For an Australian journalist and author, the story for this latest book was right under her nose. Her husband’s grandmother, Mindla Horowitz, was a Polish-born survivor of the Holocaust, as had been her late husband, Kubush.
Mindla was reluctant to talk about her past, not because of bad memories, but because, in her Melbourne Jewish retirement home, most of the other people her age there had equally horrific stories of escaping the Nazis in World War II, and she did not think her story was anything special. But of all the many survival stories from that time, this one is unique.
Mindla’s husband, Kubush, had been a clown in a prestigious Polish circus, and the couple’s circuitous route to freedom, along with their young son, would take them via the Moscow Circus, the Middle East, and even Africa, to Australia.
Smethurst started interviewing Mindla in her nursing home, patching together her life story. Even after Mindla died in 2015, aged 96, there were still many gaps in the tale. For some years, Smethurst set about finding out as much as she could from family members and even Kubush’s TV colleagues on Melbourne’s The Tarax Show, in which he performed as Sloppo the Clown in the early 1960s.
She also researched the Polish background to the family story, aided by historians and genealogists, along the way discovering two more members of the family, each of whom had thought they were the only surviving siblings in Mindla’s family.
It is a moving tale, covering not only the German invasion of Poland from the west, but also life under the Russian invaders from the east. Mindla, sprightly in her 90s with brightly painted fingernails and deep red lipstick, stands as a defiant symbol of those Holocaust survivors whose stories will not be forgotten.

Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville