Driving to Treblinka

Diana Wichtel is raised in Vancouver, Canada by her mother, a Catholic New Zealander, and her father, a Polish Jew who miraculously survived the Holocaust. When she’s 13, her life changes dramatically, as her mother whisks her and her siblings away to New Zealand. Though she's told her father is to follow, she never sees him again. Many years later she sets out to discover what happened. The search becomes an obsession as she painstakingly uncovers information about his large Warsaw family and their fate at the hands of the Nazis, scours archives across the world for clues to her father’s disappearance, and visits the places he lived. This unforgettable narrative is also a deep reflection on the meaning of family, the trauma of loss, and the insistence of memory. It asks the question: Is it better to know, or more bearable not to?

Diana Wichtel is an award-winning journalist and a feature writer and television critic at leading current affairs magazine the New Zealand Listener. She has a Master of Arts from Auckland University and tutored English there before taking up a career as a journalist. She lives in Auckland and has dual New Zealand-Canadian citizenship. She was awarded the 2016 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship.