The Hidden Book by Kirsty Manning

Title: The Hidden Book

Author: Kirsty Manning

Genre: Historical Fiction

Publisher: Allen and Unwin

Published: 29^th August 2023

Format: Paperback

Pages: 312

Price: $32.99

Synopsis: From the bestselling author of The Jade Lily comes a compelling novel based on a true story of a WWII European heirloom that brought down war criminals and travelled through history … to be found in an Australian country shed in 2019.

Europe, 1940s: Imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, Spanish fighter and photographer Mateo Baca is ordered to process images of the camp and inmates for a handful of photo books being made for presentation to top Nazi figures. Just five books in total, or so the officials think …

Mateo manages to make a secret sixth book and, with the help of a local woman, Lena Lang, it remains hidden until the end of the war.

Australia, present day: When thirteen-year-old Hannah Campbell’s Yugoslavian grandfather, Nico Antonov, arrives in Australia to visit his family, one of the gifts he brings with him is an intriguing-looking parcel wrapped in a flour sack, which Roza, Hannah’s mother, quickly hides.

Later, Hannah sneaks off in search for the mysterious package. She is horrified to find in it a photo book full of ghastly historical photographs of a terrible place full of people suffering.

At first Hannah has little context for what she sees, but over the years, as she experiences love, grief and trauma, she understands what these photos came to mean, for herself, her freedom and for those who risked their lives to ‘bear witness’ to history. 

A startling story of clandestine courage and treachery in World War Two, and how we must meet and overcome our pasts to move into our futures

~*~

Hannah is thirteen when her deda comes to visit from Yugoslavia and brings family heirlooms, including a book of photos wrapped in a flour sack, but before she can look at it, her mother, Roza, hides it. When Hannah finds it later, she is horrified by what she sees, yet determined to find out where it came from and how her deda came to have the photos. As Hannah grows, she learns about the context of the photos. Her family won’t tell her, school doesn’t help much, so studying history at university leads her down the right path.

Decades in the past, near Mauthausen in the late 1940s, war rages on, and prisoners are kept in concentration camps. In amongst this horror, photographer, Mateo creates five books of photos for the Nazis, and with the help of local girl, Lena, hides a sixth book that is secreted away until the end of the war. These secrets lie hidden for decades, and as Hannah works on her PhD, research about memorials, and changing the way history is presented, she starts to understand her mother and generational trauma, and what the book signifies for her family.

The Hidden Book goes between past and present, 1944-1945 in the past, and 1987 and 2018 in the contemporary storyline as Lena and Nico, and Hannah make their way through their lives and what they are dealing with in the different decades: war, imprisonment, education, family squabbles, and finding your way with an undercurrent of family secrets and knowing your history and how it impacts you and everything in your life. History converges in many ways in this book, highlighting the horrors of the camps, with the Nazis desire to document everything for their own records and needs, and the rebellious act of making sure there was evidence for the future, to show people what happened. Evidence that could be used in trials. Kirsty Manning’s book is based on a true story, a real book like this but she has fictionalised it sensitively and with in-depth research – many more sources than she included in the book, though she included the main ones. It reveals that there is much more to World War II history than we may learn about in school – the individual stories are varied and illustrate a need to understand as many of these as possible and the significant role that memorials play in showing history like this to the world, and the role of museums in preserving history for future generations. It also explores responses to trauma and war – the way some people want to move on, and forget about it, or how people like Hannah want to work to ensure what their relatives went through, what people in the camps went through, is never forgotten, despite the fact that looking at it and reading about it may be uncomfortable. Despite this, her stories are always compelling, and allow her female characters to shine, pushing them towards the front. Her family stories and stories of her characters are always the most important aspect of each novel, with any romance coming into the secondary plotline without overshadowing the important parts of the story, which I enjoy very much.

Each of Kirsty’s books has dealt with an aspect of World War II history, or history overall, that may not be common knowledge, and ensures that the memory of the victims, those who suffered, and those who would have died because they weren’t ‘perfect’, is preserved. These novels also serve as a reminder to us today what genocide and hatred can do to people – to those who tried to help and those who were forced to endure it, and what it can mean for the world and history. The Hidden Book also shows that there are ways to memorialise war and tragedy respectfully and in ways that hold great meaning and help to educate people about what has happened. I have enjoyed each book that Kirsty has written has brought something new to the realm of history, which helps build our knowledge about times past. I enjoy them because they explore different aspects of history. In doing so, there have been things I have learnt about that are just as interesting as the historical record, and I hope there are many more books like this to come.