Karen Holdom: a tale of many truths

Karen Holdom first encountered the name Edmund Baton on a hilltop in Normandy.

It was around a decade ago, in the German War Cemetery at Mont-de-Huisnes, when she wandered around the circular ossuary, reading the names of the soldiers and noticing it wasn't just men buried there, but women, teenaged boys and even younger children.

A pamphlet of soldiers’ stories went some way to solving the mystery. It included a few lines about Edmund, a 14-year-old who had died at La Chauvinerie civilian internment camp in France. He was one of thousands of German civilians cleared from Alsace-Lorraine by Western Allied troops as they passed into Germany in 1945.

"Edmund had already journeyed 500km across his war-torn homeland in a bid to get home. He was about the same age as the eldest of my three sons at the time and I knew enough about the final stages of World War Two to know that it was just Armageddon where he had ended up. The thought of a kid my son's age, in that landscape, was hard to comprehend.”

The atrocious conditions and death rate at La Chauvinerie later triggered a national scandal. Edmund, and what his life might have been, stayed with Karen until she began writing her first novel, in which he is renamed Max Bernot.

“I had enough information to imagine this story and didn’t plan to investigate or research it further,” Karen says. “However, that’s what I ended up doing. My journalistic instincts forced me to check things out, do a little bit of digging.”

She sent a tentative email to a regional historical society, expecting nothing. Instead, within days, she was surprised to receive a reply from Joseph Baton, Edmund’s French cousin and childhood friend, then aged 85. 

Joseph and his cousin Elisabeth (Lilli) Paulus, who was Edmund’s German sister, invited her to meet with them in France. A few weeks later, Karen was sitting in Joseph’s home in Saint-Avold, Moselle, listening to memories and poring over fragile letters, documents, postcards and photos.

“They opened their doors and their hearts to a stranger from the other end of the planet. Joseph later joked, ‘Je vous ai Googlé. Pas grande chose.’ I Googled you. Did not find much.”

That hospitality shaped The End and the Beginning, partly written while Karen completed the Master of Creative Writing at the University of Auckland in 2019.

Moving from journalism to fiction was not seamless.

“World-building was tricky. In journalism, you take your raw materials from the world and other people’s words. In a novel, you have to invent so much.”

To conjure the landscape, she retraced Edmund’s journey through France and Germany, visited the family repeatedly, and listened as long-silent memories surfaced, sometimes messy and often contradictory. 

A friend at the University of British Columbia offered her an early anchor: the idea of multiple truths, including forensic truth, social truth and personal truth, all of which shift with time.

“I trusted what people were saying because they were telling me their truth, which may change over time,” she says. “Those truths can contradict each other.”

The camp at La Chauvinerie was not a death camp, but it was marked by corruption, starvation and neglect. She says it was essential to keep the scale in view and to be precise about what this place was and was not.

“The overall death rate at La Chauvinerie was seven times higher than that of other internment camps in France. It was a drop in the ocean compared to the lives that were lost to the Nazi death camps. But it was a terrible scandal because the Republic of France provided enough money to feed these people and keep them alive. The camp authorities failed to do that. The director himself sold the babies’ milk on the black market. Not one baby born in the camp survived. It was corrupt, callous and uncaring.”

The letters Edmund wrote from La Chauvinerie were the most important documents Karen encountered. They start full of hope, but Edmund ends up writing of starvation, diarrhoea and disease. Days later he was dead of “dysentery and weakness of the heart” according to the camp records.

Her most significant archival discovery came in the French National Archives. There she unearthed a carbon copy of the Inspector General’s post-war investigation into the camp.

“It was gold,” she says. The language, rich and precise, described an arid site that turned to mud in the first rain and barracks where people cooked in suffocating heat. “It showed in devastating detail the suffering of those prisoners.”

The documented world, from troop movements to dates and geography, are factual in the novel but around that structure Karen allowed herself to imagine.

“The thing about history, is that small, ordinary people's stories often get forgotten. We usually hear about heroes and the loud voices, not the person who was just living their life.”

Her meticulous research eventually informed a small exhibition at the German war cemetery in Normandy.

“The opening, on the 80th anniversary of the first D-Day landings, was a really poignant day – not just remembering Edmund and all those who died in WWII, but the concern of everyone I spoke to that with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Europe faced its biggest threat since Germany invaded Poland.”

Karen had kept Edmund’s family updated on research discoveries throughout the process and went straight to them to share photos of the exhibition.
“Even though I was imagining Edmund’s story, to have the forensic truths be told in this exhibition just feels right.”

Karen came to fiction after three decades in journalism and a family interlude raising her sons with Steve Cassidy, an engineering alumnus. By the end of the year on the MCW course, she had the spine of a manuscript. Five years of intertwined research and writing followed.

She says Edmund’s family are happy with the book.

“Along the way, I kept stressing it was going to be a work of fiction. You can't come into these people's lives and ask all these questions and then go off and write a novel without them being really clear that you're going to be inventing things and changing things.

“But they never had a problem with it. They understood it completely.” 

The End and the Beginning, by KJ Holdom, is published by Simon & Schuster.