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I know you can't hear me …' I begin. I look at him, at his resting expression. 'But I want to read you a scene I've been writing.'

Harry Peters - formerly Hermann Pollnow, known to his family as Mutzi - was born in Berlin in 1920. As a teenager he fled Nazi Germany and landed in rural Australia. Harry's parents, Edith and Max, never saw their son again. Edith perished at Theresienstadt; Max at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Years later, Tess Scholfield-Peters discovers a box of letters written to her grandfather, Harry, from his parents, who she knows only as the framed black-and-white figures on Harry's TV stand. She embarks on a journey through her family's history just as Harry's memories have all but faded. This impressive debut skirts the edges of fiction and non-fiction, as Scholfield-Peters weaves her research with Harry's recollections to envision the unknown.

Reviews

Caroline Overington, The Australian

• This felt very close to home for me: it’s about an Australian grandpa, bon in the 1920s in Berlin. I had one of those, and I called him Opi, and I loved him dearly. Tess Scholfield-Peters had one, too. She called him Mutzi. As a teenager, he fled Germany and came to Australia. His parents, who stayed behind, were murdered in Nazi camps. This book is the result of years of painstaking research. A labour of love, for sure, but this man’s story will feel so very real to so many Australians whose families came from Europe before and after the war.

Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll, WA Today

• The Mutzi of the title is Hermann Pollnow (anglicised to Peters), a Berlin-born Jew who immigrated to Australia (via Buchenwald) in 1939 when he was 18 and lived to be 100 years old. His parents stayed and he never saw them again. Scholfield-Peters, his granddaughter, tells his story from different perspectives: letters between Mutzi and his parents, documents and imagined scenes drawn from research. The result is a combination of non-fiction, biography, historical observation and creative writing that is often novelistic, the book both disturbing and deeply moving. The scene at the station in Berlin when Mutzi farewelled his father (his mother too sick to go), before leaving for Holland and on to Australia, haunts the reader as it must have haunted Mutzi. A highly atmospheric, meticulously researched labour of love. Read more at WA Today.

Katy Briggs, Book+Publishing

• Dear Mutzi goes beyond a personal family history with its themes of involuntary migration, adaptation into Australian society, and resilience, and will strike a chord with readers interested in the history of this period or who have enjoyed historical fiction by Heather Morris. Read more at Book+Publishing

About the author

Author Tess Schofield Peters

Tess Scholfield-Peters is a Sydney-Eora based writer and academic.

Currently she teaches creative writing at the University of Technology Sydney. Previously Tess worked as senior journalist for the independent community newspaper Urban Village, based out of Sydney’s Surry Hills.

Tess’s writing spans the academic and literary fields with a focus on life writing and narrative non-fiction, hybrid literature and memory studies, and her work is featured in significant Australian and international publications.

Dear Mutzi is her first book, drawn from her recently completed Doctorate.