The Hand That Signed the Paper

The Hand that Signed the Paper is a 1994 novel that has been described as one of Australia's most notorious literary hoaxes. The novel was written by Helen Darville, now Helen Dale, and was published under the name Helen Demidenko. It recounts the story of a Ukrainian family that collaborated with Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. The novel initially received positive reviews and was the 1995 winner of Australia's top literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award. However, it soon became the subject of a lengthy and heated debate—first over accusations of anti-semitism, followed by the revelation that Darville had falsified her identity and ethnicity to suggest that the novel was based on her own family history.

The novel is narrated by Fiona Kovalenko, a university student of Irish–Ukrainian descent living in Queensland, Australia. Fiona's uncle Vitaly has been charged with crimes against humanity for his service as a guard at the Treblinka extermination camp. The novel recounts Vitaly and his siblings' upbringing in Ukraine during the 1930s amid the famine known as the Holodomor and other atrocities committed by the Soviet Union, positing that Jewish involvement in Bolshevism was the motive for Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust. The novel's author Helen Darville, a student at the University of Queensland and the daughter of middle-class English parents, presented herself as a working-class Irish–Ukrainian woman named Helen Demidenko between around the time she began writing the novel in 1992 and her eventual exposure in 1995. During this period, she misrepresented the novel as being drawn from her own family's wartime experiences.

The unpublished manuscript for The Hand that Signed the Paper was the winner of the 1993 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and was published by Allen & Unwin in August 1994. The novel received a positive reception upon its release and was the winner of the 1995 Miles Franklin Award and ALS Gold Medal. However, the novel soon became the subject of controversy over accusations that it was overly sympathetic towards the perpetrators of the Holocaust. The backlash intensified in August 1995 when it was revealed that "Helen Demidenko" was a fabrication and that Darville had no familial connection to Ukraine.

The novel and the resultant controversy have been the subject of multiple books, including Andrew Riemer's The Demidenko Debate and Robert Manne's The Culture of Forgetting. Defenders of the novel have argued that it is a valid work of fiction, while critics have contended that it is anti-semitic and that it distorts the history and moral lessons of the Holocaust.