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Helen Dale
Helen Dale (born Helen Darville; 1972) is an Australian writer and lawyer. She is best known for writing The Hand that Signed the Paper, a novel about a Ukrainian family who collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust, under the pseudonym Helen Demidenko.
A daughter of British immigrants, Dale was educated at Redeemer Lutheran College in Rochedale, a suburb of Brisbane. While studying English literature at the University of Queensland, she wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper. In 1993, the novel won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript.
Dale published her book in 1994 and won the Miles Franklin Award, becoming the award's youngest winner. The following year, she was the subject of a major Australian literary controversy because she had falsely claimed Ukrainian ancestry as part of the basis of the book (and her pseudonym). The misrepresentation has been described as a "literary hoax" in The Sydney Morning Herald. The novel was subsequently reissued under her legal name, then Helen Darville. It won the 1995 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.
After teaching, Dale returned to university, gaining her law degree in 2002. She later did post-graduate law study at Oxford and completed an LLB degree in 2012 at the University of Edinburgh. She returned to Australia and became a senior adviser to David Leyonhjelm, a Liberal Democrat member of the Australian Senate, but at the end of May 2016 Leyonhjelm revealed that Dale had left his employ.
A daughter of British immigrants, Dale was educated at Redeemer Lutheran College in Rochedale, a suburb of Brisbane. She had previously claimed that her father was Ukrainian, and her mother was Irish.
While studying English literature at the University of Queensland, she wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper, a novel about a Ukrainian family who collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust. In 1993, the novel won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript.[citation needed]
The novel tells the story of a Ukrainian family trying to survive a decade of Stalinist purges and state-imposed poverty and famine. The family comprises the parents, a daughter, and two sons. They suffer abuse by the drunken local commissar and are refused treatment by the village doctor and his wife (a secular Jew). Many Ukrainians hail the German invaders as liberators from Soviet oppression. Many volunteered for the German armed forces—Wehrmacht, SS, and Ordnungspolizei. The novel stresses the arbitrariness of the assignments to military units. A Ukrainian could as easily end up fighting on the front alongside the Wehrmacht as be in a death squad.
The two young brothers are separated in military assignments: 16-year-old Evheny to Nazi Einsatzgruppen C (a mobile killing squad) and the elder 19-year-old Vitaly to the SS training facility for Ukrainians at Trawniki in Poland. Evheny is implicated in the massacre at Babi Yar outside Kiev, while Vitaly is posted to Treblinka extermination camp as a guard. Evheny is later sent to a front-line Waffen SS formation on the Eastern Front, while Vitaly is posted to northern Italy. He is part of German anti-partisan activity in the wake of Italy's withdrawal from the Axis alliance.
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Helen Dale
Helen Dale (born Helen Darville; 1972) is an Australian writer and lawyer. She is best known for writing The Hand that Signed the Paper, a novel about a Ukrainian family who collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust, under the pseudonym Helen Demidenko.
A daughter of British immigrants, Dale was educated at Redeemer Lutheran College in Rochedale, a suburb of Brisbane. While studying English literature at the University of Queensland, she wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper. In 1993, the novel won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript.
Dale published her book in 1994 and won the Miles Franklin Award, becoming the award's youngest winner. The following year, she was the subject of a major Australian literary controversy because she had falsely claimed Ukrainian ancestry as part of the basis of the book (and her pseudonym). The misrepresentation has been described as a "literary hoax" in The Sydney Morning Herald. The novel was subsequently reissued under her legal name, then Helen Darville. It won the 1995 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.
After teaching, Dale returned to university, gaining her law degree in 2002. She later did post-graduate law study at Oxford and completed an LLB degree in 2012 at the University of Edinburgh. She returned to Australia and became a senior adviser to David Leyonhjelm, a Liberal Democrat member of the Australian Senate, but at the end of May 2016 Leyonhjelm revealed that Dale had left his employ.
A daughter of British immigrants, Dale was educated at Redeemer Lutheran College in Rochedale, a suburb of Brisbane. She had previously claimed that her father was Ukrainian, and her mother was Irish.
While studying English literature at the University of Queensland, she wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper, a novel about a Ukrainian family who collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust. In 1993, the novel won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript.[citation needed]
The novel tells the story of a Ukrainian family trying to survive a decade of Stalinist purges and state-imposed poverty and famine. The family comprises the parents, a daughter, and two sons. They suffer abuse by the drunken local commissar and are refused treatment by the village doctor and his wife (a secular Jew). Many Ukrainians hail the German invaders as liberators from Soviet oppression. Many volunteered for the German armed forces—Wehrmacht, SS, and Ordnungspolizei. The novel stresses the arbitrariness of the assignments to military units. A Ukrainian could as easily end up fighting on the front alongside the Wehrmacht as be in a death squad.
The two young brothers are separated in military assignments: 16-year-old Evheny to Nazi Einsatzgruppen C (a mobile killing squad) and the elder 19-year-old Vitaly to the SS training facility for Ukrainians at Trawniki in Poland. Evheny is implicated in the massacre at Babi Yar outside Kiev, while Vitaly is posted to Treblinka extermination camp as a guard. Evheny is later sent to a front-line Waffen SS formation on the Eastern Front, while Vitaly is posted to northern Italy. He is part of German anti-partisan activity in the wake of Italy's withdrawal from the Axis alliance.