Review: The End and the Beginning, by KJ Holdom
'Neither sufficiently French nor meeting the standards to be purely German, the Bernots’ experiences explore the fates of normal people swept up in arbitrary national conquest...'
Even when a war is ‘over’, it isn’t really over. You still have to survive the callous judgments of the powers that be as they sort out who supposedly deserves peace.
The slow slog to the end of war is the framework for The End and the Beginning, the debut historical novel by New Zealand journalist K.J. Holdom, who applies her impeccable research and ability to bring a person’s story to life in her account of one family’s harrowing experiences in 1945, during the last gasps of World War II.
The story unfolds in two parts. In one, fourteen-year-old Max Bernot flees from his Hitler Youth camp before he’s sent to the front, striving to make his way back home to Saarland – a nebulous strip of territory between France and Germany, near Luxembourg, contested over by one empire or another for generations. He needs to tell his mother the truth: that he did not turn his uncle in to the authorities. Meanwhile, his mother, Marguerite, and sister, Anna, have found themselves caught in the deadly whims of a Nazi fanatic, clutching at the flimsy straws of his remaining military authority.
Neither sufficiently French nor meeting the standards to be purely German, the Bernots’ experiences explore the fates of normal people swept up in arbitrary national conquest. The suffering that happens at home, away from the front lines. The families torn apart by secrets; communities fractured by mutual suspicion. ‘The mothers bear such a burden,’ one woman tells Marguerite. ‘The men are out there making all of the noise, but who keeps the children safe?’
The novel’s title pulls from the anti-war poem of the same name by Polish Nobel Laureat Wislawa Szymborska, translated into English by Joanna Trzeciak. It opens: ‘At the end of every war / someone has to clean up,’ detailing a slow mourning of how a community recovers from conflict, having to unearth and dispose of ‘rusted-out arguments,’ ash, glass, twisted metal and other debris while untold horrors fade into obscurity.
Holdom certainly doesn’t let the horrors fade. Max’s saga, though fictionalised here, is based on the true story of Edmond Baton. Thanks to the many interviews Holdom was able to have with the surviving members of his family back in 2015, The End and the Beginning is lush with detail – a mother dropping a suitcase, which pops open to reveal the greying corpse of her emaciated child. Bombs trapping hundreds of women and children beneath the warped ruins of the very shelter supposed to protect them. Being crushed on a train like so many cattle, without food or water. Despite the young age of the protagonist, it’s not light reading.
As the last of World War II’s veterans pass – merely several hundred remain in New Zealand, as of 2022 – The End and the Beginning is a timely read in the light of ongoing conflict around the world today. And there are parallels with today, too, in how indoctrination of any kind breeds contempt, and that contempt has consequences: ‘This was all it took now to have your life destroyed: a snub, a slight,’ Marguerite realises during one encounter with a neighbour. ‘Lives hung in the balance over a misjudged word.’
Transportive and moving, The End and the Beginning is a timely reminder of the consequences when basic human decency is sacrificed in the name of patriotism.
