Fergus O'connell

Call the Swallow Fergus O'connell

This first novel is the powerful story of Ariela Steinbaum, a nineteen-year-old Jewish girl in Poland who leaves home to study music in Warsaw. It is 1938, the eve of the Holocaust in Germany, and Nazi power is at its zenith. By 1945 Hitler will have erased European Jews and their culture from the map. This novel shows in searing detail how the Holocaust was, as much as anything else, an industry, with quotas, business meetings, office politics, all the trappings of a grim commercial business. While few were involved in the actual killing, many ordinary people were involved in its administration. What was the impact on people's lives of those extraordinary times? Fifty years later her brother, David, who witnessed the horrifying events, comes searching to find out what happened to her. Interwoven into her story is the horror that affected all as many tried to pretend there was no horror, including the story of Rudolf Fest, a family man with a future in the Gestapo's Department of Statistics.