At a glance…
- Her debut novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz had a profound effect on not just Heather Morris but on millions of readers around the world.
- That, and her latest work of historical fiction, The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse, can both be traced back to a practical piece of family advice.
- Heather Morris joins Tiffany Dunk on an episode of The Australian Women’s Weekly Love Stories podcast to share the importance of listening.
Growing up on a farm in rural New Zealand, Heather Morris didn’t have a huge amount of love in her life as a young girl.
With four brothers, she was the only girl in the family. “My mother admitted to me many times that she actually regretted having had me,” Heather shares in a new episode of The Australian Women’s Weekly Love Stories podcast. “Because for her, girls were doomed to the life that she saw that she had.” However, salvation came in the form of Heather’s great-grandfather, who showed her what real love could be. He lived two paddocks over and “was the only adult in my life who talked to me, who listened to me”, she says.
Listen to the episode:
“It was an era where children were to be seen and not heard. He was a man well into his 80s. He called me ‘girlie’. I’m not even sure he really knew my name.” As Heather shared her life with her beloved Gramps, he too shared his. He’d been a teenager when he signed up to fight in the Boer War in South Africa. And until Heather came along, he’d mostly kept stories from that time to himself.
“I would sit every afternoon with him on the veranda, and he would talk to me and tell me stories of his life,” she recalls. It was where she first developed her gift for being a listener and recorder of stories, laying the foundations for her 2020 non-fiction release Stories of Hope, an exploration into the art of listening. “He would say to me, ‘The only way you’re ever going to learn anything in this world, girlie, is just shut up and listen.’ And that was his key thing for me.”
After leaving New Zealand for Australia at 18, and later starting her own family, Heather eventually found her way into social work. This was another world where listening was her superpower. It was how she would meet Lale Sokolov, an Auschwitz survivor, in 2003. Lale was 87 and Auschwitz was where he’d fallen in love with his wife, Gita. Before he died in 2006, Lale made Heather promise that she would share with the world the couple’s unlikely love story.
At first, Heather tried to write it as a screenplay. A decade later, she tried a memoir format – even taking a short course to learn how to do so. Finally, she found a publisher “willing to take a punt on a senior citizen in Australia [who had] never written a thing”, she laughs. In 2018, she made good on her promise, and The Tattooist of Auschwitz was published. It caused controversy at the time. Members of the Jewish community and historians, including the Auschwitz Memorial, were critical. However, the debut novel became a worldwide hit and went on to be translated into more than 40 languages.
Heather’s follow-up, 2019’s Cilka’s Journey, was about one of the women Lale had met – and whose story was sprinkled through The Tattooist of Auschwitz. During this writing process, she met the women who inspired her third Holocaust novel, 2021’s Three Sisters. And Heather’s latest book, The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse, also has a connection to Lale. In 2024, his story was adapted for television. Melanie Lynskey played Heather, while Harvey Keitel played the aged Lale. When Heather attended the London premiere, the conductor Hans Zimmer – who co-composed the score alongside Kara Talve – pulled her aside, asking, “Has Kara told you about her grandmother’s piano yet?”
Kara had used this piano to write the haunting score. And, as she later shared with Heather over a late-night chat back at the hotel, it had been left to her by her grandmother Josephine.
“Josie was a young 11-year-old girl the night the Nazis came to take her family away in November 1942,” Heather recounts. “It was winter in Paris, and [her] mum told her to run to the piano teacher, who was then the only non-Jewish person that she knew.” That teacher was named Andrée Levallois, a woman secretly working with the French Resistance.
Despite the extreme risks, Andrée’s family took Josie in, protecting her as best they could – both from the Germans and from the dangerous work the family was performing covertly. They opened up their home, and also Andrée’s piano, to that frightened young girl. “She played it every day to drown out the sound of the war,” Heather says. “To drown out the noises in her head: ‘Where is my brother, my mum, my family?’ She lost them all. And so she used this piano to play the music that she needed … at that time.”
It’s another incredible love story that shines a light on an ugly part of history. But it’s important to continue sharing these tales, Heather insists. “These were all just ordinary people like you and me, but they were living [through] such an extraordinary period of history.”
During her book promotion tours, Heather is inundated with people wanting to find ways to better understand their loved ones. “We don’t tell the people that we’re closest to really too much about ourselves and our past. And I’m a classic at it,” she says. But it’s about choosing your moment, Heather adds, and being willing to listen without interruption.
A handy tip for those wanting to collect their own stories about family and friends is to pick an object in someone’s home while you are sitting with them, Heather explains. Then, ask: “Where did you get it? What does it mean? Or who is that in the photo that’s been sitting in plain sight for some time? Where was it taken? What were you doing?” The object is on display “because it means something to them”, she adds. “The biggest ‘in’ for getting people to open up is to show some interest … in something you know is meaningful to them. Then you’ve just got to shut up and listen so that they will fill in the blanks.”
Watch the episode:
The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse by Heather Morris, Allen & Unwin Australia, is on sale now.
Listen to The Australian Women’s Weekly Love Stories podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Watch full episodes on YouTube now.
