We chat with author Hugo de Burgh, about his new novel To the River, recounting a story of courage and altruism in Second World War Italy.
Set in Second World War Italy where Nazi troops are massacring whole villages in retaliation for help being given to even a single fugitive, To the River is the new novel by Hugo de Burgh. Outside a pretty country town is a prison camp of six hundred British, Commonwealth and American soldiers seething with hatred for Italians. A young widow Lucia does a deal with escapee FitzGerald, allowing the prisoners to escape into the hills or make their way out of Nazi occupied Italy. FitzGerald himself moves from farm to farm until his contempt for Italians turns into admiration for the impoverished people who risk everything to succour a stranger.
Hugo was Walt Disney Chair of Media and Communications at Schwarzman College of International Relations, Tsinghua University, until 2022 and has published a number of books, though this is his first foray into fiction: “I’ve always wanted to write books, but like many people, one has to earn one’s living,” Hugo tells us. “I ended up writing books which were connected with my job as a university professor, rather than the books I really wanted to write, like To the River.”
The story within the novel is based on several true accounts from people Hugo has met throughout his life: “My parents were soldiers who met in Italy in 1944. My mother was a British Intelligence officer who had worked with refugees from Germany and Central Europe, investigating the atrocities the Nazis were doing. She was posted to Italy, where she met my father. Therefore, I knew about this story all my life, though when I was younger, I didn’t take it very seriously. By the 1980s my father had passed away, and some of the lads who had been in the prison camp with him, invited me to go and meet them for lunch in London. They told me their stories about how they had escaped with my father and been helped by these Italian villagers.
“I’ve always wanted to write books, but like many people, one has to earn one’s living.“
“I also worked for Channel 4 for some time, and I was sent to America to interview a man called Samuel Oliner, a Jewish refugee. As a young boy, his entire family had been saved by some Poles.
He became a professor of Psychology in the United States, where he studied the motivations of the rescuers. He spent most of his professional life trying to understand what the difference was for these few people who risked all to help others in pain.”
It is this question of altruism which drives the main theme of the book: “The main theme of the story is the ability of some people to be courageously altruistic, and to help when nobody else is. To help others when it is the worst thing to do for themselves and their families. It’s Samuel Oliner’s theme, which I have tried to present in different context in the novel.”
To get your own copy of To the River visit Hugodeburgh.com/book/to-the-river/