Two spies and a code-breaker in the family
Sue Klauber’s new book for children shows Jews actively fighting the Nazis. As she tells Karen Glaser, it’s all based on her father and his siblings
HEN I ask Sue Klauber if I can interview her at a local café, she asks if I can come to her Muswell Hill home instead. She wants me to see the family photographs and letters that inspired her debut novel Zinc — and also the wooden chest where she keeps them.
“The chest started off in my grandmother’s flat and after she died, when I was seven, it was brought to our family home. I’d spend hours rifling through its contents, poring over childhood photographs of my father, John, and his siblings George and Eva, looking for clues of who they were, what had made them tick. If furniture could talk, this chest, which is now more than 100 years old, would tell me everything I have ever wanted to know about them.”
As it is, Klauber has imagined the lives of her late HungarianJewish father, aunt and uncle in this work of historical fiction, which is pitched at children aged from 11, but which adults will certainly enjoy as well. Set in Britain and Slovakia between 1939 and 1941, with flashbacks to childhood holidays in Hungary, it is a story about the extraordinary lengths three siblings went to protect and serve their adopted country. A book about a time “when ordinary young people did extraordinary things”, as JC columnist Jonathan Freedland writes on the cover.
But when Klauber was growing up, those extraordinary things were shrouded in secrecy. “My father and uncle had both signed the Official Secrets Act, had sworn never to tell anyone, anything,” she says. “All I knew was that my dad was a code-breaker at Bletchley Park and that George was a secret agent in enemy territory.” Her aunt, it was rumoured, was also an agent for the Special Operations Executive, the secret organisation nicknamed The Baker Street Irregulars. “What is sure is that she married a man in Hungary, where she was marooned when war broke out,” says Klauber.
She is also sure that Eva was subsequently murdered in Auschwitz with her two children. But when a young Sue asked what had happened to the aunt whose photos she would return to again and again, she got evasive answers. “I was told she had disappeared.”
Eva’s murder isn’t covered in Zinc — “this is a children’s book” — but in the course of her research Klauber visited her aunt’s former house in Hungary. Her research also took her to Bletchley Park, where her father learned to decode Nazi messages, and to Bratislava, where George made a clandestine parachute landing, and where he then lived under cover.
“I was gifted with a remarkable family history, which felt like it was waiting to be discovered, even if there is so much about their lives
I will never know,” she says. “Their wartime secrets died with them, and the National Archives, in Kew, where I spent hours and hours, weren’t able to provide me with all the answers I craved.
“So lots of scenes in Zinc are based on the work of code-breakers and secret agents whose lives I was able to research.”
And when she needed a little inspiration, Klauber would go to the big wooden chest in her living room and pull out another photograph.
“I have now transferred all the photographs and documents to museum-grade boxes. I want to be sure they are preserved for future generations of my family.”
The long lines of blood and family, the bonds between the generations, are feelings that run deep in Klauber. She has dedicated the novel to her son, Benjy, 21. And though when she began writing the book, it was because she wanted to publish an adventure story for children, it was a deeply felt moral injunction to remember her murdered relatives that kept her writing and polishing her manuscript for ten years.
“I wanted to stand up for our scores of relatives in Germany and Hungary who were killed for simply being who they were, for being Jewish. I wanted to commemorate them, bring them back to life, into the light.”
Being Jewish now feels part of who she is, but it has taken Klauber years to feel comfortable in her skin.
“My mother came from a strictly
Orthodox family who left Frankfurt in 1933 when Hitler came to power and when she arrived in Britain she quickly rejected her religious upbringing, which she saw as highly restrictive. Growing up, Judaism, all religion, was dismissed as Bronze Age hocuspocus. In addition, I think my parents wanted to make me and my sister to feel safe. So we knew we were Jewish, but that was about it. It sounds awful now, but I grew up thinking it was uncool to be Jewish. I was pretty snobbish about the community.”
That discomfort at being Jewish started to wane when it was time to send Benjy to school.
“We were out of the catchment area for all the ones we liked, and when some friends asked why we didn’t consider a local single-form-entry Jewish school, I was initially highly sceptical. But then, as we didn’t have any other options, and were planning to move soon anyway, we sent him there.”
During Benjy’s first week at Simon Marks Jewish Primary in Stoke Newington, where the family then lived, Klauber burst into tears. “I felt completely out of my comfort zone. There was Hebrew writing on the walls, Israeli parents in the playground and for the first time in my life I heard the words ‘bris’ and ‘siddur’. It was overwhelming.” But the discomfort was* all hers. She never once felt judged for her ignorance, she says. “No one laughed at my questions, no one made me feel less than. And that enabled me to explore my curiosity.”
That curiosity led to her novel about her Jewish family’s bravery in the Second World War. This is not an explicitly Jewish novel, but while he is at Bletchley Park, John attends a Friday night dinner in Bedford, and there are other more subtle Jewish references in the novel that won’t escape the notice of sensitive readers.
“I’ve had lots of lovely feedback about the book, but one comment from a writer has made particular impression. She said it’s quite original in children and teen fiction to present a Jewish family’s involvement in the war in terms of active service as British citizens, rather than as victims. This didn’t occur to me when I was writing the book, but now it’s been pointed out, I keep returning to the idea.”
It also interests Klauber’s mother, Ruth, to whom she has also dedicated the novel and who has been on her own Jewish journey. After rejecting for decades the Judaism of her youth, Ruth now attends the family Seders her daughter hosts every year and was a proud grandma at Benjy’s barmitzvah eight years ago. And now, she is hugely proud of her daughter’s literary achievement. She has told Klauber that her late father, a Jewish Bletchley Park hero, would be too.
Her research took her to Bletchley Park, where her father learned to decode Nazi messages