One family’s death-defying act to escape the Nazis and start a new life in Australia
When Sue Smethurst first sat down with her grandmother-in-law, Mindla, and asked how she survived the Holocaust, she was shooed away. By that time Mindla was in a Melbourne Jewish nursing home with other survivors, her body ageing but mind still razor sharp.
‘Why do you want to know?’ she’d ask. ‘My story is nothing special.’
As death began approaching, Sue became a little more pushy. She knew Mindla’s life had to be recorded and they were running out of time. Each week she’d bring cake from her favourite shop in St Kilda, a bottle of the brightest nail polish she could find, a handful of old pictures and her tape recorder. They’d chat and paint Mindla’s nails, and with each ‘chat’ her story unfolded. It was beyond anything Sue could have imagined.
The tale of how Mindla and her husband Michael Horowitz, a circus performer for the famous Staniewski Brothers, escaped from Poland with their young son and embarked on a terrifying journey through the USSR and Middle East to Africa and ultimately to safety in Australia, is nothing short of extraordinary.
Written by award-winning author and journalist Sue Smethurst, whose husband is Mindla and Michael’s grandson, The Freedom Circus is an epic story of courage, hope, humanity, survival and love, perfect for readers of The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
I’d like to start by saying that I’m something of a history buff, and a huge reader of both WWII historical fiction and non-fiction. In the last few months alone, I’ve read a stack of books that fall into this sub-genre, yet, I’ll admit, even I was starting to grow tired of reading about this terrible period in our history. That is, until I picked up The Freedom Circus – the remarkable true story of one family’s daring escape from Poland during the Second World War. And it is remarkable. As I was reading the novel, I had to keep reminding myself that this was a memoir – Mindla and Horowitz’s story is so extraordinary that you might be forgiven for thinking it’s a work of fiction.
The story primarily follows Mindla and Horrowitz as they escape from war-torn Poland and eventually make a new life in Australia. Drawing on her extensive research into this period, and Mindla’s own account of the events, Smethurst smoothly weaves their personal journey with wider political events so that the reader is never lost and always has a greater sense of how Mindla and Horrowitz’s story fits into the larger historical context.
Meticulously researched, powerful and incredibly moving, The Freedom Circus is an important story that needed to be told, and I’m so glad that Smethurst managed to convince Mindla it was worth sharing.
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