Jonathon Freedland is a London-based writer who visited Australia recently for the Adelaide Writers Festival. When the festival was cancelled, the Sydney Writers Festival invited him to speak about The Traitors Circle at the State Library of NSW, an event I was fortunate enough to attend.
The Traitors Circle is a non-fiction book which reads like a thriller. It is the result of extensive research on a group of German dissenters against Hitler and his war who met in Berlin for afternoon tea in September 1943. Amongst the group was a man who would betray them to the Gestapo. In his book, Freeland introduces us to the members of the group, including the Nazi spy, and follows their fates after the tea party both during and after World War II.
Jonathon Freedland is a journalist and former foreign correspondent for The Guardian as well as a writer of thrillers under the name of Sam Bourne. His most recent book before The Traitors Circle was The Escape Artist, another non-fiction book written engagingly about the second world war. It tells the true story of a 19-year-old Jewish man who escaped Auschwitz to inform and warn others about the death camps.
The Traitors Circle concerns a different group of German men and women many of whom were aristocrats or professionals who held high positions in society or in government before Hitler came to power. They defied the Third Reich with both words and actions which included hiding Jews and helping them escape from Germany. But it was their conversation at the tea party, where they thought they were amongst friends, which led to their trial as traitors.
According to Freedland, at least 95 percent of Germans kept their heads down and said nothing during the horrors of Hitler’s regime. The Traitors Circle raises a key question for readers: What would I do in the same circumstances?
The Traitors Circle is certainly a book for our times. It invites us to look back on the events of history and resolve to stop them happening again.