It’s not as if Diana Wichtel doesn’t give the reader notice that things aren’t going to end well. In the opening lines of this remarkable memoir, the Listener journalist is reading the autopsy report from November 1970 of her father Ben, dead at 60 in a Canadian psychiatric hospital. He had pneumonia. He had bruises on his face. He had been psychotic for years. The note about the funeral states: “Family and friends: none.” He had stayed behind in Canada when his Kiwi wife had taken 13-year-old Diana and her two siblings back to New Zealand. They were told their father would be following soon, but he didn’t. Five years later, he was dead.
So, as the subtitle puts it, this book is “A long search for a lost father”, an account of Wichtel’s attempts to learn the truth about her father’s demise, including a guilt-stricken examination of her own culpability. But then there’s the actual title, with the name of the Nazi extermination camp in Poland where 900,000 people, almost all Jews, were murdered.
Read more: Book review: Driving to Treblinka by Diana Wichtel | Stuff.co.nz
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