It was only after I finished The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse that I realised something most other readers would already have known. That the characters were real.
The publishers had emailed me an advance copy of Heather Morris’s new novel as a PDF, without the benefit of either the front or back cover. So I never saw the all-important line: “Inspired by real events and people.”
I thought I had been reading fiction. Knowing that these people had actually lived through what I’d just read made it all the more powerful. That was the first surprise.
The second came in the author’s notes at the end of the book, about how Morris found the story. Or, more accurately, how the story found her, following the extraordinary success of her debut novel, The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
It was while that book was being adapted for television that Morris was introduced to composer Kara Talve, who jointly scored the music for the miniseries.
Talve said she’d composed the score on her grandmother’s piano. She then told Morris the remarkable story behind the instrument, and shared her grandmother’s Shoah testimony.
That became the foundation of The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse.
Talve’s grandmother, aged nine (and known as Josie in the novel), was living in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1942 when the SS stormed the family apartment with a list of Jews to be deported.
Her name, somehow, was missing. Her mother had already told her what to do if the family was arrested. Run to the home of Andrée Levallois, her non-Jewish piano teacher. And so she ran.
Andrée and her parents, all members of the French Resistance, risked their lives by taking her in. They hid her in plain sight, re-enrolling her at the school she already attended, using their surname to fool the authorities and with the complicity of the headmistress. And all that time she practised, day in, day out, on that piano.
“For a mother to send her daughter to her piano teacher, because she knew she would save her, that was an enormous act of maternal love, courage and trust,” said Morris.
“I’m honoured to be telling this story, and hope that it will resonate with readers in the way that it has with me.”
The novel goes on to chart the daily struggle to survive and resist, under constant threat from the SS and from the French collaborators, who were capable of even greater brutality.
Josie was among an estimated 10,000-plus Jewish children who were saved from deportation in France, many hidden by families, religious institutions and clandestine rescue networks.
Talve, Andrée’s granddaughter, subsequently inherited the 1901 Rud. Ibach Sohn piano. She had it shipped to the United States and still uses it in her work, even though it is now too old and fragile to be tuned.
Morris is drawn to tales of survival and resilience, of ordinary people confronted by extraordinary circumstances, of hope emerging from seemingly impossible situations. Again and again, they have had a Jewish and Holocaust connection.
It all started in December 2003. Morris was working as a social worker at a hospital in Melbourne, Australia, while studying screenwriting in her spare time. A friend told her about an elderly man whose wife had recently died.
The man’s son wanted somebody to tell his father’s wartime story, with one stipulation. The writer could not be Jewish. And so Morris met Lale Sokolov, then aged 87, a Slovakian Jewish Holocaust survivor. He told her how he had been forced to tattoo identification numbers onto prisoners at Auschwitz. He told her about his trauma, his experiences in the camp and his survivor guilt. That story eventually became The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
Lale also told her about Cilka Klein, a Jewish teenager who was sexually abused by a camp commandant at Auschwitz. Her story became Morris’s follow-up novel, Cilka’s Journey.
Fate intervened again when Livia Meller, a Holocaust survivor living in Israel, read The Tattooist of Auschwitz. She recognised Sokolov and contacted Morris through her son to tell her own story.
She and her sisters, Cibi and Magda, had promised their father that they would always look after each other. They did. They survived.
Their story became Three Sisters, Morris’s third Holocaust novel.
“I’m so honoured to have been able to write these Holocaust stories,” said Morris, speaking from her home in Brisbane.
“And for me, not being Jewish, I was able to tell these stories in a way that I wanted to read them as a non-Jewish person, and to grasp them, and fully immerse myself in them.
“Not the day-to-day Jewishness and Judaism, but the Holocaust from a non-Jewish perspective, with no baggage, no family back story. And so that is why I was able to tell those stories so simply.”
The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse is the result of painstaking research.
Morris spent six months immersed in archives, working with a research historian, and she met Andrée’s granddaughter in Paris.
There were testimonies and statements made by Andrée and her mother at the end of the war, documents, accounts of Resistance missions and records of acts of sabotage.
But Morris makes an important distinction between historical accuracy and historical fiction.
“For me, the main thing when I’m writing stories that are set in history is that I’m writing this as fiction,” she says.
“I’m telling a story and so for me there’s a degree of licence to be able to create conversations about what I think would have happened.
“And that’s fine. I can do that. That’s easy-peasy. For some reason, I can picture myself as an 11-year-old Jewish girl running through the streets of Paris.
“But the one thing I’m a stickler for, and that’s where my researcher comes in handy, is that I never, ever interfere with the timelines.”
The narrative is accurate down to the smallest details – the Nazi decree, for example, that the meagre rations of bread had to go stale before they could be sold.
And it is honed not only by the author’s previous experience – including her Holocaust trilogy – but by the life experience and emotional intelligence acquired during her two decades as a social worker, before her literary career took off, aged 64.
She writes about fear and trauma, but also about choices made in moments when there may be no safe choice at all, which makes her stories particularly resonant today. The world has changed in so many ways since the Second World War, and especially since October 7.
If the Nazi occupation she describes in The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse were happening today, would a potential righteous gentile say to themselves: "I'm not going to risk my life for a Jew".
“I would like to think that’s not the case,” Morris says. “I have to believe that would never, ever be the case.
“And this is where it’s probably easier for me to say, because I don’t come from a faith of any sort.
“I grew up in a small town in New Zealand, in a village where 80 per cent of my friends were Maori people. We grew up never seeing colour. It was just not a thing until I was an adult.”
There is a striking consistency to Morris’s work as she returns to people who, faced with circumstances they did not choose, find the courage to do something extraordinary.
For her next novel, she says she may head in a different direction. One possibility, she says, is the extraordinary true story from the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, when the Soviet invasion of Hungary turned the Games into a Cold War battleground of spies, abductions and political intrigue.
The JC is hosting an exclusive evening with Heather Morris, in conversation with Rob Rinder, to mark the launch of her new novel on October 21.They will talk about her inspiration, her research, and her life as a best-selling author. The discussion will be followed by audience Q&A and book signing. Book your tickets here
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