A$13.95 rrp ISBN 1-86448-046-7
Allen & Unwin

"It has suited us all to identify with the victims and to demonise the Holocaust's perpetrators. Pity is an emotion easily come by and, in our hearts, we believe our natural good fortune will save us from victimhood. But what, if anything, will save us from being...Vitaly?"

Frank Devine, The Australian

"Astonishingly talented...with the true novelist's gift of entering into the imagination of those she is writing about."

David Marr, Sydney Morning Herald

"The scandal is that she undermines neat moral fables. There is no absolute evil in her world - and hence no absolute innocence. Her Ukrainian killers are not devils, they are flawed human beings, acting on a mixture of delusion and self-interest. Like Geoffrey Wright's remarkable film Romper Stomper, she opens a crack in the grand fables of the early 20th century and lets a little late 20th century scepticism in."

McKenzie Wark, The Australian

Leading holocaust scholar Christopher Browning, described his work as "studying the perps" while giving expert testimony at the Irving/Lipstadt libel trial. Darville too chose to "study the perps" in her novel.

This meant examining the personal experiences of one particular family of Ukrainians trying to survive a decade of Stalinist purges and state imposed poverty and famine while being abused by the drunken local commissar and refused treatment by the village doctor, his sneering wife (and a secular Jewess). As in real life, the German invaders were hailed as liberators by the Ukrainians. Many volunteered for the German armed forces - Wehrmacht, SS and Ordnungspolitzei - and the novel stresses the arbitrariness of their allocation to military formations. A Ukrainian could just as easily end up fighting on the front alongside the Wehrmacht as in a death squad.

In the novel, the 16 year old Evheny and 19 year old Vitaly are separated, the younger to Einsatzgruppe C (a mobile killing squad) and the elder to the SS training facility for Ukrainians at Trawniki in Poland. Evheny is implicated in the massacre at Babi Yar outside Kiev while Vitaly is posted to Treblinka death camp as a guard. Evheny is later sent to a front line Waffen SS formation on the Eastern Front, while Vitaly is posted to northern Italy as part of German anti-partisan activity in the wake of that country's withdrawal from the Axis alliance.

The novel is primarily told from the point of view of Kateryna, sister of the two brothers, and Magda, Vitaly's common law wife from the polish village near Treblinka death camp. Kateryna has a relationship with a German SS Hauptsturmfuhrer. Magda assists a Jewish prisoner to escape after the Treblinka prisoner revolt in August 1943. The family's story is gradually revealed by the investigation of Fiona, Evheny's Australian born daughter, after her uncle Vitaly is charged with war crimes in the early 1990's.

At no point in the novel is there any attempt to draw generalised conclusions about the causes of the Holocaust from the experiences of the four main characters - two perpetrators and two bystanders. There are times when Jews persecute Ukrainians, but there are also Jews who help Ukrainians. Often, as in history, Ukrainian persecution of the Jews is both enthusiastic and brutal, however there are times when Ukrainians assist Jews to escape, both from the massacre at Babi Yar and from Treblinka death camp in the course of the revolt. German characters are most often encountered both as persecutors and organisers of persecution, however there are individual Germans who also rebel against their role. The motives behind the command level policies decreed by the Nazis are irrelevant to and entirely absent from the novel.

Nowhere in "The Hand That Signed the Paper" does it say that Ukrainian brutality was either reasonable or justified, yet the opinions and attitudes of its characters are continually represented as Darville's own. This is despite the fact that she long ago abandoned the Ukrainian Demidenko pseudonym under which the novel was first published, which had confused some less than literary commentators into calling it a 'hoax'.

One of these days messers Manne, Jones and Henderson are going to leap to a conclusion, miss, and break their necks. In the meantime their statements misrepresent both the subject and tone of the novel, which won and still holds three major literary awards judged on the quality of the book, not the identity of the author.

This malicious misrepresentation has been continually repeated by Jeremy Jones, Gerard Henderson, Robert Manne, Danny Ben Moshe, Mark Liebler and anyone else who wants to justify calling the author an anti-Semite. Yet they have been unable to produce a single incriminating quote, - either from Darville, or her novel, or numerous pieces of journalism - which would justify this libel. Excuse me, label. Instead they repeat choice nuggets of hearsay and subjective assumptions highly coloured by their personal predjudice about the novels 'intent', as if saying it often enough would make it so. These assumptions are usually attributed to some 'general consensus' that doesn't actually exist or safely quoted from a nameless source.

"The Hand That Signed the Paper", is invariably described as...

Or that

Or

There is a very important aspect to The Hand That Signed the Paper that most detractors have completely failed to notice.

The book is about Ukrainians, not Jews.

Because of this misunderstanding, the most active critics of Darville have been overwhelmingly Jewish themselves and/or semi-professional lobbyists from organisations claiming to represent the wider ‘Jewish Community’ with the occasional Gentile Zionist, usually Gerard Henderson, thrown in.

Jan Epstein in the Australian Book Review (Aug95) was typical in focusing solely on the “crude stereotypes” of its Jewish characters and asserting "There is not one decent Jew in the whole book.” Not true, though there's certainly a couple of real nasties. (On the question of whether identifiably Jewish people could ever be anything but sympathetic, it might be worth asking a Palestinian.) In fact there are about five in the entire novel, and to say their combined dialogue would cover three pages risks gross exaggeration. As several are officials of the Soviet State they are Jewish only by ethnicity, having abandoned religious practice. The fact the Ukrainians still identify them as 'Jews' is an acknowledgement of the history of anti-Semitism within the local population, not a defence of it. Leaving aside the matter of what constitutes a ‘decent’ Jew (religiously observant, obeys his mother?) most have power and control over Ukrainians, a far more immediate reason for resentment.

The book is told from the viewpoint of victims who become perpetrators. They’re rude, they’re crude, and yes, they’re anti-Semitic - totally in keeping with many Europeans of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Otherwise sophisticated literary critics seem to find this kind of historical accuracy unacceptable in the context of the Holocaust unless the characters are then given big black hats or physical deformities representative of their moral disease. This attitude certainly seemed to be shared by the very first editor to see the manuscript.

Kate Legge of the Weekend Australian (15-16 July 95), described how freelance editor Lynn Segal was commissioned by Allen & Unwin to “write a detailed report on how the manuscript might be improved", that being what editors do. She felt it lacked “a sufficiently strong voice of condemnation or enough historical distance to give readers a proper, moral perspective”...without which they might think the Final Solution was a good thing, presumably. According to Legge, “For the first time in her life, she refused to edit a book”.

And for the last time it would seem. What the article doesn’t mention is that Segal (who is Jewish of South African origin) submitted her report on The Hand That Signed the Paper to a Jewish organisation rather than the publishers employing her. Legge states that “Ms Segal believes that the published version actually contains less crude anti-Semitism than the version she read”, though this quote was obviously taken AFTER she was fired. Publishing sources suggest she may still bear a personal grudge about this, having recently tried to interest journalists in stories questioning Darville’s academic prowess and right of authorship.

If the book does have any “essential thesis”, it is that ordinary men are capable of monstrous acts. That is the real horror of The Hand That Signed the Paper. It shows in uncomfortable detail how men who blow the brains out of a procession of mostly faceless victims and make bayonet baby-kebab by day, can return home to drink, laugh and raise successful families. And if they are capable of this slaughter, then so are we. (Historian Christopher Browning explores the actual mechanics of this process in his book “Ordinary Men”, which explores how a group of ordinary Hamburg policemen were turned into a death squad.)

This is a truth too uncomfortable for many people. Alan Dershowitz, the American lawyer, condemned the book specifically because it makes “Ukrainian killers look like comprehensible, ordinary human beings rather than monsters”. Unfortunately he never went on to reveal whether this generation of monsters was spontaenously spawned only within the borders of the Ukraine or amongst the Axis populations as a whole (presumably with Italians and Russians evolving back to human as their alliances changed and they stopped putting flouride in the water). It is of course inconceivable that nice middle class American boys would be capable of THAT kind of thing. cough Vietnam cough.

The accusations of anti-Semitism are a cover. The Jewish Lobby really hate Helen Darville because she doesn’t believe in monsters.