Helen Dale

Magda assists a Jewish prisoner to escape after the Treblinka prisoner revolt in August 1943.

Helen Dale (born Helen Darville; 1972) is an Australian writer and lawyer.

She is best known for writing The Hand that Signed the Paper, a novel about a Ukrainian family who collaborated with the Nazis in The Holocaust, under the pseudonym Helen Demidenko.

A daughter of British immigrants, Darville was educated at Redeemer Lutheran College in Rochedale, a suburb of Brisbane.

While studying English literature at the University of Queensland, she wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper.

The family's story is gradually revealed by Fiona, Evheny's Australian-born daughter, who starts investigating the past after her uncle Vitaly is charged in the early 1990s with war crimes in World War II.

The book is frank about the antisemitism of its major characters (who blame Jews for the excesses of Communism), and Darville represented the lives of Ukrainian military men in a sympathetic manner, rather than featuring their victims as is more usual in Holocaust literature.

These elements attracted accusations of antisemitism and condemnation of the book by leaders of Australia's Jewish community.

There was a perception that the attitudes of the author "Helen Demidenko" may have been informed by her Ukrainian ethnic identity, until her pseudonym was revealed along with her false representation of the book as history.

The Hand that Signed the Paper won the Miles Franklin Award, one of the most prestigious literary awards in Australia.

At the time, the media discovered Helen Dale's identity and legal name.

This promoted much debate on the nature of identity, ethnicity, and authenticity in Australian literature.

In 1993, the novel won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript.

In 1993, the novel won The Australian Vogel Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript.

The novel tells the story of a Ukrainian family trying to survive a decade of Stalinist purges and state-imposed poverty and famine.

The family comprises the parents, a daughter, and two sons.

They suffer abuse by the drunken local commissar and are refused treatment by the village doctor and his wife (a secular Jew).

Many Ukrainians hail the German invaders as liberators from Soviet oppression.

Many volunteered for the German armed forces—Wehrmacht, SS, and Ordnungspolizei.

The novel stresses the arbitrariness of the assignments to military units.

A Ukrainian could as easily end up fighting on the front alongside the Wehrmacht as be in a death squad.

The two young brothers are separated in military assignments: 16-year-old Evheny to Nazi Einsatzgruppen C (a mobile killing squad) and the elder 19-year-old Vitaly 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 extermination 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.

He is part of German anti-partisan activity in the wake of Italy's withdrawal from the Axis alliance.

The novel is told primarily 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 extermination camp.

Kateryna has a relationship with a German SS Hauptsturmführer.

When Dale submitted her novel to the University of Queensland Press in 1993, she said it was based upon recorded interviews with her own relatives, among others her uncle "Vitaly Demidenko".

Dale published her book in 1994 and won the Miles Franklin Award, becoming the award's youngest winner.

The following year, she was the subject of a major Australian literary controversy because she had falsely claimed Ukrainian ancestry as part of the basis of the book (and her pseudonym).

The misrepresentation has been described as a "literary hoax" in The Sydney Morning Herald. The novel was subsequently reissued under her legal name, then Helen Darville.

It won the 1995 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.

Despite the adverse publicity for the author, the novel won the 1995 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.

After teaching, Dale returned to university, gaining her law degree in 2002.

After the awards, the Sydney Morning Herald mistakenly reported in 2005 that the novel had been submitted as a non-fiction book.

She later did post-graduate law study at Oxford and completed an LLB degree in 2012 at the University of Edinburgh.

She returned to Australia and became a senior adviser to David Leyonhjelm, a Liberal Democrat member of the Australian Senate, but at the end of May 2016 Leyonhjelm revealed that Dale had left his employ.

A daughter of British immigrants, Darville was educated at Redeemer Lutheran College in Rochedale, a suburb of Brisbane.

She had previously claimed that her father was Ukrainian, and her mother was Irish.

While studying English literature at the University of Queensland, she wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper, a novel about a Ukrainian family who collaborated with the Nazis in The Holocaust.