This month, through no planning of my own, my book – In My Grandfather’s Shadow – seemed to go on tour.   

On 22^nd July it reached its fourth anniversary since publication and, as if to celebrate each year, four interesting invitations came my way. From a prison, a history festival, a German magazine and a school.

This week I spent a day in prison, moving between hot rooms filled with men, each clutching a copy. They had been distributed by Give A Book through its Prison Reading Groups programme. The Shannon Trust, an indispensable charity promoting literacy in prisons, had invited me to speak to two groups. Many of the men had not only read the book but had annotated its pages with notes and carefully prepared lists of questions and comments. 

Do you think there is a way through guilt? 

How do you find out what has gone on in one generation that might need resolving?

Should there be more art in prisons and schools? 

I feel so fortunate to have access to these pockets of society that most people never encounter. Prisons hum with life, attitude and testosterone. They also carry the unmistakable stench of waste: wasted money, wasted opportunity, wasted time and wasted human potential. Not because of those living or working inside, but because of how the system is designed. Cuts to funding and staff, overcrowding, and a punitive undercurrent in policymaking have created conditions that prevent prisons from functioning as they could. 

As I have often found over the decades, I can speak more freely inside these locked institutions than outside them. The people who live and work there generally have more experience and understanding of the darker side of human nature. The parts of ourselves most of us prefer not to acknowledge and thankfully do not act upon, but that nonetheless reside in us all.

The great Russian writers understood this well. 

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”   Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from The Gulag Archipelago.         

Human beings are capable of both extraordinary good and extreme evil. If we accepted that as a foundational truth, our society might paradoxically become more compassionate and more honest. Instead, we are encouraged to project evil onto others and goodness onto ourselves. 

We see this in our culture of remembrance, the subject I will be exploring with Henry Montgomery and James Holland at Chalke Valley History Festival this Sunday. We see it in the media, as I was recently reminded while being interviewed by one of Germany’s most respected magazines, Der Spiegel, for an article marking the 85^th Anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of Russia in 1941 and the war of annihilation that followed – a war in which my Wehrmacht grandfather took part. We see it in every form of discrimination. And we see it in our criminal justice system. 

I understand why, in Germany, nuance remains difficult when discussing those dreadful years shaped by Nazi ideology and its hierarchy of human worth… and worthlessness. Germany cannot be seen to relativise any aspect of that history, just as it cannot be seen to pass critical judgment on Israel. I have a huge amount of empathy for the country’s predicament. However…

In some ways, a serious criminal is in a similar situation, albeit on an individual rather than a national scale. Yet just as our prison system risks trapping people in a criminal identity with adverse outcomes, so certain aspects of Germany are in danger of remaining stuck in a ‘They were the guilty perpetrators’ identity. With ever fewer contemporary witnesses and widespread silence still prevailing within families, it becomes increasingly easy to project total accountability – or evil – onto whole groups and categories, without acknowledging the impossible choices ordinary individuals – people like us – often faced, and how their decisions were driven by fear, survival, ignorance, weakness or a genuine belief they were serving a greater good. 

We judge them at our peril. 

And what good does judgment do anyway? Of course, crimes must be judged and punished. But the person? 

Writing In My Grandfather’s Shadow required me to walk many metaphorical miles in my grandfather’s boots. I wanted to understand both the man and the circumstances in which he lived. What choices did he really have? What alternatives, as a career soldier, were available to him? These were questions I had learned to ask through my work with prisoners. Not to excuse or justify, but to comprehend how essentially decent people can become culpable of terrible deeds.

Faced with another person’s unique situation – their education, upbringing, family background, psychological resources, personality and opportunities – would I truly have made different decisions? 

With all that is going on in the world today, we may one day be put to the test. 

Whenever I visit prisons to talk about my book, I notice the effect non-judgment can have on the men – and as 96% of the prison population is male, it is usually men I am talking to. I witness defences softening. People begin to think differently about themselves and others.  Self-reflection emerges. Empathy. A dawning of hope and the possibility of change which ultimately is the possibility of a better society for all of us. 

It is not rocket science. But it does require a shift away from our current culture of disconnection, blame, decontextualisation and blinkered thinking.

Perhaps that is why the fourth invitation, to speak at a school, touched me so deeply. A pupil had read my book and been sufficiently affected by it to pass it on to her headmaster. He read it, wrote to me and invited me to give the speech at their forthcoming Speech Day. For someone who was expelled from school, this is indeed an honour! As well as academic achievement, he wants to instil these same values of inclusion and compassion in his students to help equip them to find their own individual ways into the world. 

It’s only a start. But it is a start. And we need to start.

Forthcoming events:

Chalke Valley History Festival

Hatchards, Piccadilly. In Conversation: Alice Jolly and Rachel Seiffert with Angela Findlay

I am delighted to be chairing this event with two of my favourite authors on Wednesday 22nd July at 6:30pm at Hatchards, Piccadilly. Both books relate to the Nazi and World War II years in Germany / Austria.

Book here