The Hand That Signed the Paper is a 1994 novel and literary hoax. The novel was written by Helen Darville, now Helen Dale, and was published under the name Helen Demidenko. It tells the story of a Ukrainian family that collaborated with Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. While the novel initially received a positive reception and was the 1995 winner of Australia's top literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, it eventually became the subject of a heated debate—first over accusations of antisemitism, followed by the revelation that Darville had adopted a false identity to imply that the novel was based on her own family history.
The novel is narrated by Fiona Kovalenko, a university student of Irish-Ukrainian descent living in Queensland, Australia. Fiona's uncle Vitaly has been charged with crimes against humanity for his service as a guard at the Treblinka extermination camp. The novel recounts Vitaly and his siblings' upbringing in Ukraine amid the Holodomor, positing that perceived Jewish involvement in Bolshevism was a motive for Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust. The novel explores the moral responsibility of the Holocaust's perpetrators and suggests that it is unjust to prosecute Nazi collaborators like Fiona's father and uncle for actions taken during the war.
Helen Darville, the daughter of middle-class English parents, presented herself as a working-class Irish-Ukrainian woman named Helen Demidenko between 1992, when she began writing the novel, and her eventual exposure in 1995. Her unpublished manuscript was the winner of the 1993 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and was published by Allen & Unwin in August 1994. The novel received a positive reception upon its release and was the winner of the 1995 Miles Franklin Award and Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Shortly after the Miles Franklin Award announcement, however, the novel sparked controversy over accusations that it was overly sympathetic towards the perpetrators of the Holocaust. This backlash intensified in August 1995 when it was revealed that "Helen Demidenko" was a fabrication and that Darville had no familial connection to Ukraine.
The controversy surrounding the novel has been the subject of multiple books, including Andrew Riemer's The Demidenko Debate and Robert Manne's The Culture of Forgetting. Defenders of the novel have argued that it is a worthwhile experiment in postmodern fiction despite its imperfections, while critics have contended that it is an antisemitic work that distorts the history and moral lessons of the Holocaust.
Plot summary
Fiona Kovalenko, the daughter of an Irish mother and Ukrainian father, is a university student in Queensland, Australia. Her uncle Vitaly immigrated to Australia from Ukraine in 1948 and has recently been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the Holocaust. Fiona fears that her father Evheny may soon also be charged. She describes finding photos in his bedside table at the age of 12 showing him and her uncle in SS uniforms participating in the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar and guarding prisoners at the Treblinka extermination camp.
Kateryna, the sister of Vitaly and Evheny, begins describing her upbringing in a village near Khmel'nik, Ukraine. She recounts the 1930s famine known as the Holodomor and the repression that Ukraine suffered under the Soviet Union. During the famine, the kommissar's wife, a Jewish doctor named Judit, refuses to treat Kateryna's youngest brother and likens Ukrainians to dogs. The famine eventually takes the lives of Kateryna's brother and all 12 of her cousins. Kateryna and Evheny are sent away to a Komsomol school, although Evheny soon runs away. At the school, Kateryna blames the famine on "communists and Jews" and is told by her fellow Ukrainian students that Adolf Hitler will help them to get revenge.
Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the village's residents begin to massacre communists. The German Army arrives in the village and is joyfully welcomed by its inhabitants, while Kateryna and her fellow students are evacuated to Kiev as German troops surround the city. On the journey, she develops a connection with a German SS captain named Wilhelm Hasse, with whom she enters into a relationship. Vitaly and Evheny join many of the other young men from their village in signing up to join the SS as auxiliary volunteers. In Kiev, Kateryna watches from a window as two uniformed men rape and kill a Jewish woman. She recognises one of the men as Evheny and waves to him. The next day, the Jews of Kiev are marched to the Babi Yar ravine and massacred using machine guns.
Vitaly is assigned to the Warsaw Ghetto and recalls bayonetting a Jewish baby hidden in a knapsack before shooting the father. He is later reassigned to Treblinka, where he is tasked with burning the corpses of those who have been killed in the gas chambers and participates in the looting of their belongings. He describes throwing infants into the air so that another guard, known as Ivan the Terrible, could catch them on a bayonet. A guard explains that Ivan is particularly brutal towards the prisoners because during the famine, Jews burned down his house while his parents and six siblings were trapped inside. Vitaly begins a relationship with a Polish girl named Magda and has a son named Ihor. Eventually, following a prisoner revolt, the Treblinka camp is shut down and Vitaly is sent to the front, leaving Magda and Ihor behind in Poland.
Evheny, serving with the 14th Waffen SS Galizien Division, surrenders to the British at Klagenfurt in 1945. He migrates to Britain with Kateryna, whose husband Hasse was killed in the Battle of Stalingrad, after they learn that their mother was killed in an industrial accident while working as a forced labourer in Germany. They assume that Vitaly is also dead and begin preparing to move to Canada, until they learn in 1949 that he has migrated to Australia and is working on the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Evheny, his Irish fiancée Margaret, Kateryna, and Kateryna's two children all move to Australia to join him.
In the present day, as Fiona works to help Vitaly prepare for his trial, he dies in hospital from a stroke. Fiona continues to protest the ongoing war crimes trials, but her father is ultimately not charged. Fiona visits Treblinka and meets a man whose Quaker aunt was killed at the camp. He asks her whether she is sorry for what her uncle did, and she says that she is.
Background Helen Darville grew up in Queensland, Australia, as the daughter of two middle-class English migrants, Harry and Grace Darville. She attended Redeemer Lutheran College in Rochedale, a suburb of Brisbane. In 1989, Darville began her university studies at the University of Queensland, where she soon developed a reputation for eccentricity, often making fanciful claims about her background. She initially introduced herself as being of upper-class Belgian or Franco-Norman descent and said that she was a graduate of one of Brisbane's most prestigious private schools. She also claimed to be a prodigious mathematician and the daughter of a Czech resistance fighter. Eventually Darville settled on the story that she was the daughter of a working-class Irish mother and Ukrainian father.
In mid-1992, Darville began using the surname Demidenko-Darville, before eventually adopting the surname Demidenko. At around the same time, she began working on the manuscript for The Hand That Signed the Paper. The manuscript was written amid a nationwide debate over the trials of Nazi war criminals in South Australia. In 1988, the Australian government had passed the War Crimes Amendment Act to allow for the prosecution of the estimated 4000–5000 war criminals who had moved to Australia following the Second World War. The act was controversial, with many fearing that the legislation would result in costly and socially divisive trials of elderly residents. Three alleged war criminals, all of whom were Eastern European men in their seventies living in South Australia, were ultimately charged—Ivan Polyukhovich, Mikolay Berezowsky and Heinrich Wagner—of whom only the first was brought to trial. Polyukhovich was found not guilty on all charges.
Darville was a strong opponent of the trials, later explaining, "I was very upset by the war crimes trials, because I thought they were very specifically directed at the Ukrainian community and were very vindictive and sanctimonious... it wasn't motivated by a sense of justice but by a sense of revenge". In 1988 Darville had written a short story in her high school magazine from the perspective of John Demjanjuk, who was believed at the time to be the Treblinka guard known as "Ivan the Terrible", during his war crimes trial in Israel. Her short story paints a sympathetic portrait of Demjanjuk as a victim of both Nazi Germany and the Israeli prosecution. Some of Darville's acquaintances later said that she had been expelled from her university's branch of the conservative Young Nationals after persistently sponsoring a motion opposing the war crimes legislation. During her time at the university, her politics became more left-wing; she eventually became a member of the Australian Democrats and advocated for environmentalism and LGBTQ rights.
Development and publication Darville's manuscript for The Hand That Signed the Paper was initially written as a work of non-fiction, with its characters sharing her adopted surname, and an author's note stating that the work was based on interviews with her uncle Vitaly Demidenko. Darville's boyfriend Paul Gadaloff later said that around this time Darville had developed a preoccupation with Jewish influence on society and with the Jewish Bolshevism conspiracy theory. He also said that Darville had described her book as a work of oral history, telling him that her uncle Vitaly lived in Adelaide and that he had been a guard at Treblinka. A friend of Darville, Natalie Jane Prior, later wrote that Darville had a tendency during this period to use "ugly, offensive and tiresome" language about "hook-nosed Jews and looney Zionists".
In early 1993, Darville submitted her manuscript for The Hand That Signed the Paper to the University of Queensland Press. The manuscript was rejected by the editor Sue Abbey, who wrote that she was unimpressed by what she deemed its flat characters and stilted dialogue. Later that year Darville submitted the manuscript under the name Helen Demidenko to the 1993 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award, an award for an unpublished manuscript by an author aged under 35 for which the winner is awarded a publishing contract with Allen & Unwin. According to Darville, she submitted her manuscript on a whim after her brother pointed out the application form printed on a newspaper page that she had placed underneath her dogs' bowls. Gadaloff later contradicted this account, saying that Darville had made "an assault on the Vogel from day one".