IT’S often said that everyone has a book in them waiting to be written.
For his literary debut Simon Weisz of Clifton decided on a family memoir.
But this was no ordinary memoir as for the first eighteen years of his life Simon’s parents were at pains to keep their past concealed from him. All he knew for certain was that they had grown up in Hungary and had arrived in Britain after the Second World War.
It was only after Simon had reached manhood that they began to confide their secrets to him: that they were Jews and his mother had experienced the horrors of Nazi persecution.
Simon eventually learnt that his mother was deported first to Auschwitz and then to Ravensbruck, to the death march she withstood from the ruins of Berlin in 1945.
In Himmler’s Curtains published by Hutchinson Heinemann, Simon Weisz examines the ways in which his mother’s wartime experience affected his earliest development, his evolving sense of self as a gay child growing up in the 1960s and his subsequent relationships in later adult life.
Following the death of his mother in 2017 at the age of 91, Simon Weisz gained a Diploma in Humanistic and Integrative Counselling and now pursues a career as a psychotherapeutic counsellor in the West Country.
Simon Weisz will be giving a talk about his book at the Regent Street, Clifton, branch of Waterstones on September 25 starting at 6.30p.m.