slightly closer to me. My husband says, I've become all the people I write about over the years, and I've written lots of books about all sorts of different people, but Fredy does feel exceptionally close. I was very close to Zuzana Ruzickova, the woman who first introduced me to him. When I worked with her in Prague, I was there on and off for almost a year. I left her on a Friday, and she died the following Tuesday. There'd been no indication that she was going to die, and she was 90 years old. One of the last things she asked me was, Please make your next book about Fredy. She wanted him to be remembered. She was responsible for raising money to have a plaque put up in his honor in the ghetto of Terin, from all the children he saved and looked after, and gave a glimmer of light to one of the survivors, who said that he built a wall against suffering in their hearts. I think that's a wonderful expression. To my great delight, I discovered that there was one member of the children's block still alive: a lady named Dita Kraus, known as ‘the librarian of Auschwitz’ in her nineties, living in Israel. She read the manuscript, and I waited with great trepidation for her response. It made me cry when I got it back. She said, “This is the closest possible narrative. A person who did not experience those times herself could have written. It'll finally do justice to Fredy and all those victims.”

EDGE: “The Teacher of Auschwitz” is a story about hope, dignity, and resistance in the most unimaginable conditions. What message do you hope readers take away?

WH: Back in 2017, Zuzana told me that she was terrified that the world was repeating history with, as she put it, dreadful symmetry. In today’s climate, it's essential to recognize those individuals who set an example, lead by example, and demonstrate that we can all refuse to be bystanders to evil and hate speech. We can all step up. We can protect the underdog, the underprivileged, and the people who are being picked on, and we can speak up against what ultimately can turn into a machine of evil and a machine of death, as it did in the Holocaust. In a way, this book has never been timelier.

For more information about Wendy and to purchase The Teacher of Auschwitz visit, https://www.wendyholden.com/