Why? That was the first question anyone asked me when I said I was writing a novel about the Holocaust. It's a question I've struggled to answer. Who am I to write about the Shoah? I'm not Jewish, I'm not German; I don't have any familial connection; I have no direct sense of guilt or responsibility. I'm an Australian woman (of mongrel heritage, with no sense of belonging to any nation other than Australia), born in the late twentieth century, distanced from the Holocaust by time, nationality, geography, culture, language and experience. Like many of my generation my first exposure to the Holocaust was reading The Diary of Anne Frank, seeing fragments of documentaries on weekend TV, and meeting the Nazis as cartoonish villains in the movies, as they dabbled in the supernatural and were frustrated by Indiana Jones.

I have one strong memory from childhood. It was the mid-1980s (I want to say 1986, but who can be sure?) and I was around ten years old. I was watching Sunday afternoon television with my grandmother. Grandma Matthews was a powerful presence in my life; calm, quiet, white-haired and sweet, she was a cliché of a grandmother. Everyone in the family loved her. I was the first grandchild and I've always been curious (okay, maybe nosy is a better word). I loved asking questions about the way things used to be, way back when.