Pat White
Lily, Oh Lily: Searching for a Nazi ghost by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman (Canterbury University Press, 2024), 200pp, $37
Lily, Oh Lily: Searching for a Nazi ghost by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman is a volume hovering between autobiography and family memoir, spiced with a genealogy search for the unknown hinted at in family stories. On the face of it, there is sufficient intrigue here to satisfy the reader who wants a bit more from the page than another series of anecdotes justifying an author’s position in life, a step past tales of overcoming the odds. The contents provide reinforcement of the idea that we’re surrounded by interesting stories regardless of who we are or where we come from. For Holman, his Blackball beginnings have provided results way beyond the vision of a small West Coast mining village, where the sound of rain on the corrugated iron roof could seem fated to drown out dreams of children and grownups alike. Lily, Oh Lily hinges on a sentence repeated to Holman by his maternal grandmother as he grew up:
‘Hitler,’ Lily told her grieving sister, ‘is a great man, Eunice. He is doing wonderful things for the German people.’
Holman can ‘still sense the bitterness and the anger in her [Eunice’s] retelling of this statement’, which he guesses was made in the aftermath of a 1934 family funeral in England. Seeking the context behind it becomes a central focus of his writing. From family anecdotes, supplemented by available documents, a history unfolds—revealing espionage, falsehood, love entanglements, loss and intrigue—all set against the broader backdrop of armed conflict in twentieth-century Europe.
For any writer interested in personal histories, Holman has made use of writing material taking him outside his comfort zone more than once. Honing his skills while writing a PhD, he produced Best of Both Worlds: The story of Elsdon Best and Tutakangahau (Penguin, 2010), and as a consequence immersed himself, as a Pākehā, in aspects of Māoritanga. An incident during his father’s active naval service on HMS Illustrious during World War II, and a near miss from a kamikaze pilot, formed the basis of a search for the pilot’s Japanese family in The Lost Pilot (Penguin, 2013). This was another immersive journey, both to Japan and into the world of families whose sons were kamikaze pilots. I imagine that while unravelling the threads of these stories Holman also discovered hidden aspects of himself.
The writing of Lily, Oh Lily follows this established mode of working. He finds ways to fund travel to Europe, Germany in particular, and sets off from there. In the process, he meets relatives, makes new acquaintances in fellow researchers also interested in his quest, learns some basic German, and generally enlarges his connection to the planet.
He notes almost a third of the way into his story:
Writing memoir and history, we are prey to something novelists need not consider: the inadvisability of stepping away from known acts, into wishful thought. We may get things wrong, may speculate, but we should never invent or embellish. We may be in search of the dead, but it is the living discovered along the way who will prove just as interesting—often just as eccentric, and at times, just as uncooperative.
And he proceeds to take us with him as he probes dead ends, follows promising leads that turn into rabbit holes, and celebrates small victories in the search. We learn some of this through his journal, written at the time and later edited for publication. Along the way, he tests the veracity of his own writing advice. Throughout Lily, Oh Lily, Holman provides us with instances—a paragraph, sometimes just a sentence—in which he questions or states an aside, such as the one above, about history writing. I will return later in this review to the idea of history as an unfinished story.
Meanwhile, the fact that Holman’s grandmother had a sister who married and lived in Germany is interesting, but far from unique. My wife’s grandmother also had a sister who married a German, possibly someone she met when the two sisters formed and ran a dancing school in Germany before World War I. Both branches of those families remain in contact to the present day.
Because trade and language links between the two nations have existed for many hundreds of years, it is not unreasonable for there to be large numbers of families with both German and English components among the relatives. After all, Angle, Saxon and Jute populations of mercenary soldiers from what is now Germany settled in parts of England after the Roman withdrawal in the fourth century AD. Their assimilation over subsequent centuries contributed to the creation of the Anglo-Saxon speaking nation we now recognise as Britain. For many centuries, both nations have often pursued common interests intended to accommodate the welfare of their citizens.
However, when Holman travels to Germany to take an introductory language course run by the Goethe Institute, he suffers a considerable culture shock. Along the way, he confronts aspects of his personal history that had left him unprepared for what he was about to learn. If the consequences were not so deep-seated, there could be an element of comedy in how war comics and model aeroplanes had conditioned Holman’s childhood view of the German people. For an author to write so openly about such prejudices takes courage; for a man to confront his attitudes in maturity with an openness to change takes faith and trust. This openness is a strength Holman brings to his writing.
And trust is required when he takes his genealogical quest as far as he can, seeking out the world of great-aunt Lily and her brothers, who also spent time in Germany. A downright stubborn streak, unable to give up on his search, is also necessary. A birth or death certificate arrives and opens the door to further questions; a new turn in the journey appears as the author seeks more information. Always more information. For much of the time Holman is on the move, and this movement is recorded in his journals with immediacy and, at times, urgency. The reader goes along for the ride: from Blackball to Berlin, to Dresden and Hamburg, then to England where relatives meet up, and on to sites of concentration camps and the homes of people met along the way—always moving by bus, train and plane.
Where is Lily? Her birth family, the Bywater siblings and their parents, occupy most of the narrative space. The brothers, Ulysses and Hector, and Eunice, the grandmother, are larger than life in their own right. Lily’s husband Carl also occupies the stage with his presence. Lily exists in the narrative elusive as a night bird, calling though unable to be located. She eventually gets her turn, as the expatriate shadow living in Germany while Allied troops fight the country she has married into. That is how the author’s story unfolds.
Genealogy is sometimes no more than a cluster of birth, death and marriage certificates, providing evidence that someone was connected to someone else, and lived here, there or elsewhere. The fascination, then, lies in how a researcher moves beyond the recorded facts to turn these shadows into flesh and blood. In the case of Holman’s search for substance, he is helped by diaries, letters, postcards, surviving relatives, the half-remembered childhood conversations of the dead, and the fact that much of his search centres on times and places documented elsewhere.
What begins as a welter of names leading to confusion gradually levels out to become a narrative where the pieces fit together like a phantom jigsaw—though not all from the same puzzle. I keep reading because there is more to learn, and it is interesting. From what Holman writes, it must have been a little like that for him also—a bottomless well sometimes—over the decade it took to write this book.
The only quibble I have with what the book offers me is that Holman takes a genuine ‘Boys’ Own’ story, with elements of mystery, adventure and suspense, and imposes his own opinions on the telling, to the detriment of content from time to time. Referring back to his earlier comment about the writing of history and memoir, a case can be argued that both are acts of myth-making and storytelling, reinforcing a cultural viewpoint. So, the ‘truth’ sometimes changes depending upon the beliefs of the interpreter. No matter what, there are always shades of grey in the black-and-white judgements we find it easy to make. As the recent debate on the teaching of history in Aotearoa shows, facts can be construed as fictions, and history needs to be constantly under revision—and rightly so. However, is Lily, Oh Lily written because, deep down, the author wanted to know the answer to one question—was Lily, in fact, a Nazi? It could be argued the question underlies much of the book, especially in its later parts.
Holman was born into a century where Hitler was damned because of the Holocaust. But it was also a century marked by ethnic cleansing—of Armenians, in Rwanda, under Stalin and Pol Pot, and against dozens more racial groups. As a species, we’re awash with atrocity based on ethnicity throughout the history of the twentieth century. To try and judge Lily’s life for her part in that seems to me like trying to detect thought crimes in a mirror fogged with steam, or warped by time and absence.
Holman is of course free to demonstrate his own beliefs or biases in an authorial overview at times. In Lily, Oh Lily it can range from something as simple as an adjective used where it is not needed because it begs the question—‘on board a mighty airbus 380’—through to what can essentially be read as an essay connecting German imperial excesses with British colonial actions in New Zealand in the chapter ‘Victor Culture and Colonial Amnesia’. This is not a matter of right or wrong, but more to do with storytelling. As readers, we need to be free to make our own judgements of the narrative as it’s presented without authorial direction. Writers, experienced ones, have encouraged beginners from day one in their careers to ‘show, don’t tell’.
What can be found here could be described as a ‘crime of passion’. Holman, wholeheartedly embracing his experience of Germany, is on a voyage of discovery while telling the story of his Bywater forebears. How much does he engage in enthusiasm for his personal discoveries in Germany through the family story he is writing? Sometimes the balance is spot on, at others, he is in so deep he risks crowding the reader out. Still, his instinct is correct; Lily, Oh Lily is a big story, and worth the telling.
PAT WHITE is a poet, essayist, biographer and painter living in Rangiora. His most recent publication is the poetry collection Night Shifts (Cold Hub Press, 2023). He is working on a series of essays, ‘Some Things I Could Have Told You’, among other projects. He has been reviewing books for Landfall and other publications since 1974.
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