The End and the Beginning
by K. J. Holdom

The End and the Beginning is the debut novel by former journalist K.J. Holdom – born in Taranaki, now living in Auckland, with extended periods spent in France. The story is based on a real family and true events, set largely during the second World War. The novel’s prologue takes us back to 1815, the year of Napoleon’s defeat, and to the Franco-Prussian border. An ancient coin, pilfered centuries ago from a dead soldier, is returned to the surface by ‘the root of a young beech tree’. It re-emerges in 1935 – in the Saar Basin, now on the border between France and Germany – when a boy named Max Bernot ‘pulls from his pocket a small silver coin’ given to him by his godfather, Uncle Charles. The coin holds a secret, ‘a marvellous story of a land, a crown, a great and terrible war’.

Now a new terrible war looms. Like their neighbours, the Bernot family speak French, German, and ‘Platt—the patois that unites them with their husbands, that has united everyone here since before there was a Germany, before there was a France’. But the people of the Saar have voted to ‘return to the Fatherland’, opting for Germany over France. Max’s Uncle Joseph says they are just ‘ordinary people’ who don’t need to be afraid. Max’s mother, Marguerite, insists ‘Ça ira Ça ira’, it will be fine’. His father believes that ‘Hitler won’t last’. Outside, a gallows is being paraded through town.

The story at the centre of the novel is inspired by the real-life experiences of the young Edmund Baton, reimagined here as Max Bernot, and much of the narrative takes place between March and April 1945, during the final months of the war. At the age of thirteen he is sent hundreds of miles from home, conscripted into a ‘Kinderlandvershickung’ (Hitler Youth camp). Members of his family will end up in labour or concentration camps. Many of the characters here will not survive the war.

The novel’s point of view moves between Max and his mother, Marguerite. Max’s journey in and out of danger is action-packed and often brutal, tempered by a touching friendship with another ‘Saarfrench’ boy, Hans. They are outsiders, tortured by their sadistic teenaged leader. Max remembers a disapproving doctor at a ‘racial hygiene check’ complaining because Max ‘has a French family name and slurs his words like an Alsatian peasant’. When he and Hans are intercepted by French soldiers, their captors want to know why Max can speak French. He tells them: ‘My mother is French. My grandparents are French. I have cousins and aunts and uncles — my godfather is — was French. He was shot by the SS.’ They are skeptical – ‘That’s quite a story’ – and insist that the boys are Nazis.

The relentlessness of Max’s extreme plight leaves little room for reflection. The short, punchy chapters, with interrupting flashbacks, make for a frenetic reading experience. Then, amidst the chaos of war, on a postcard to his mother he writes: ‘Dear Mama, I have visited this place. Sending warmest greetings and hugs, Max’. The chaos dissolves, revealing the simple fact of a son who misses his mother.

Marguerite has been forced to move as well – hired, against her will, as secretary to Karl Hinckel, an old acquaintance and now a sinister SS officer. Marguerite’s new role requires that she and teenaged daughter Anna, live with ‘snake’ Hinckel, his nasty wife Lina, and Tonia, a Russian maid, in Baden-Württemberg. Marguerite’s internal life carries the emotional weight of the narrative. Her predicament is less frantic than Max’s, and her relationships with the others in the grand house are revealed through affecting interactions.

Margurite’s observations are nuanced, and emotionally charged. Lina Hinckel tells her: ‘‘The difference between my husband and me is that he has not a gram of sentimentality … You will soon enough be back out on the street or wherever he found you. You and your hure daughter’. ‘Marguerite ‘itches to smack the smile from that gutter mouth. Instead, she steps in close to the other woman, taking satisfaction in standing a good fifteen centimetres taller’. Unlike Max, she is now well-fed, but she too is a prisoner, longing for escape:

They [the Guards] think she is a woman entranced by nature, fascinated by a splash of moss on a rock while she is assessing the strength of a branch that overhangs the stone boundary fence, mapping the possible footholds in a crumbling section of the wall. They allow sufficient distance to fall between them that, if she wanted to, she could scale that wall and disappear into the woods.

She tries to protect naïve, Hitler-loving Anna from sexual assault and begs Hinckel to help find Max, patrolling the border between her children and evil. It is her anguish that endures after the book is put down. Her final response – ‘Good,’ Margurite says, and she wants to thank him but it is no longer possible to speak’ – belies an agony that Holdom is right not to reduce to dialogue.

Borderlines are a fruitful imaginative space for the fiction writer. Here, one family’s attempts to remain intact on a contested border in wartime is a site of rich emotional potential. In 1945, there is also no clearly defined line between war and peace. Max walks through a small town in Baden-Württemberg, knowing little about what is really going on in the war, and this is what he sees:

White sheets drape from windows along the length of the street. Defeat was once impossible. It meant annihilation, the end. But now, in silence, in this weightless, timeless, inbetweenness, in the brightness of those lengths of white cloth, he senses a change, a fragile awakening.

Holdom’s talent for writing sentences that evoke an atmospheric and high-pressure world, her attention to sensory details as well as symbolic gestures, helps the story to generate a mood fraught with peril. Civilians fleeing to the French border are described as ‘hundreds of shivering figures pick[ing] their way through the Warndt Forest, boots creaking on snow, coats snatched by fingers of larch, clambering their way through bracken and bramble, frozen creeks and cut wire’.

When Max and his group are transported to Bavaria to catch a westbound train towards the front, the boys ‘kick icicles off a low-hanging shed roof’ and ‘trot through the snow, fists in coat pockets, a flock of wingless crows’. He sees a family laid out dead beneath a quilt, ‘six pairs of shoeless feet peek out. The smallest would fit into Max’s palm’. Touch is an intimate sensory experience, and so reveals Max’s tenderness. He considers stepping out of line to ‘pull the quilt down to cover those poor frozen feet. But he doesn’t have the courage’.

The historical facts of this novel are based both on extensive research and a relationship-turned-friendship with the living relatives of Edmund Baton. In a note to readers, Holdom outlines what is known of his experience in 1945, and the generosity of the Baton family. The care Holdom has taken with this story is obvious. Her first contact with Edmund’s story was back in 2015, and in 2018 she worked on the novel for the Master of Creative Writing at the University of Auckland; she won that year’s Wallace Foundation Prize for best manuscript. The novel, now available in New Zealand, was first published by Simon & Schuster Canada.

I remember reading the World War I poets Wilfred Owen and Sigfried Sassoon in high-school English, and reading about the contested Rhineland for History. But what always moved me most was reading the memorialised names of former students at my school who had died fighting in wars. The simple fact of their names. Mouthing them, one by one, silently to myself. I don’t recall thinking about heroism, or imagining feats of bravery. I remember feeling an aching sadness. What Holdom’s novel achieves is the telling of a small, intensely felt family tragedy set during a ‘great and terrible war’.