Sunday, June 22, 2014

History and imagination

I am working on a new edition of my booklet on the Deckstons. I want to expand it and write about the children they brought out to New Zealand and why they did it. Our display in the Holocaust Centre focuses on the children. I made the assumption that Annie and Max Deckston went to Poland in 1932, times were tough in Poland, it was the time of the Depression, they saw something that appalled them and they decided to do something for these poor children. But information came to light as I was rewriting my essay, which showed that they did not go to Poland in 1932, they might have gone there or been there in 1930. More important, they were not that fussed about saving Polish Jewish children, they applied to bring out sixteen Jewish orphans from London. This sheds a new light on the motives of Annie and Max. I need to get inside their minds to understand why they decided to do this. It had nothing to do with conditions in their homeland. Obviously it is impossible to get inside the minds of people who had been dead for some seventy-five years and left no records, yet understanding their motivation is important in telling their story. So I have to imagine whatever might have motivated them. I know that they were difficult, cantankerous people, but they were also charitable, putting up their money to bring out members of  their extended families, even if at times the help they gave to these relatives was less than the relatives expected. So we can assume that their motive might have involved charity. But was there more to it? A letter from the London County Council's Public Assistance Committee says that the New Zealand government had approved the immigration of sixteen Jewish orphans from London. Somewhere in New Zealand archives there must be a record of this, which might explain why the government agreed to the request of the Deckstons. More questions, more research. In the scheme of things this detail hardly matters, but getting it right matters. The original printing of my Deckston Story sold out. The new second edition has to be as right as possible, without losing the flow of the narrative. It is an interesting story of some colourful unusual people.

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