The Missing - Michael Rosen Q&A

January 12th 2020

The Missing by Michael Rosen is a personal and powerful account of how the Holocaust affected his family, and the relatives that perished in Auschwitz, from one of this country's best-loved children's authors.

Q: What inspired you to write this book, and to share this personal story about your family?

A: To start off with, it was the fact that there was a mystery in our home and in our family, and I wanted to solve it. There was also a historical reason: because our family didn’t know, it felt as if the Nazis (who had killed my relatives) had “got away with it”. I thought that, if I found out, it would be a bit like a trial.

Q: The Missing begins with the story of your childhood – how aware were you, as a boy, of your “missing” relatives?

A: I was always aware that there were people missing from my father’s family tree. He could describe them as uncles and aunts, he could say where they were before WW2 started – in France and Poland – but anything after that was a nothing. Just a blank. 

Q: How did you find out what you now know about your great-uncles and great-aunts?

A: I had little tiny fragments at the beginning: names, possible jobs they did, possible places they lived. The first big breakthrough came when some letters were found following the death of a distant relative. This game me an address. My next step was to rely on the work done by local historians in France.

Their books and online work told me that one of my father’s uncles, Oscar (also known as Jeschie), was a clock-mender: he had lived in Sedan in eastern France, had fled to western France when France was invaded.

He and his wife Rachel were marked out as being Jews, ordered to wear a yellow star and had everything that they owned taken away from them. They then escaped that place in western France and fled to Nice, where Jews were safe because the Italians (who ruled in Nice) were protecting them.

But the Italians were defeated by the “Allies” (that’s the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and the rest of the British Empire – and the Soviet Union). Italy withdrew from Nice, which meant that Oscar and Rachel were arrested and transported to Auschwitz.

They might have survived, if a man called Angelo Donati had had a little more time to finish what he was doing which was shipping the Jews in Nice out to North Africa. The other French uncle was called Martin, and he was either a jeweller or a dentist (or perhaps both) – and had been married but his wife Lucie Thérèse died in 1937. He had been living in Metz in eastern France, fled to western France and, I think, was hiding in someone’s house, when the order went out for all Jews to be handed over to the Nazi authorities.

Four French policemen arrested him in the middle of the night, and he was transported to Auschwitz too. The Polish relatives – my father’s aunts – were living in western Poland, and were rounded up in what was called a “ghetto”: a kind of open-air prison and then later they too were sent to Auschwitz. 

Their son, Michael, survived, came to England and is still alive.  

Q: You made a few new discoveries about your great-uncles while writing the book – are you still exploring them further, or do you believe you’ve found out everything you can?

Yes, I am still exploring. I would like to know more about the family that Martin married into: they are called Débias and lived in and around Metz. There are also mysteries to do with why that generation – Including my grandfather, who lived in the US – were born and lived in so many different places in Poland between 1875 and 1939.

I would have liked to have known whether there were people in the French villages and town where Oscar and Martin lived who knew them. I have tried to find traces of the clock-mending and jewellery in the towns – adverts in local papers, that sort of thing. And there is also a mystery in how Oscar and Rachel’s names appear on a memorial in Sedan. Who put them there? Given that they were transported from another part of France, how did they find out that that was what happened? 

Q: The Missing is told partly through prose and partly through poems; how do you think the two forms communicate your memories, experiences and discoveries in different ways?

A: When you tell stories in prose, there is something about that which tends to “complete” what you’re saying. It tends to tidy things up. Poetry is very good for when you want to “suggest” things, ask questions, leave things hanging for people to think about.

It’s also good for expressing “paradox” – that’s to say, an ironic juxtaposition of things. And you don’t have to say it all, when you write a poem. You can leave things hanging in the air. 

Q: What kind of parallels do you see between your relatives and those people affected by the ongoing refugee crises?

A: When these terrible things happen, it always involves the authorities in one way or another. They have regulations and laws which policemen, guards and soldiers have to put into place and enforce. So when I hear of laws about refugees being put in place and security forces enforcing them, I do hear echoes from my family’s history.

There’s something else: refugees and asylum-seekers are often portrayed in the press and by hostile governments as if they are parasites, or in some way another meaning harm to the countries they flee to. This is very similar to the way the refugees in my family were portrayed by the authorities in France.  

Q: How do you think teachers could use this book in the classroom? 

A: The book can just be read for what it is. It’s possible to resource the book, with other books, videos, films and the like so that a class would have many ways of viewing this story – or there’s also a way in via my poems and stories, as if to say, “Here is this person living in the UK in 2020 and he seems like many other people going about their job.” What’s interesting about family history is that you only have to go back a few years and you start to find that extraordinary things. It’s not that we hide them but nevertheless they are hidden. 

So you could approach the book in any of these ways. You could look also look at it alongside some modern stories – real and fictional – to do with discrimination, persecution, flight and genocide, in order to show that some of these questions are very much still alive. 

With that said, I would try to avoid being too “lecturing” about these things; I confess that I’ve been guilty of this sometimes, when I’ve been too keen to tell the whole story and not leave enough time for the children or students to ask questions and think about it.

In the work that I do with schools in Cambridge, we work hard on getting the children to explore some of the ideas through poetry, song and drama – whether it’s my story, analogous stories they hear, or ones that they find out in their own family. 

Order your copies of The Missing.