Three Sisters next book from
| Author | Dean Taylor |
| Published date | 09 September 2021 |
| Publication title | Te Awamutu Courier |
It was a story so bound to The Tattooist of Auschwitz main characters Lale Sokolov and Gita Furman, yet Heather hadn’t heard any of it before in her research and interviews.
Three teenage sisters, Cibi, Magda and Livia Meller, grew up in the same Slovakian town as Gita, and like Lale and Gita, they were all in Auschwitz-Birkenau at the same time and all survived.
But not only did they survive the camps, they also survived the death march and after World War II travelled to Israel and be part of the creators of the new State of Israel , where hundreds of thousands of other Holocaust survivors were seeking a new life.
They then went on to marry and raise families in their new home.
So how did a girl from Pirongia come to be a respected historical storyteller and international traveller when most people at her stage of life are planning to slow down and take life a bit easier?
Heather (nee Williamson) left Te Awamutu College and her family in Pirongia, parents Jock and Joyce and four brothers, ‘some decades ago’ to make a bit of money and then escape small town New Zealand to see the world.
Like many young Kiwis she headed across the Tasman, where she met her future husband, Aussie Steve Morris.
For a while they moved to Christchurch where they had family.
Steve worked in IT and was headhunted back to Australia in 1987, where they have lived since. Heather worked in social services within the medical profession - mostly at Melbourne’s Monash Medical Centre.
She has always been a keen reader, and a movie lover, but nothing prepared her for the journey of more than a dozen years that led her to international fame when she released her first book – the historic novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
That was in 2018 and when I first met Heather in April, 2019 she was back at Te Awamutu College speaking to English and history students.
It was the Te Awamutu Courier that announced she was working on a second book, based on the information from Holocaust survivor and Auschwitz-Birkenau tattooist Ludwig (Lale) Sokolov, and further research, to be released later in the year.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz had spent weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list and at that time had been translated into 46 languages and more than two million copies sold into 49 countries – with more on the...
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