Article and Interview by Elise Cooper
The Star on the Grave by Linda Margolin Royal is a wonderful novel that explains the reasons why Holocaust survivors refused to talk about those horrific days and why some chose to no longer embrace their Jewish heritage, hoping future generations would never know the hatred and antisemitism that they had experienced.
The story begins with Rachel Margol, a twenty-year-old nurse in 1968 Sydney who only learns she is Jewish after she becomes engaged to be married to a Greek Orthodox doctor. Her grandmother, Felka, decides to tell Rachel the truth about her heritage. Rachel feels like her whole world has fallen apart and cannot understand why she was not told sooner of her Jewish background. Why was she sent to a Catholic school? Why has she never set foot in a synagogue? After finding out her grandmother is going to attend a reunion in Japan to see Chiune Sugihara, the man who saved her dad and grandmothers’ lives from certain death at the hands of the Nazis, Rachel decides to go with her.
From 1938-1940, Chiune Sugihara was the Vice-Consul for the Japanese Empire in Kaunas, Lithuania, and he defied his own government’s orders and secretly issued thousands of transit visas to Jewish refugees desperate to flee. Sugihara is often referred to as the Japanese Schindler. It is estimated that he saved 6,000 people including the author’s father and grandparents. Because Sugihara defied the Japanese government and issued the visas anyway, he was dismissed and disappeared into obscurity. At the reunion in Japan, Rachel meets other families who have been saved by Sugihara and learns more about her heritage. Readers take a journey with Rachel as she discovers new strengths within herself. She begins to understand the sufferings her family and others experienced during World War II and why they kept so many secrets.
This story is very powerful, and the characters are very complex. Readers start to understand the trauma that Jews went through during the Holocaust and can relate the antisemitism that still goes on today. A bonus is learning about Jewish traditions, ceremonies, and rituals.
Elise Cooper: Idea for the story?
Linda Margolin Royal: My brother suggested we interview our dad on his 80th birthday. We knew they left Poland, went to Japan, and then came here to Australia. At first, when I heard about Sugihara saving our family from being murdered, I thought I would write it as a screenplay, but someone suggested I write it as a book as well. I gave it a try. I got it published in Australia. And now I have just secured a US publishing deal, and it is now available on Amazon. (https://www.amazon.com/Star-Grave-Linda-Margolin-Royal/dp/B0GRKKLTL2)
EC: Did you ever get the story from your dad?
LMR: He mentioned how he escaped and was helped by this man, Chinua Sugihara. I looked him up and found out he had saved 6,000 Jews in the Holocaust. I found out he was the reason I am alive. I was able to get in touch with his son to tell me what happened. This book is the true story of my family’s escape although I did take some artistic license. I created a character, Rachel, based on me but not fully me.
EC: What happened to Sugihara?
LMR: He was found in Moscow in 1968 by a survivor who was living in Israel. He had issued him a visa that helped him survive the Holocaust. Sugihara was told he saved all these people. He was issuing visas but had no idea if anyone would survive. On his return to Japan, he was dismissed by the diplomatic corps, likely due to the fact Japan in WWII was an ally of Germany and he issued visas to 6,000 Jews illegally. He had asked three times for permission to do it and each time his government said no but he defied orders.
EC: How would you describe him?
LMR: He challenged authority. He had a strong moral compass and did what was right. His father wanted him to be a doctor, but he left the entrance exam blank and walked out because he did not want to go into medicine. He enrolled and got a degree in International Studies. He was put in charge of the Manchurian Railway Project but resigned because of the brutality he witnessed inflicted on the Chinese workers by the Japanese.
EC: How would you describe Rachel’s grandmother, Felka?
LMR: She was based on my grandmother. Very intelligent, upbeat, positive, bold, brass, and funny. She had a huge presence and adored me and my siblings. She suffered privately, but lived and breathed for us. Both her parents perished in the Holocaust.
EC: How would you describe Rachel’s dad, Michael?
LMR: Michael was not based on my father, who was very loving. Michael conceals his own feelings from his family, non-compassionate, callous, uncaring, and avoids talking about the war. He denies his Jewish faith and makes his family do so as well. He did this because of his trauma.
EC: Were there any similarities between your dad and the book dad?
LMR: He had a loving family and a rich life. He was forced to flee Poland as an 11-year-old.
EC: How would you describe Rachel?
LMR: A deep thinker, courageous, direct, and lacks order in her life. Motherless, she lost hers when she was nine years old. Just as I did with mine, Rachel also has a strong bond with her grandmother, who is the matriarch of the family. Felka was the rock of my and Rachel’s world. She was our go-to.
EC: The Japanese seemed to be very complex about the Holocaust?
LMR: There were those who did not want to give visas to the European Jews. Yet the Jews who did come to Japan did not face antisemitism. They gave them free food, found ingredients to make Matzo. There was a synagogue there. My father and other survivors said they had a lovely experience in Japan. The Japanese people were welcoming. About twenty years ago Sugihara became a hero there.
EC: Did Rachel change once she found out she was Jewish?
LMR: She was brought up atheist. Then she finds out she has this rich heritage with a sense of belonging. This book is a mission for me to teach about the importance of faith.
EC: What do you want readers to get out of the story?
LMR: Intense generational trauma is at epidemic proportions. Hitler’s work had far-reaching consequences. It did not stop with the ones murdered but impacted second generation lives. For example, my husband’s father went through Auschwitz, survived, had terrible depression, and took his own life when my husband was sixteen. This severely impacted my husband and his parenting.
Another point I wanted to make was that some people I met were brought up not Jewish only to realize in their late teens that their parents concealed they were Jewish for fear of persecution.
EC: Do you think the story has connections with what is going on today?
LMR: The book went to print the week of October 7, 2023 when 1,200 Israelis were brutally murdered by Hamas. None of us could have imagined the antisemitism that followed all over the world, particularly in Australia. Here we have the largest population of Holocaust survivors other than Israel. No one ever thought anything could happen out here like the killing of Jews and then the Bondi Beach massacre happened during Hanukkah 2025.
I have this quote in the book, “Fear of being singled out as a Jew, of being hated and persecuted…people judge us. People hate us without reason.” This is happening today. I think about what is happening when I wrote this, pre-October 7. What it means for me to be Jewish is the constant fear of persecution and being wiped off this planet but with the desire for my people to stay on it. We have been threatened with extermination and elimination from this world for thousands of years and have prevailed. In some gentiles there is this festering seed of antisemitism and given the right circumstances it rises to the top and bubbles over in all its horrific glory. So, when October 7 and the aftermath happened there were those who accused Israel of committing genocide and ignored what really took place. Then the Bondi Beach massacre happened even though Jews have been warning the government and the police for two years. There were attacks on synagogues and then what follows is attacks on Jews. We asked for 10 to 15 police at this event and were given three fairly untrained to deal with such brutality.
EC: Why the quote about the tattoos done by the Germans on the Jewish people?
LMR: You are referring to the quote, “They stripped away the identity. The numbers are for identification.” When people refer to numbers like 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, or 1,200 people died on October 7, or 3,000 people died on 9/11, that strips away people’s identity. Numbers—whether the tattooed numbers or the statistics—strip away people’s faces and dehumanize them. This is why the posters of individual people on October 7 were so important. Statistics need to be personalized. Six million cannot even be comprehended. When I do talks, I personalize by saying how my father and Anne Frank were born weeks apart in 1929. My father died of natural causes at the age of 87 in Sydney, Australia, because one person with a moral conscious saved his life, while Anne was stripped of her life at the age of fifteen in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
EC: Next book?
LMR: It is a prequel. The backstory 1939-41. It touches on Rachel’s grandmother, Felka, as a young woman arriving in Australia in 1941 and settling in Bondi Beach, a meeting place for the Jewish people. Most, like her, are refugees who found the beach provided comfort, safety, and a place to gather and belong with their own. The whole last act of my prequel is the family, having escaped the Holocaust in 1940, settling there with Felka, spreading her arms in the ocean saying, “This feels like freedom.” The settings go from Warsaw, to Japan, to Australia, following the family’s flight. I am also considering writing a sequel book following Rachel’s journey in her future.
EC: THANK YOU!!
