Suzanne Leal

that story that inspired this new novel, The Deception.

At the time that I wrote the story, it didn't make it harder.

I had this story, which was the story of a young Jewish Czech woman who'd been sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto outside Prague and the relationship of sorts that developed between her and her guard, who's a Czech gendarme.

At the time, it was just for me a fascinating story because I never knew what happened to her.

I knew what happened to the gendarmes.

but I had no information as to the woman.

The question of appropriation came later and really came when I was editing the book and the issues surrounding the tattooist at Auschwitz came to the fore.

And it was, look, even before that had arisen, I'd been very mindful that when you're not Jewish and I'm not Jewish and you decide to write about the Holocaust,

you've got to be very careful.

You've got to be careful to be sensitive.

You've got to be careful in particular, I think, to be accurate.

And that means, for me, even if you're writing a work of fiction, it needs to be possible.

I read somewhere that someone said that when you're writing about the Holocaust, make sure it could have happened.

So that meant the transport numbers had to be right, the dates had to be right.

And to do that, I had help, and I had assistance from a couple of Jewish-Australian authors, Bram Presser, who wrote The Book of Dirt, and Leah Kaminsky, who wrote The Hollow Bones.

And when I say assistance, they both agreed to read the manuscript very kindly and to provide their feedback.

So, of course, any mistakes are mine.

But that was a little bit scary because I knew that

if I put it in someone else's hand and I'd asked to have it assessed for accuracy, for sensitivity, there was a risk that it would come back with enormous changes or perhaps even with the advice that I shouldn't go ahead.

Fortunately, that wasn't the case.