The fact that we humans can break any tyranny is beautiful

A journalist reporting from conflict zones for The Times London, Paul Pickering turned novelist to tell the story of Josef Mengele, the 'Angel of Death' at Auschwitz, whom he met in Paraguay.

- PAUL PICKERING

Pickering is often likened to Graham Greene, as much for his fiction as for the life he has led. Lucy, his eighth novel, is being released later in July by Salt in the UK. In an exclusive interview with writer Bhaskar Roy, Pickering talks about Lucy and its uncanny insights into the Gaza genocide.

Q\When the burning man runs up a mountain of rubble, giving Lucy a stunning opening, the American colonel watching the spectacle mistakes him for another Jew set aflame by the Nazis. You wrote the novel, set in post-war Berlin, well before the Gaza genocide triggered by the Hamas incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023. Was it clairvoyance to construct the horrid scene, an ironic civilisational commentary on victim-turned-aggressor role reversal?

A\ The epigraph of the novel is, "No one has the right to obey", by Hannah Arendt, a philosopher and journalist who covered the trials of those accused of killing at least six million Jews in the Holocaust, plus one million gypsies, not to mention homosexuals, Freemasons, communists and those that have fallen out with the regime. There is no understating this unique horror, or that Jews from all over Germany, France, Italy and the rest of Europe were the main target. Perhaps more people have died from famine or war under other regimes, but this killing was meticulously planned and industrial.

Jewellery was melted down, hair was cut off to stuff mattresses with, skin was used for lampshades, children were used in experiments beyond horror. I still have a receipt for a section of a 12-year-old gypsy boy's head I carried when looking for Josef Mengele, a journalistic assignment that led to my first novel.