Holocaust revenge story is far from pure fiction

The comforting Jewish Australian concept of the sun-bronzed land as a sanctuary for Jews was shattered on the sands of Bondi Beach on December 14. Although it was written before the shooting, that horrific awakening somehow churns deep beneath Danny Ben-Moshe’s new post-Holocaust novel, The Watchmaker’s War.

After World War II, the far-flung continent, as geographically remote as possible from the horrors of Europe, became a place where Holocaust survivors could shelter .

But that remoteness also made it a favoured destination for Nazi war criminals; a bland backwater where they could hide in plain sight.

Ben-Moshe’s novel is the story of how, in that Australian sanctuary, the odysseys of victim and murderer collided, and of how hunter and hunted momentarily reversed their roles.

The historical fiction, launched this week, is the first novel by the Walkley Award-winning Melbourne documentary maker, based on his landmark documentary Revenge: Our Dad, the Nazi Killer.

The documentary, which aired in 2024, traced how Melbourne Jews Jack, Jon and Sam Green pieced together the truth about their father Boris and their uncle Fima.

It comes to the conclusion that Boris had murdered a Nazi living in Sydney in the 1950s.

Boris and Fima had been partisan fighters in the forests of Lithuania during the war. In Australia, they tracked down Nazi war criminals responsible for the deaths of their extended families. These Nazi fugitives were living quiet lives in Australian suburbia, the beneficiaries of a deliberately blinkered immigration system.