Welcome to the official website for author, Sarah Matthias.
Here you can read about Sarah's latest work and her previous books with links on where to buy copies. Her new book, 'A Berlin Love Song' is published in April and there will be some launch events announced soon, here on the website. There are also some articles featured on the site, where Sarah talks about what inspires her writing.
On Meeting my Character in Auschwitz
An extract from the article 'My inspiration for A Berlin Love Song'
"I visited Auschwitz, both the main camp where the holocaust museum is situated and also the death camp two miles away – Auschwitz-Birkenau. By that time I had read everything I could get my hands on about the Zigeunerlager, the gypsy family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The remains of the camp is vast but I didn’t need a map or a guide because I had the layout of the camp so clearly in my mind. My husband was amazed that I knew my way around the vast area without a map. But by this time it had lived with me for so long. I stood with my family on the site of the gypsy family camp, on the very place where I imagined my character Lili Petalo, would have lived. We walked around the remains of the gas chambers where thousands of Jews, gypsies and political prisoners had been gassed and walked down the railway lines where the cattle trucks came in, carrying truckloads of desperate people to be worked to death or gassed as soon as they emerged. It was a very emotional visit, and I was able to buy a wonderful series of books in the museum there called Voices of Memory, containing first hand accounts from hundreds of prisoners and witnesses, gathered together by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. And it was in that museum that I saw the picture of the Romani girl who would come, in my own mind, to be Lili Petalo."
