The Watchmaker’s War
Nazis—and their nemesis—surface in 1950s Melbourne Book review by Dr Anne Sarzin
Danny Ben-Moshe’s superb thriller, The Watchmaker’s War, is mired in the past but speaks to the present.
Based on a true story, it explores major ethical and philosophical questions, such as the nature of justice and its tipping point into revenge. When survivors and witnesses of wartime atrocities experience searing trauma and pain, there is often a compulsion to seek justice in the name of the dead. Judaism has much to say about the nature of justice. Our sages exhort us, ‘Justice justice shall you pursue’ (Deuteronomy 16:20); and this duplication of the word ‘justice’ denotes the double purpose of justice, justice not for oneself but also for others.
Ben-Moshe’s novel, set in 1950s Melbourne—interspersed with vivid flashbacks of Jewish suffering and heroic resistance in the forests of Lithuania during the Second World War—explores this issue in relation to the psychological baggage and historic forces shaping characters on both sides of an ideological divide, where personal hostilities bleed into complex global currents of an evolving and new world order.
These questions and challenges are firmly rooted in the novel’s central figure, partisan Yakov Holtzman, the eponymous watchmaker of the title, who led an intrepid unit of Jewish resistance fighters in Lithuania during the Second World War. His leadership as their commander and their intrepid sabotage of Nazi infrastructure and successful forays against Nazis and local collaborators powers the novel’s beating heart and suspenseful actions. Their exploits are integrated into a narrative that switches seamlessly from the killing fields of the old country to civilian life in Melbourne among Jewish émigrés and their Baltic enemies. The reader goes back and forth between these two worlds at dizzying speed.
The novel’s central character, Yakov, has loved and lost those nearest and dearest to him and his surviving older brother, Benny. Their parents, siblings, grandparents and little nephew were slaughtered in mass graves in the Ponar forest outside Vilna, one of more than 200 death pits in Lithuania. After the genocide of the Jewish people in Europe, Australia proved a welcome sanctuary for survivors, who cherished with immense gratitude the country’s cultural diversity and social cohesion and, most importantly, the promise of healing for refugees eager to find a peaceful place in civilian life. Surely, in this city with its tranquil suburban neighbourhoods, their nightmarish memories might recede and their hopes for renewal and regeneration would be realised. But, as the author skilfully intimates, there is much that lurks beneath the deceptively tranquil surface of pedestrian-paced Melbourne; and the emergence of antagonistic forces threatens to fracture the émigrés’ newfound security and optimism.
Not all is as it seems, and there is something rotten in the state of Victoria, especially, but not only, when Jews recognise Nazi killers and Lithuanian collaborators on the streets of St Kilda. This period is one of the novel’s many strengths. The eruption of swastikas throughout Melbourne in the 1950s, as well as other antisemitic manifestations have an immediate resonance with readers in Australia, given our country’s recent history. With dramatic effect, Ben-Moshe also reveals the presence of Lithuanian Nazis in the Bonegilla migrant camp, only 12 kilometres from Wodonga in north-east Victoria. The infiltration of a unit of Nazis into the camp has a devastating effect on the morale of a Jewish resident there, Berel Tishkovitz, a shipmate of Yakov’s en route to Australia. Although frail and fearful, in true Jewish fashion, Berel has a repertoire of jokes that infuse humour into stressful situations that relieve the gloom and tension for the reader.
This societal turmoil in Melbourne’s Jewish community in the 1950s is compounded at the highest level by the pernicious duplicity of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and the hypocrisy of eminent Australian politicians in their coverup of Nazi criminals entering the country. Brigadier Sir Charles Chambers Fowell Spry (Charles Spry in the novel) was Director-General of Security from July 1950 until 1970, defining the agency’s character for that decade. Virulently anti-communist, he shaped Australian intelligence during the Cold War and led ASIO during the 1951 referendum to ban the Communist Party. Interestingly, the Australian Dictionary of Biography (Volume 19, 2021) states that Spry believed the Soviet bloc represented a threat to Australia equal to that of the Axis powers in the war. Possibly this accounted for his obsessive focus on communist subversion and evident willingness to overlook the atrocities committed by the Nazis he recruited for their anti-communist knowledge and fervour., as Ben-Moshe demonstrates so effectively. He presents these divisive views succinctly and clearly, developments that impacted massively on Melbourne Jews, who faced a potential onslaught of Jew-hatred from former Nazis they recognised in the streets of St Kilda.
The author draws on parliamentary records and other historical sources to show, without a shadow of a doubt, that both Australian political parties at that time were involved in covering up the presence of known war criminals in Australia in the years after the war. He states in his Notes that Spry has an especially significant part in the story because he used Nazis and their collaborators to spy on migrants suspected of communist sympathies. He also indicts Harold Holt, then Minister for Immigration and, subsequently, Minister for Labour and National Service, ‘because he apparently did little to stop this spying, instead pressuring the Jewish community to end its campaign against Nazi migrants’. For many readers, this exposure of hidden history will offer its own rewards.
Sometime last year, I watched Ben-Moshe’s superb documentary ‘Revenge: Our Dad the Nazi killer’, which might still be available on ABC iView. In that film, there is much circumstantial evidence but no definitive conclusions. This novel, however, penetrates further into the territory of revenge killings. As Ben-Moshe asks, ‘What would you do if you knew mass murderers, possibly including the killers of your family, were living freely and the authorities seemed uninterested?’, especially a trained partisan killer in the aftermath of war, ‘when the wounds of a family slaughtered were still raw?’
This book is a page turner provoking reflection and discussion that deserves followers among book-clubs and general readers. Intriguing, suspenseful and fast-paced, it is also balanced and thoughtful, covering responsibly an era with significant historical and political challenges, some of which remain unresolved. At its core, The Watchmaker’s war, is entertaining and gripping, with characters that come alive on the page. Undoubtedly, this novel will spark discussion and even controversy, depending on readers’ diverging perspectives. What is certain is that Ben-Moshe’s entertaining, informative and perceptive novel will set the reader’s pulse racing. You’ve been warned!
The Watchmaker’s War: A new beginning, an old enemy, a perilous choice
By Danny Ben-Moshe
HarperCollins Publishers
Australia 2026
