Maya's Dance

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A powerful novel of survival, resilience and the lifelong tenderness of first love, based on an incredible true Holocaust story.

Would she be able to dance, where they were taking her She could not imagine a life without dancing

1942, Sawin, Poland: sixteen-year-old Maya Schulze arrives terrified at a Nazi labour camp. Despite the appalling conditions, lack of food and constant fear of being beaten, she finds courage and beauty in dancing it is when she performs that she feels free.

During a show staged by the prisoners, one of the camp guards watches Maya dance, and so begins an impossible love affair. Mayas secret romance with Jan enables her to keep going from one day to the next, and, eventually, he helps her to escape. They intend to meet after the war, but fate cruelly intervenes. Undeterred, Maya continues to write Jan letters, in the hope that she will one day find him again.

Fast-forward half a century, and Kate Young, an English journalist, has moved to Sydney, where she cant seem to catch a break; her pieces are always relegated to the back pages. Until she attends a memorial for Holocaust survivors and meets Maya, who wants to tell her story. So begins a friendship that leads Kate to help Maya try the impossible find Jan before its too late.

Author Bio

Helen Signy is an Australian writer who grew up in England or, depending how she feels that day, an English writer who lives in Australia. She spent much of her youth travelling the world before becoming a print journalist in Asia and then in Sydney. Most of her writing these days involves science communications for academics, governments and not-for-profits, but she has never lost her passion for telling an amazing story. Mayas Dance is her first foray into fiction. Helen lives on the Northern Beaches in Sydney with her husband, Peter, and, at various times, her (nearly) grown-up children, Ella, Jamie and Katie.