Helen Darville
Encyclopedia
Helen Dale also known as Helen Darville and Helen Demidenko, is an Australian writer and lawyer.
While studying English literature at the University of Queensland
in Brisbane, she wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper, a novel about a Ukrainian family who become both bystanders and perpetrators during the Holocaust. In 1993, the novel won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award
for an unpublished manuscript. It was first published in 1994 under the pseudonym Helen Demidenko and won the Miles Franklin Award
the following year before becoming the subject of a major Australian literary controversy about the author's false claims of Ukrainian ethnicity. The misrepresentation has been described as a "literary hoax" in the Sydney Morning Herald and the novel was subsequently reissued under her then real name, Helen Darville.
In the novel, the 16-year-old Evheny and 19-year-old Vitaly are separated, the younger to Nazi
Einsatzgruppen
C (a mobile killing squad) and the elder 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 death 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 as part of German antipartisan activity in the wake of that country's withdrawal from the Axis alliance.
The novel's frankness about the antisemitism of its major characters (who blamed Jews for the excesses of Communism), and Darville's sympathetic focus on the lives of Ukrainian perpetrators of war crimes rather than the story of their victims as is more usual in Holocaust literature, led to accusations of antisemitism and condemnation by leaders of Australia's Jewish community. This impression was reinforced by the perception that the personal attitudes of "Helen Demidenko" might be informed by her own Ukrainian identity, until this was revealed to be a pseudonym
.
, one of the most prestigious literary awards in Australia. This created a furor and much debate on the nature of identity and ethnicity in Australian literature.
Despite adverse publicity, the novel still went on to win the 1995 Australian Literary Society Gold Medal.
The novel was initially submitted to Queensland University Press in 1993 and was said to be based upon recorded interviews with her own relatives, among others her uncle "Vitaly Demidenko." The Sydney Morning Herald mistakenly reported in 2005 that it was submitted as nonfiction, a claim justified by quoting the author's note that she submitted with the manuscript, which read: "The things narrated in this book really happened, the things they did [are] historical actualities." After indicating that the work was based on history, the note went on to position the author's presentation of her work as fiction, saying: "But this is also a work of fiction. I have presented it as fiction...."
's The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust and Andrew Riemer's The Demidenko Debate, both published in 1996. Manne is very critical of Darville's book. Riemer is not.
demanding that she identify these possible war criminals .
Darville was briefly a columnist with the Brisbane daily newspaper, The Courier-Mail
, before being dismissed over accusations of plagiarism for repeating jokes originally from the Evil Overlord List
in one of her columns and passing them off as her own. She continued to write freelance features for other News Corporation
newspapers and magazines, and occasionally the Fairfax
press.
In 2000, she was again accused of anti-semitism after choosing to interview historian and Holocaust denier
David Irving
, for Australian Style magazine during his failed libel
trial in London. She wrote a post-11 September article in The Sydney Morning Herald
. Darville is reported to have worked variously as a graphic designer, property law lecturer and PE teacher.
After working as a secondary teacher for several years in Australia and the UK, she returned to the University of Queensland in 2002 to study law. Graduating with a first class honours degree in law in 2005, she commenced work as a judge's associate ("judge's clerk" in the U.S.) for Peter Dutney, a justice of the Supreme Court of Queensland
.
Previously a regular contributor to the libertarian
group blog Catallaxy files under the name 'skepticlawyer,' Darville now has her own blog in this name http://skepticlawyer.com.au/. In recent times, she has also appeared on the SBS
program Insight (in a special on liars) and as a guest of Melbourne University
's Publishing and Communications Program. She has a strong involvement with the Australian Skeptics
, and has written for both their in-house magazine and Quadrant Magazine
, a conservative journal. Recently Darville was included as an entry in Ben Peek
's Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth
, a novel exploring the nature of truth in literature, and is reported to be working on a second novel, more than a decade after the publication of the first.
programme at the University of Oxford
, where she is a member of Brasenose College. She is now reading for an MPhil in Law (Jurisprudence).
While studying English literature at the University of Queensland
University of Queensland
The University of Queensland, also known as UQ, is a public university located in state of Queensland, Australia. Founded in 1909, it is the oldest and largest university in Queensland and the fifth oldest in the nation...
in Brisbane, she wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper, a novel about a Ukrainian family who become both bystanders and perpetrators during the Holocaust. In 1993, the novel won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award
The Australian/Vogel Literary Award
The Australian/Vogel Literary Award is an Australian literary award for unpublished manuscripts by writers under the age of 35. The prize money, currently A$20,000, is the richest and most prestigious award for an unpublished manuscript in Australia...
for an unpublished manuscript. It was first published in 1994 under the pseudonym Helen Demidenko and won the Miles Franklin Award
Miles Franklin Award
The Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize for the best Australian ‘published novel or play portraying Australian life in any of its phases’. The award was set up according to the will of Miles Franklin , who is best known for writing the Australian classic My Brilliant Career ...
the following year before becoming the subject of a major Australian literary controversy about the author's false claims of Ukrainian ethnicity. The misrepresentation has been described as a "literary hoax" in the Sydney Morning Herald and the novel was subsequently reissued under her then real name, Helen Darville.
Contents
Darville's debut novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper, tells the story of a Ukrainian family trying to survive a decade of Stalinist purges and state-imposed poverty and famine while being abused by the drunken local commissar and refused treatment by the village doctor and his sneering wife (a secular Jew). As in real life, the German invaders were hailed as liberators by the Ukrainians. Many volunteered for the German armed forces—Wehrmacht, SS, and Ordnungspolitzei—and the novel stresses the arbitrariness of their allocation to military formations. A Ukrainian could just as easily end up fighting on the front alongside the Wehrmacht as in a death squad.In the novel, the 16-year-old Evheny and 19-year-old Vitaly are separated, the younger to Nazi
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
Einsatzgruppen
Einsatzgruppen
Einsatzgruppen were SS paramilitary death squads that were responsible for mass killings, typically by shooting, of Jews in particular, but also significant numbers of other population groups and political categories...
C (a mobile killing squad) and the elder to the SS training facility for Ukrainians at Trawniki in Poland. Evheny is implicated in the massacre at Babi Yar
Babi Yar
Babi Yar is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kiev and a site of a series of massacres carried out by the Nazis during their campaign against the Soviet Union. The most notorious and the best documented of these massacres took place on September 29–30, 1941, wherein 33,771 Jews were killed in a...
outside Kiev while Vitaly is posted to Treblinka death 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 as part of German antipartisan activity in the wake of that country's withdrawal from the Axis alliance.
Style
The novel is primarily told from the point of view of Kateryna, sister of the two brothers, and Magda, Vitaly's common-law wife from the Polish village near the Treblinka death camp. Kateryna has a relationship with a German SS Hauptsturmfuhrer. Magda assists a Jewish prisoner to escape after the Treblinka prisoner revolt in August 1943. The family's story is gradually revealed by the investigation of Fiona, Evheny's Australian-born daughter, after her uncle Vitaly is charged with war crimes in the early 1990s.The novel's frankness about the antisemitism of its major characters (who blamed Jews for the excesses of Communism), and Darville's sympathetic focus on the lives of Ukrainian perpetrators of war crimes rather than the story of their victims as is more usual in Holocaust literature, led to accusations of antisemitism and condemnation by leaders of Australia's Jewish community. This impression was reinforced by the perception that the personal attitudes of "Helen Demidenko" might be informed by her own Ukrainian identity, until this was revealed to be a pseudonym
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
.
Imposture
The deception was revealed by the Australian media when her novel won the Miles Franklin AwardMiles Franklin Award
The Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize for the best Australian ‘published novel or play portraying Australian life in any of its phases’. The award was set up according to the will of Miles Franklin , who is best known for writing the Australian classic My Brilliant Career ...
, one of the most prestigious literary awards in Australia. This created a furor and much debate on the nature of identity and ethnicity in Australian literature.
Despite adverse publicity, the novel still went on to win the 1995 Australian Literary Society Gold Medal.
The novel was initially submitted to Queensland University Press in 1993 and was said to be based upon recorded interviews with her own relatives, among others her uncle "Vitaly Demidenko." The Sydney Morning Herald mistakenly reported in 2005 that it was submitted as nonfiction, a claim justified by quoting the author's note that she submitted with the manuscript, which read: "The things narrated in this book really happened, the things they did [are] historical actualities." After indicating that the work was based on history, the note went on to position the author's presentation of her work as fiction, saying: "But this is also a work of fiction. I have presented it as fiction...."
Books that discuss the scandal
The controversy that surrounded The Hand that Signed the Paper led to publication of at least two books offering assessments of the novel: Robert ManneRobert Manne
Robert Manne is a professor of politics at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.Born in Melbourne, Manne's earliest political consciousness was formed by the fact that his parents were Jewish refugees from Europe and his grandparents were victims of the Holocaust...
's The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust and Andrew Riemer's The Demidenko Debate, both published in 1996. Manne is very critical of Darville's book. Riemer is not.
Later work and allegations of plagiarism
In 1995, the Australian culture journal Meanjin published a short story, Pieces of the Puzzle, also by Demidenko although the journal also mentioned that Demidenko had "taken back" her previous name as Darville. She now admitted that she had met Ukrainian witnesses and based the story on them, resulting in correspondence from the Simon Wiesenthal CenterSimon Wiesenthal Center
The Simon Wiesenthal Center , with headquarters in Los Angeles, California, was established in 1977 and named for Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter. According to its mission statement, it is "an international Jewish human rights organization dedicated to repairing the world one step at a time...
demanding that she identify these possible war criminals .
Darville was briefly a columnist with the Brisbane daily newspaper, The Courier-Mail
The Courier-Mail
The Courier-Mail is a daily newspaper published in Brisbane, Australia. Owned by News Limited, it is published daily from Monday to Saturday in tabloid format. Its editorial offices are located at Bowen Hills, in Brisbane's inner northern suburbs, and it is printed at Murarrie, in Brisbane's...
, before being dismissed over accusations of plagiarism for repeating jokes originally from the Evil Overlord List
Evil Overlord List
The Evil Overlord List, also known as If I Were An Evil Overlord, is one of several popular lists of planned actions for a competent Evil Overlord to avoid the well-known, cliché blunders committed by supervillains in popular fictional works, typically explained in a comical fashion...
in one of her columns and passing them off as her own. She continued to write freelance features for other News Corporation
News Corporation
News Corporation or News Corp. is an American multinational media conglomerate. It is the world's second-largest media conglomerate as of 2011 in terms of revenue, and the world's third largest in entertainment as of 2009, although the BBC remains the world's largest broadcaster...
newspapers and magazines, and occasionally the Fairfax
Fairfax Media
Fairfax Media Limited is one of Australia's largest diversified media companies. The group's operations include newspapers, magazines, radios and digital media operating in Australia and New Zealand. Fairfax Media was founded by the Fairfax family as John Fairfax and Sons, later to become John...
press.
In 2000, she was again accused of anti-semitism after choosing to interview historian and Holocaust denier
Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...
David Irving
David Irving
David John Cawdell Irving is an English writer,best known for his denial of the Holocaust, who specialises in the military and political history of World War II, with a focus on Nazi Germany...
, for Australian Style magazine during his failed libel
Slander and libel
Defamation—also called calumny, vilification, traducement, slander , and libel —is the communication of a statement that makes a claim, expressly stated or implied to be factual, that may give an individual, business, product, group, government, or nation a negative image...
trial in London. She wrote a post-11 September article in The Sydney Morning Herald
The Sydney Morning Herald
The Sydney Morning Herald is a daily broadsheet newspaper published by Fairfax Media in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1831 as the Sydney Herald, the SMH is the oldest continuously published newspaper in Australia. The newspaper is published six days a week. The newspaper's Sunday counterpart, The...
. Darville is reported to have worked variously as a graphic designer, property law lecturer and PE teacher.
After working as a secondary teacher for several years in Australia and the UK, she returned to the University of Queensland in 2002 to study law. Graduating with a first class honours degree in law in 2005, she commenced work as a judge's associate ("judge's clerk" in the U.S.) for Peter Dutney, a justice of the Supreme Court of Queensland
Supreme Court of Queensland
The Supreme Court of Queensland, which is based at the Law Courts Complex, is the superior court for the Australian State of Queensland and sits around the middle of the Australian court hierarchy...
.
Previously a regular contributor to the libertarian
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
group blog Catallaxy files under the name 'skepticlawyer,' Darville now has her own blog in this name http://skepticlawyer.com.au/. In recent times, she has also appeared on the SBS
Special Broadcasting Service
The Special Broadcasting Service is a hybrid-funded Australian public broadcasting radio and television network. The stated purpose of SBS is "to provide multilingual and multicultural radio and television services that inform, educate and entertain all Australians and, in doing so, reflect...
program Insight (in a special on liars) and as a guest of Melbourne University
University of Melbourne
The University of Melbourne is a public university located in Melbourne, Victoria. Founded in 1853, it is the second oldest university in Australia and the oldest in Victoria...
's Publishing and Communications Program. She has a strong involvement with the Australian Skeptics
Australian Skeptics
The Australian Skeptics is a non-profit organisation based in Australia which investigates paranormal and pseudoscientific claims using scientific methodologies.-History:...
, and has written for both their in-house magazine and Quadrant Magazine
Quadrant (magazine)
Quadrant is an Australian literary and cultural journal. The magazine takes a conservative position on political and social issues, describing itself as sceptical of 'unthinking Leftism, or political correctness, and its "smelly little orthodoxies"'. Quadrant reviews literature, as well as...
, a conservative journal. Recently Darville was included as an entry in Ben Peek
Ben Peek
Ben Peek is an Australian author. His middle name is Michael.Peek's short stories have been published in a variety of genre magazines, including Fantasy Magazine and Aurealis. His fiction has been reprinted in various Year's Best volumes...
's Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth
Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth
Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth is a piece of contemporary literature and an autobiography by Australian author Ben Peek published in 2006 by Wheatland Press. The novel is written in a semi-linear excerpt format, using 10 "blog posts" per chapter to tell the story of the novel's narrator and main...
, a novel exploring the nature of truth in literature, and is reported to be working on a second novel, more than a decade after the publication of the first.
Oxford
Darville has completed the Bachelor of Civil LawBachelor of Civil Law
Bachelor of Civil Law is the name of various degrees in law conferred by English-language universities. Historically, it originated as a postgraduate degree in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, but many universities now offer the BCL as an undergraduate degree...
programme at the University of Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
, where she is a member of Brasenose College. She is now reading for an MPhil in Law (Jurisprudence).