The Hand That Signed the Paper

by Helen Dale, Helen Demidenko

The Hand that Signed the Paper tells the story of Vitaly, a Urkranian peasant, who endures the destruction of his village and family by Stalin's communists. He welcomes the Nazi invasion in 1941 and willingly enlists in the SS Death Squads to take a horrifying revenge against those he perceives to be his persecutors.

This remarkable novel, a shocking story of the hatred that gives evil life, is also an eloquent plea for peace and justice.

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Historical Fiction, Novels, 20th Century, War

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recommend anyone thinking of reading this book first try hard to erase from their mind the author's identity and the various allegations made against her. Just keep in mind that she was awarded The Miles Franklin Award and the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal in 1995, both prestigious Australian literary awards. These have not been withdrawn. But mainly just read the novel and form your own opinion.

I found it an absorbing, brutal and very difficult read, but I think it entirely merited its awards. It deals with Ukrainian collaborators working as death camp guards in World War II. There is a great deal of awful violence because as we all know, that's what happened in places like Treblinka and Babi-Yar. There is a great deal of anti-semitism, which I do not condone, but I don't have to - this novel is in part about anti-semitism and we all know that's what the Nazi death camps like Treblinka were all about.

This novel for me was a nuanced explanation of the history of these Ukrainians and why they did what they did. The novel does not to me try to condone or excuse what they did. It tells the story of what they did, made the characters beleivable and human, and gives an insight into why they did it. Humans sometimes do inhuman things, and the novel gives insight into the human condition in all its ugliness. That to me is what literature should strive to do.

Keep in mind that Ukraine went through its own devastation before the war. It is a matter of record that in the famine of 1932-33, between 10% and 25% of the population starved to death, brought on by Stalin's forced collectivisation of agriculture.

Whether the novel is a true story or not to me is immaterial. It is a work of fiction, as is stated right up front. I recommend reading it, but it is not for the faint-hearted.

Regarding the various scandals surrounding the author, I frankly don't understand them. She wrote under a pseudonym, which is fairly common. What made the press and historians go ballistic was that the author embellished her personal history. She was never forgiven for this and savagely attacked in Australian media and books for years. But all of these attacks I think completely overlook the merits of the novel itself and that we all need to understand why dreadful historical events occur so that we can try to prevent them happening again. I think this novel helps us to do that.

A final comment on the quality of the writing. I have read reviews where the reviewer claimed that they found the prose "wooden" and even that they decided that before the scandal broke. I am sceptical that they actually read the whole book. That is why I recommend you try and ignore the scandal and read the book. Then by all means read all about the scandal and make up your own mind. Try not to be influenced by yellow journalism. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, "the book is the message", not the noise surrounding it.

[Deb Omnivorous Reader · Rating 1 out of 5]

It is to the eternal shame of Australian literary evaluators that they were so desperate for ‘real’, ‘personal discovery’ ect that they fell for this very regrettable hoax. Hate literature thinly disguised as a personal/family history/discovery journey.

And I do mean thinly disguised; surely anyone with any background reading from the era and location should have seen through it. Neither the lack of research, nor the racial hate messages however are my main problem with the book winning awards (they are enough to make me, personally dislike it, but not to judge the award) no, my main problem with the novel is that it is terribly badly written! No high school graduate should do such a pathetic job. I read it in 30 – 40 minuets in a book shop and was disgusted by the poor grammar, the terrible writing and the incredible unlikeliness of the story. I could not believe that anyone was ever taken in by this inept manuscript that clearly needed more editing and this was before it had been exposed as a fake, mind.

I am not that much of a historian, and I guess the average Australian competition judge was neither primed for hoaxes nor very big on eastern European history but still, surely the (fake) author could have done a couple of weeks of research at least.

[Duncan Smith · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book isn't very good, yet it won at least two major literary awards in Australia and for a brief time was a big deal. Why?

The author, Helen Darville, pretended to be an immigrant from the Ukraine. It was the central part of her author persona. At the time, the Australian literary scene was obsessed with multiculturalism, and also with tales of trauma. World War 2 was in vogue, as it was the 50th anniversary of the war's end. Along came Darville with this book about what "her people" suffered in WW2.

For publishers at the time it wasn't enough just to publish good books, they seemed to want to be political and align with just causes and social reform. Darville - a young ethnic woman with a tale of trauma - was an ideal author. Her book was published and won two awards, including the Miles Franklin.

But the bottom line is it's not a very good book. Somehow that got overlooked. It shows that for sections of the 1990s literary world, literary merit ran a very distant second to politics.

The spell was largely broken when Darville turned out to have fabricated her whole immigrant persona. And didn't certain people look just a little bit silly at that point ...

[Patrick Johns · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of you said this book lost you on page 6. Well I am afraid I only got as far as the first sentence: "… Americans and Iraqis are engaged in a bizarre competition to see who can destroy the world many times over most...". Grammatically a horrible and clumsy sentence. Then further down the first page we have

".. the light and darkness at sunset plays over the glittering Ampol sign". Should be "play", and also another badly constructed sentence. And so it goes on. To quote a couple of the more hideous examples:

P91: "Soon we had quite a good shantytown, but it wasn't so good if it rained or snowed, which was most of the time, because it leaked". Can't she think of more expressive words than "good" and what exactly leaked?

Then the piece de resistance:

P120: "He also loved me good in bed"

Well you all know how much importance I attach to the language and style of a book, so you can guess what I thought about this one.

Then I thought, aha, maybe this is written by someone who has a poor grasp of English, and for whom English is not their first language (even though this didn't hinder Conrad or Nabokov). But then in the front I read that the author was born in Brisbane and read English and Classics at the University of Queensland! Oh dear.

Another linguistic point: on p 62 the narrator frequently uses the word "Lorry" but would someone born and bred in Brisbane use this word? Strange.

Putting aside the quality of the writing, I must say I found this book deeply depressing with very few redeeming qualities. I found I really did not enjoy reading it, to such an extent that it made me feel quite depressed. The only attraction to picking it up for me was so that I could finish it and get onto the next book. So I suppose its brevity (155 pages, thank God) was a small Plus point!

OK, so it dealt with a grim subject. But we have all read grim war and Holocaust books before. Notably Schindler's Ark, but also Cafe Bohemia, Suite Francais + episodes of the Magus and Captain Corelli's Mandolin. However all of these have an optimistic and positive aspect to them, some pleasant, surprising characters, or an example of human spirit shining through. This book had nothing. All the characters were unpleasant and all the racial groups behaved atrociously. Even the love affairs between Magda and Vitaly and Kateryna and Hesse, were sordid and not at all romantic. We have read The Slave which also deals with the depths of depraved human behaviour in Central Europe and Poland, but here was also had the Jewish community who at least attempt to lead a better life, to rise above animal like human behaviour that is all around them, and the uplifting bond between the two main characters. In common with The Slap, I found myself shocked and disgusted by this book on a number of levels - hey maybe I am becoming an old prude - taking over from Richard??

I thought the caricature of the Jewess doctor in the first section an absurd racial stereotype, and I couldn't help thinking of the extreme cartoon-character "Jew woman" as portrayed in Borat.

I found the chronology of the book confusing and irritating. The flashbacks were apparently not in sequence which is unusual for this style of book. And I found the device of occasionally slipping into the first person of one of the characters a complete cop out and simply lazy on the part of the author. And (to my shame) I never actually worked out who the narrator was - was she Evheny's daughter? And her mother was Irish right, but then in the last few pages we hear Evheny married an English woman Margaret Collins. I didn't really care too much.

I found the letter Kateryna received from Vitaly (p151) bizarre - how would he find her address in the confusion of the post-war years? But why was it written in appalling English? Surely he would have written to her in Ukrainian, or was it supposed to indicate that his written Ukrainian was terrible? It didn't quite work.

Another problem I had was with the book’s title. The title of a book should either be a simple, unambiguous reference to the subject of the book, eg. On Chesil Beach and The Slave, or it should contain a (possibly subtle) reference to some event or theme within the book, such as Disgrace, The Slap or Never Let Me Go. This title is neither of these and its relevance to the contents of the book was lost on me. I can only conclude it is a shameful attempt to sell the book.

I was disappointed that the narrator's reaction to the discovery that her ancestors had been war criminals and Nazi collaborators was not fully explored and was unconvincing. This is exactly the subject of another book I have recent read, The Dark Room by Rachel Suiffert, which is by contrast a gripping, moving and expertly written book.

I suppose the historical detail was interesting, the way the Germans manipulated the Poles and Ukrainians, and the pre-war communist establishment in the Ukraine, which is not often covered in holocaust literature.

Apart from that, there was not much for me in this book. I actively disliked it so much I am going to give it 0 stars (a first for me - are we allowed to go negative?).

[Dominic Feeney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great and gutsy book. Despite the fact that the author is not Ukrainian (I mean, really, an author writing a novel based on a premise that isn't completely true??? I never heard of such craziness!) she manages to understand the mentality of Ukrainian nationalism in the 1930's and 40's. They had just undergone their own holocaust at the hands of the communists, the holodomor, which devastated Ukraine, so the Germans must have seemed like saviors. Without judgement, she proceeds to give an gripping and unscrupulous account of the carnage that followed, as the Ukrainian auxiliaries to German and SS forces wreaked their bloody revenge on those they saw as being architects of the holodomor.
Of course the book found an unwelcoming audience among many, for daring to empathise with the death squads, and explaining their reasoning for targeting the Jews in particular. A large percentage of the commissars in the early Soviet Union were Jewish, ironically as their own revenge for the pogroms and violent repression they have suffered under the Tsar. Predictably, The Hand the Signed the Paper was instantly greeted by shrill shrieks of anti-semitism. The fact that the book is about empathy and perception, rather than hard facts, went over the heads of many readers. The inability to empathise with someone with whom you are at odds, is a recurring theme in human society and the main reason why we keep having these ridiculous wars that continue to this day.
To sum up, this book accurately empathises with the mood of the time and provides an entertaining and thought-provoking read.

[Greta G]

A hoax, revisionist and anti-semitic.

[Sammy · Rating 2 out of 5]

So it turns out this book isn't very good. That's not entirely surprising: this is an ultimately minor, short first novel attempting to compress one of the most shocking events in 20th century history into 157 pages. Still, the prose is surprisingly bland when I think the author is trying to be chilling; the major characters are neatly drawn but fall asunder under the novel's broader conceit; and the minor characters just don't 'pop' at all.

The Hand That Signed the Paper should have been justly forgotten, were it not for the fact that - after winning two of Australia's most prominent literary awards in the early 1990s - it became the subject of the greatest literary scandal in the country since the Ern Malley Affair of the 1940s. Indeed, two scandals!

Scandal One: The author, a young woman named Helen Demidenko, had promoted the novel as what she called "faction" (factual fiction, geddit?), based on the experiences of her elderly and deceased relatives. See, Demidenko was a Ukrainian-Australian - a role she played up by wearing Ukranian peasant dress to some media ops - and felt that the recent increase in war crimes tribunals was merely the latest turn in an endless cycle of revenge which had led to the Holocaust in the first place. She wanted to explore how a combination of hate and self-justification led to the horrors at Treblinka and other places. Critics, therefore, naturally linked Demidenko to the framing character of Fiona, who discovers her uncle and her father's dark secrets from the home country, plunging us into the memories that form the bulk of the novel. We witness three siblings who all become involved in genocide of the Jews, maintaining their ignorance in the face of shocking evidence. These siblings, like so many people who accepted the barbaric rise of Fascism, justify the behaviour of others through a belief that all of the problems in Ukraine were initiated by the Jewish people. When the horrors are done, the survivors are able to make their way to a new life, to an escape to the other side of the world and a life of conscious forgetting. It's a compelling concept.

Demidenko won the Miles Franklin Award and the ALS Gold Medal, on the agreement of the judging panels, as well as the Australian/Vogel award (for an unpublished manuscript) a couple of years earlier. But after the award win, she was criticised by numerous figures - including notably Robert Manne in Quadrant and in an ABC interview - for what many saw as anti-Semitism and historical revisionism. Is this accurate? Initially, I can see how her supporters stood up for her. It's clear what the author was trying to do. Her novel was not intended as a screed of hatred; it was designed to show how ordinary people could be led to do the most monstrous things. After all, many Ukrainian peasants did believe (falsely, of course) that the Jews were the cause of their woes. This is why they welcomed the Nazis in and why they committed atrocities which rival any others that took place during the Holocaust. To achieve her aim, Demidenko puts us inside the heads of the three siblings, making the (obvious) point that even Nazis and their sympathisers were often banal humans with loves and fears and woes. If anything, she's a little heavy-handed with this. There are multiple scenes where characters live out joyous moments within sight or smell of genocide, and even a couple of instances where a didactic narrative voice suddenly emerges, 19th century style, to make it very clear to us that these characters are supposed to be villains!

So, you may ask, what's the problem? First of all, while the author's thesis is clear, the novel's mission statement ultimately presents to the reader not as "ordinary people doing evil things to innocent victims" but rather "ordinary people doing evil things to people who are just as bad as them". There are essentially no good Jewish characters; a couple of them are even notably unpleasant. Also, there's no real attempt to explain some of the more hateful Ukrainian actions beyond a sense that they have been raised to believe the Jewish people are evil. Now, a good novel should not be a cartoon; there is no need for a series of saintly Jews to drive home the point. And no doubt there were horrible Jewish people as there are horrible people of any race. But combining this dearth of "good Jews" with a lack of interest in complicating the mindset of any of the Ukrainians creates a rather unpleasant aftertaste. When we recall Demidenko's stated motivation for writing the novel - that war crimes tribunals were just the latest in an eternal cycle of revenge - we realise that The Hand That Signed the Paper comes perilously close to arguing, purely unintentionally, that, even though the Jews didn't deserve what they got, perhaps they caused it nevertheless. Either Demidenko seriously thinks that the Holocaust only came about because poorly educated people with legitimate generational hatred were given a chance to act on it, or she's too immature to make any more out of this. Given that Demidenko was all of 21 when she wrote the book, I suspect the latter is the answer.

Thus my suspicion is that the book is accidentally anti-Semitic. An author barely out of her teens who decided to tackle such a massive subject: the mindset of monsters trapped in a complicated historical era. Squeezing this into 157 pages, pages that perhaps deserved more editing but were rushed into the public eye because they had won an unpublished-manuscript award, doesn't help. As much as I don't think there was anything deliberate at play here, I've come to appreciate why some critics were so aghast. This short novel concludes with a war criminal dying, surrounded by his loving family, saving him from facing a mean and nasty tribunal that was only going to try and exact revenge on him for acting in line with his cultural values, a trial (the novel implies) would have been little different to the Holocaust itself. It's messy.

Some will say that a novel is not the same as an historical essay; the author should not have to give us the moral we want at the end. In theory I agree. Looking back at the contemporary commentary, it's clear that some of Demidenko's more vociferous critics, including the marvelous Andrew Riemer, were clearly reacting out of ideology as much as from rationality. However in 1995, one can understand this. Plenty of people remembered the Holocaust or had parents who had fought in WWII. Many people continued to deny it had happened at all. The issues were all the more sensitive a generation ago, and the novel simply doesn't have a mature way of tackling this. While I like to think the best of everyone, I find myself suspicious whenever a more libertarian reader refuses to see anything even slightly murky about this novel. Surely any objective critic would have to at least acknowledge that the book implicitly suggests that the Jews and the Bolsheviks were up to something in pre-War Ukraine, and that they should have stopped the "cycle" by being less hateful themselves.

All of this would be beside the point if this were a masterpiece. But The Hand That Signed the Paper is like most first novels: underwhelming and designed to introduce a literary community to an author. First novels are often forgettable, even embarrassing in retrospect. Sometimes they reveal that an author has talent but give little indication as to where that talent will go (think of Patrick White or Virginia Woolf). Intermittently they sparkle or shock. Occasionally they may be a towering achievement. I had long assumed that Demidenko's fate was a tragic one. She had all the promise of an Astley or a Malouf but was thrown out of the club because of an irrational grudge held by the establishment. Instead, this is simply a storyteller of adequate skill who hasn't found her voice yet and isn't up to the task of reckoning with her chosen subject. That's no great shame, and perhaps the author could have become something in the fullness of the time.

But then the real scandal happened. Because someone gave some breadcrumbs to the media, and it didn't take them long to ferret out the truth: Demidenko was not Demidenko at all. She was Helen Darville, an English Lit student from the University of Queensland, daughter of British immigrants, someone with no Ukrainian heritage whatsoever. Her outspoken conduct throughout the book's publicity phase had been merely a performance. It's bewildering, right? Why on earth did this young woman present such a highwire act? She wore that ubiquitous Ukranian peasant dress to conferences and book signings. She gave a ferocious defense on television of her (allegedly) deceased immigrant father's wartime history. It's absurd to think that Darville felt that she could have kept this going. Her fellow highschool and university alumni knew her true identity and I believe her parents were still living. She can't honestly have expected to develop a career as a noted novelist without the charade falling apart. It doesn't seem, in retrospect, that she was genuinely deluded. One might assume, given Darville's subsequent libertarian streak, that this was an ideological ploy, a swipe at the prevailing progressive literary establishment, designed to prove that an average novel could win major awards if the judges were misled by identity politics. (Shades here of the Ern Malley affair, after all.) Yet, given Darville's age, I'm inclined to place the blame on something simpler: youthful arrogance. Like many young people, she was a bit misguided as to her own brilliance and how the system worked. She felt she could make a splash in the world of literature, drive up her sales, and gain an element of notoreity while doing so. After all, no-one seemed to care (and nor do I) that Norman Mailer was a psycho, because his brilliance was all that mattered. So, why not?

I've read a few reviews that get quite hot under the collar, defending Darville against what they perceive as a hegemonic conspiracy to discredit her literary reputation. And, look, let's acknowledge that any system only admits people who are willing to play somewhat by its rules. Patrick White may have been a curmudgeon and an iconoclast, but on a personal level he was known for hosting stonkingly entertaining dinner parties and driving up the prestige of Australian literature. These things mattered. Darville instead merely made everyone feel stupid, tried to con them before she was in the door, and didn't have the literary street cred to make up for it. I'm sure it was tough for her in the aftermath, although I don't know whether she tried to push a second novel in the years immediately following. But it was a poor choice that she made. Additionally, most writers never recover from their first novel; history is littered with watery second novels that end a career, and I see little in this book to suggest she wouldn't have suffered the same fate.

Since 1995, Helen Dale (as she is now known) has gone in a particular direction. She was sacked for plagarism by a major newspaper, worked for a crazed libertarian politician, joined conservative blogs, and was repeatedly accused of plagiarism on her social media accounts, on which she refers to herself as the only real "classical liberal" left in Australia's arts scene. In a 2006 article, she made some intriguing claims. First, that she had been given the idea for the story by a dying Ukranian war criminal, and wanted to protect that person when she submitted her manuscript. Second, that when she received negative feedback from her editor, she decided not to tell them the truth because she rather hoped they might suffer a bit when it was found out. And third, she then got it into her head to challenge the political correctness which she felt dominated the literary scene. (It's odd, of course, that some of her biggest critics at the time turned out to be conservatives, but I suppose she couldn't have predicted that if her story is true.) Yet it's fair to say that people from all sides of the spectrum sat on all sides of the debate. As it dominated the media in the days after "Demidenko" was uncovered, the complexities of the issue - who has the right to tell a story, how much of being an author is a performance in a media spotlight, where does the line between fiction and lying begin - created a dizzying array of views. But when it was all over, as the scandal receded into history, a thick line was set between those who see themselves as socially progressive, and thus opposed to a person who stole the identity of a minority group to tell a story that discredited another minority group, and those who see themselves as socially conservative, and thus would defend the devil himself against limitations on his speech, and share a collective idea that the world is being forced into having one collective idea. While she began writing fiction again in 2017, Darville has found a place for herself as a darling of a certain social set, and there we must leave her. I doubt she would accept the narrative that she was driven to be part of that group because of mainstream dismissal, so I won't see her as the victim of such a tragedy.

One may dispute the argument that the book is anti-Semitic. I don't believe it's intentionally so, as I've mentioned. One may try to disagree that Darville's performance was highly perplexing. (But it absolutely was.) Still, I'm befuddled as to the 5-star reviews this book occasionally warrants here on Goodreads. Is it the stale prose? The underwhelming characterisations? Or the shaky moments where the narrative voice falls in upon itself, and we are left with the clear impression of a debut novelist unsure of how to deal with complexity? Or is it just being well-reviewed for political and ideological reasons? I have no desire to unfairly chastise a young person for their first major work from three decades ago. This is a novella with some good ideas that doesn't have the insight nor the self-awareness to tackle them. That's all. As to why the novel won major awards, I can only shrug and say: a) it wasn't a scintillating year for prose (look at the competitors on the shortlist); b) the feedback loop from the Vogel award, combined with the name recognition of the Demidenko performance no doubt helped; and c) reviewers are, alas, human. It would not be the first time that ideology and the zeitgeist played strong roles in an award panel's decisions, rather than merely aesthetics!

Forgettable and not worth reading, in spite of the scandal.

[Patrick Johns · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to give this 0 stars but I now realise that means "no rating" so I grudgingly up it to 1. If you want my reasons, read Deborah Ideiosepius's review - she has it spot on.

[Craig · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was living in Brisbane when she won the Vogel. I went to her book launch before her cover was blown, knowing nothing about her other than she mentioned to the Courier Mail she was a recent law graduate at the University of Queensland. ( She wasn’t.)

When she signed my copy of the book she told me she was doing articles at a Brisbane law firm. ( She wasn’t ).

She was wearing that infamous idiotic prop, her peasant blouse.

Mine is a first edition so states the author was ‘Helen Demidenko’.

She also signed the book using that name, with ‘all good wishes.’

Fake news before it even had a name.

The phrase ‘literary hoax’ does not adequately describe this book. This was not a jolly jape by a know-it-all rascal intent on making a fool of the literary establishment for the sake of it. This was a pernicious - albeit woefully amateurish - attempt to rewrite history.

[Timmy Wheeler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a review of a review (rather than the novel itself - which I have not yet read.)
I have just been listening to an interview with Helen Dale and therefore searched for this book.
I was extremely amused by the very negative review by Ben Winch (which I saw at the top of the list.) The tone was so utterly dismissive, condemnatory, and filled with offence-taking and moral grandstanding that I could not help but chuckle as I read it. On the basis of Ben's Review (and having heard the excellent Helen Dale interviewed on many occasions numerous topics) - I shall certainly read her most famous novel. 😀

[Geoff Wooldridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

There have been many books and films about the horrors of the Holocaust and the evils of Nazism over the years and it is difficult to find a different perspective on this theme.

This book approaches the subject from the perspective of Vitaly, a Ukrainian peasant, and members of his family and community, and covers periods before WWII, when the Ukrainians were subject to the brutal oppression of Stalinist Russia, during the wars years and many years later when Vitaly is an elderly migrant living in Australia.

Vitaly and his people hate the Bolshevist Russians so much, quite understandably, that they welcome the German invasion of 1941 and side with the Germans against the Russians.

Promised adequate food and vodka, clothing and a degree of safety and security, they willingly accept German offers to join the oppression, rounding up and wholesale slaughter of Jews in death camps, in this case Treblinka in Poland.

Demidenko employs a deliberately banal, almost passionless prose style to document the excesses of immorality and degradation of these times, while has a subtly powerful effect.

The reader wants to be horrified and outraged at these horrible events, but the matter-of-fact description of actions, implying their acceptance and necessity forces the reader to ask alternative questions about the nature of good and evil and the powerful mitigating forces of survival.

We see Vitaly, grown prosperous in the employ of the Germans and content in his passionate romance with his Polish love, Magda, seemingly jut 'doing his job', nit necessarily enjoying it, but accepting that his daily role is to plunder and exterminate hundreds and thousands of innocent Jews.

The small part of the novel set in Australia in the 1990s is narrated by Vitaly's niece at a time when the government is considering war crimes trials against Vitaly and others for actions committed about five decades earlier.

Meanwhile Vitally has grown old as a model migrant citizen of Australia, raising a family in peace and harmony, maintaining his love for church and family. The events of the war are, to him, just things in the past that he had to do to survive.

This is a relatively short but morally challenging novel. The style employed by the author is alternately frustrating and effective and the narrative raises many questions for the reader to ponder and decide.

[Michelle Heeter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was published in 1995, the same year I migrated to Australia. I remember the hate-fest directed at the author when it was discovered that she was not of Ukrainian ancestry, as she had claimed. Looking at some of the Goodreads reviews, some people haven't forgiven Helen Dale for being a bit of a fantasist. It also makes people uncomfortable that this books deviates from the simplistic "Evil Nazis vs Saintly Jews" narrative that we learn in primary school. This book is NOT anti-Semitic. It is not an apology for Nazi atrocities. It does show how Ukrainians were starved and abused by the Soviets (some of whom were Jews), then used by the Germans to perform some of the worst cruelty of the Holocaust at Treblinka. The book is a page-turner and I recommend it for anyone interested in WWII.

[Simone · Rating 1 out of 5]

I began reading this novel and felt intensely uncomfortable about what I felt was a Nazi apologia. I stopped reading it because of this and weeks later the controversy erupted in Australia! The book was originally published as a true story of the author, Helen Demidenko's, Ukrainian (?) family. The novel won a major Australian literary prize (the Miles Franklin) but later, it was revelaed that Demidenko was actually Darville and that she was not Ukrainian. After Darville's identity was revealed and the book's 'true story' lie exposed, the prize remained hers and set the literary world aflame with controversy.

[Clare Snow]

The darling of 1990s Australian books and publishing industry - until she was found out...

Twenty five years ago Helen D. had an outing in "trans-ethnicity." Helen Dale aka Helen Demidenko, wrote The Hand That Signed the Paper which deals with wartime atrocities in the Treblinka concentration camp in Ukraine. She fabricated a Ukranian family heritage and implied her novel was based on her family's history of collaborating with Nazis.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen...

The book won the Vogel Award for an unpublished manuscript and in 1995 the Miles Franklin Award. Both prestigeous Australian literary awards.

I read it as a teenager. All I remembered was it was about a family during WWII. My memory only has room for important facts 😉

When Helen Demidenko aka Helen Darville was found out, her brother called her performance a "marketing exercise"
https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/...

She fooled the Australian publishing and literary establishment and made a bunch of cash by lying, telling tall tales and pulling off a masterful performance to make her novel more palatable: what with it being about "her family." Publishers and various book people were a bit pissed about it and she was never published again. (I wonder if the Awards committees asked for their money back?)

With writing a dead end, she changed careers and studied Law - where lying is a job necessity.

It seems Helen is onto her third D surname and is back to being cis-Anglo these days. And lives in the UK, where I guess people don't know about her marketing cred?

[Pete · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Hand That Signed the Paper (1995) by Helen Dale is a Miles Franklin Award winning bestseller. The book was very controversial on release. Dale said the book was by Helen Demidenko and claimed Ukrainian ancestry.

The book still provokes a very strong reaction from many Australians because it successfully hoaxed Australia’s literary elite and because the book was perceived as antisemitic. The fact that Dale is still the youngest winner of the Miles Franklin Award and that she could buy a house in cash with her earnings from the book offends some Australian writers. Dale has later written that she saw that having a certain identity could make a book successful and she proved her point. Dale is a very interesting person with a very high IQ who went on to have a successful career as a lawyer in the UK. She’s also a Libertarian which upsets some people.

The book tells the story of a Ukrainian family who first suffer through the Holodomor and Soviet terror and then participate in the Holocaust. The tale is also told from the perspective of a child of one of the boys in Queensland. Her Uncle is being charged with War Crimes.

Most of the book is set in the Ukraine and Poland. The antisemitism of the Ukranians is clearly portrayed. The horrors of what they go through and then perpetrate is confronting. The book is engaging but the pacing and switching of perspective doesn’t quite work.

It is surprising that the book won the Miles Franklin Award. But it did win. For many people it would be the only winner of the Miles Franklin Award that they could name due to it’s notoriety.

The Hand That Signed the Paper is an interesting read. It’s not a great book but it’s not terrible either. It’s also a notable footnote in Australia’s literary history.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

an interesting book but the whole demidenko / darvelle debate is much more interesting

[Victoria · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a pity she spoiled a promising writing career with that silly stunt about her name.

[Sadie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very different perspective about what happened to the people caught up in WW11 in Europe. Well written, honest, brutal. A book that makes you think long after it has finished............

[Bec D · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book because it won the Miles Franklin award and I am currently reading all of the winning books. I am not/was not perturbed by all the stuff about the author. I don’t think she is a good person but I didn’t let that distract me. This book is a harrowing read about the perpetrators of the holocaust and what motivated them to repeatedly commit atrocities against humanity. It argues that a person who loses his/her humanity will treat others inhumanely. I believe this to be true in most cases (from listening to survivors of the holocaust). If you don’t take care of people who have been wounded they will become perpetrators of violence. That said: I do not have sympathy for any of the characters in the book who perpetrate the violence because in many cases it is done with such gleeful hate. I also think that since Vitaly chooses to end his life only when his evil deeds are due to be exposed (at the trials) he does not deserve sympathy. If the author has tried to draw him as a sympathetic character she has failed to win me. However I do have empathy for everyone for the characters - it is very hard not to. And it’s hard to lay blame. The characters lay much of the blame on the Jews themselves (but I think that is because they were indoctrinated and were uneducated) and then later the Germans who were described as having ice in their veins. I guess the Germans are easy targets as you won’t find too many people who disageee that the Nazi regime was evil. I think the author tries to convey a nuanced view of evil rather than seeing it in simple terms: as good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other. It’s hard to continue engaging with a character holding their evil deeds on the one hand and their good deeds such as love of family on the other. So this is a challenging read. As far as the writing goes: it’s clumsy in places but considering her age at time of writing, it is remarkable not only in the writing but the sophisticated and nuanced views she gets the reader to contemplate. For those reasons I give it 4 stars. Sadly, I feel that anyone with anti-Semitic views may like this book. :(

[Olivia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was written when the author was a young woman, just 20, under the pen name of Helen Demidenko.
It became a cause celebre, infamous in fact. After receiving awards for the quality of the writing, the subject-matter and the apparently biographical nature of the narrative it became known that the writer was not in the relationship with the material in the manner put forward.
Purporting to be Ukrainian and drawing on materials available to her and her family it details anti-semitism in the Ukraine and the passage of legislation, rules and regulations leading to purges against the Jewish population.
The writing was acclaimed. The writer was praised for her acute portrayal of events.
Awards were made.
Awards were withdrawn.
The narrative remained the same.
The author was the author in fact. So what changed? That her biographical details were false. That she was a young woman not of the background given and presumed but from a far distant and unrelated family and history in the NE of the UK.
Worth reading then. The subject-matter was controversial before the author was born and remained controversial thereafter. Hardly a situation created by the author.
Whether she was truly a writer of merit remained a mystery for a long time as she was unable to continue and unwelcome in literary circles.
It was an achievement then.
Why not still? Read it and decide perhaps.
Today she is an Australian Lawyer and has been a senior advisor to Members of Senate.
Did it really matter to the writing that she was not who she said? Perhaps it was an even greater achievement as she was able to put herself into the skin of the times and the issues. Why she felt the need to portray herself as a descendant of the period, who knows. Perhaps she felt so close to the subject-matter that it had become her life for the time?

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t find this book particularly well written, but interesting, particularly in light of whats happening in Ukraine in 2022. Maybe the first person narrative is distracting when you know it’s fictional.

[Carmen Carter · Rating 1 out of 5]

Only got through first chapter.

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but quite apologist.

[Fliss Blanch]

This story was proved to be a fake so I'm not going to give it a rating as it doesn't deserve one.

[Angelique Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this when I was 22 or 23, I'm dying to reread it as a 34-year-old.

[Simon Pockley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not going to dwell on the controversy attached to this book or its historical accuracy. Except, to say that the author is very clear in stating that it is a work of fiction. Regardless, I found the book grotesquely compelling and curiously appropriate in respect to my most recent reading choices, and to the context of the current war in the Ukraine. The last two books I have read and enjoyed have been by children of the holocaust, New York Jews. The graphic descriptions of the massacre of Jews at Babi-yar from the perspective of the perpetrators was difficult to read. The drunken chaos of German invasion was expertly handled although I was slightly confused about the inconsistent use of upper case conventions used to shift into whose story I was reading. We don't really meet the main narrator, Fiona, until two thirds of the way through the book.

THE BROTHERS Kovalenko and their comrades - Nikolai and Shura - did not kill Jews just because they were poor and Ukrainian, and did not know any better. They killed Jews because they believed that they themselves were savages (p.77)

I disagree with those that say this book lacks moral compass. In fact the perpetrators are keenly aware that their actions have consequences. In the same way that Hannah Arendt talks of the banality of evil, and the 2024 film The Zone of Interest portrays the family life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, Vitaly and brothers are normal people, traumatised not just by war but by a lifetime of oppression. The problem with this book is not its content but the way it is inconsistently structured. Nevertheless, I found it fascinating and powerful.

[p · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Hand That Signed the Paper is scarcely a novel, it reads (although it is barely readable) as a work of propaganda; a racist, antisemitic and anti-communist screed. It is astounding that it was ever able to be published (let alone win three well-regarded literary awards, that have not to this day been revoked, to the best of my knowledge) due to the blatant and obvious historical revisionism and poor grammar that belies the role of seemingly any editorial oversight. The book is replete with characters who are described only as crude, racist caricatures (both Jews and Ukrainians), the dialogue and events are completely implausible (felt reminiscent of overhearing children playing with toys). The book, beginning to end, mishmashes the recounting of excessive and grotesque violence (including for example, the bayonetting of children, rape and the mass murder of "Jewish Bolsheviks") in ways completely devoid of any levity or emotional weight, with recountings of vulgar, terribly written and pointless sex scenes. It is genuinely difficult to see how anyone felt that the book contained any literary merit. The book stands as an indictment of Australia's literary institutions and culture and as a testament of Australian racism.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. A powerful, thought provoking, violent, horrific story about Vitaly, a Ukrainian peasant who lives through the destruction of his family and village by Stalin’s communism. When the Germans invade his country in 1941 and offer Vitaly food and a paying job, he takes it. By joining the SS Death Squads, along with others, he kills innocent people, including many Jews. In Germany he has a spouse and child, but with the end of the war, Vitaly escapes, and settles to an ordinary life in Australia.

This book is a very uncomfortable read, with many descriptions of violence.

Winner of the 1995 Miles Franklin Award.

[Belinda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hadn't heard any of the controversy until after finishing,so the low rating is not because of that. I just couldn't really follow it. It jumped around too much! In no real chronological order. The 2 stars are for the historical facts I didn't know about, and because it was a truly interesting concept. But it was ruined by my not really following the story very well.

[Stephen Tuck · Rating 2 out of 5]

I gave up without finishing. This was quite a noted book in its day due to allegations of hoaxing. Reading it now it reads like what it is: an overwrought novella by an undergraduate. That it received a couple of literary awards is an example of how undemanding Australian letters were in the 1990s.