Exhibition and Book Talk: Once the Deed is Done by Rachel Seiffert

Join Booker nominated novelist Rachel Seiffert in conversation with Wiener Holocaust Library Co-Director Dr Christine Schmidt as they discuss the Library’s current exhibition Nazi Forced Labour: Perpetrators and Victims and Seiffert’s latest novel, Once the Deed is Done, shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2026. Set in the closing days of World War Two and its immediate aftermath, Seiffert’s novel follows the fate of forced labourers and those who try to help them. Her characters include Sasha and Yeva, a young Ukrainian brother and sister, former labourers held in a displaced person’s camp on the Lüneburger Heide, and Ruth Novak, a British Jewish Red Cross worker who tries to them find their missing mother. With the children losing their mother at the height of the fighting, and with so many other missing workers, Ruth’s task often seems impossible. Their DP camp is on the site of a former factory, cheek by jowl with a small German town; Seiffert also explores the stories of the townsfolk, particularly the town’s children: Freya the schoolmaster’s daughter and Benno the policeman’s son. The pair see the camp and the people inside it, just as they saw the factory and the people forced to work there through the war years. More than this: Benno was witness to an escape. Is he holding a secret about the missing labourers? Seiffert’s research was greatly aided by the Wiener Library’s collection and curators. Her characters’ stories cross over with many of those detailed in the Library’s exhibition. Come to hear about Once The Deed is Done, and the real-life experiences which inspired it. About the Speakers Rachel Seiffert is one of Virago’s most critically acclaimed authors, and a longstanding friend of the Wiener Library. Her novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Dublin/IMPAC Award, and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and longlisted three times for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She has also received awards from the American Society of Arts and Letters and the Association of Jewish Libraries and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she lives in London with her family. Christine Schmidt is Co-Director of the Wiener Holocaust Library. Her research has focused on the history of tracing and documentation efforts, the concentration camp system in Nazi Germany, and comparative studies of collaboration and resistance in France and Hungary. She is currently writing a social history and archival biography of a collection of survivor accounts recorded by The Wiener Library in the 1950s-60s and has published widely on Eva Reichmann and the Library’s post-war collecting efforts.