For a brief moment, Debra Barnes’s professional and private lives seem to be perfectly aligned. She wonders if it was meant to be like this — as the Yiddish goes, it seemed beshert, meaning destined, pre-ordained. Either way, I sense she’s arrived at a moment of balance, a happy place where some of the undercurrents that troubled her younger self have finally been resolved.

Her day job for the Association of Jewish Refugees is to record for posterity the life stories of survivors and emigrés. But ever since she took up the position she’s known she had her own story to tell, one which had been weighing on her for some time. In July this year it resulted in the publication of her debut novel, based closely on the painful experiences of her mother Paulette as a little girl during the war.

The release of Barnes’s book The Young Survivors was delayed due to the pandemic, its eventual launch an all-online event. That doesn’t seem to have blunted its impact one bit. When I connect with her on a video call the novel is in the top five on a swathe of Amazon mini-lists including Jewish fiction for young adults and biographical and historical fiction for young adults. However niche these may sound, they all add up to book sales both here and in the USA. She’s been invited to join the Jewish Book Week schools programme, and will be a guest speaker at the Oxford Lecture Series for Holocaust Memorial Day in January. Given that at one stage she despaired of finding a publisher, it’s all been a wonderful surprise.

“I wouldn’t say I’m a pessimist. But I always think that to avoid disappointment I have low expectations,” she says from her house in Edgware. She gives credit to her publisher’s input, given that she was a debut novelist with no previous experience of fiction. The reality of the process was a revelation.

“I was quite surprised that shortly after they agreed to publish, they then came back with pages and pages and pages of notes. By the time I finished, I felt like I’d done a course in creative writing.”

Though Holocaust memoirs and novels are now a crowded market, she hoped hers would cut through because it is told entirely from the point of view of children, and is set in occupied France. It works both for adult and young adult markets — a gripping narrative told in the first person by three of five siblings, with nail-biting cliff-hangers as it moves from one narrator to another. It tells of the onset of war, mounting antisemitism and anti-Jewish laws, being forced to abandon the family home in Metz near the German border, a constant struggle to feed the family and keep them together until the arrest of both parents.

Oldest brother 17-year-old Pierre assumes responsibility, arranging for his siblings to be looked after in a succession of different family homes and orphanages, changing their names and faith to avoid arrest. When they find each other after the war, two of the siblings and their parents are missing — they have perished in Auschwitz.

Even before her mother’s death in 2010, Barnes had started trying to look into her story. It was known that Paulette was a hidden child, though the details were hazy, “We didn’t speak about it at home. It was obviously something that really was very painful for Mum. And it was just easier for her, for everyone, to just not discuss it. And that’s why we didn’t watch films about the Holocaust and I didn’t read books about it.”

Though she is discreet about the dynamics of her home life, something in her mother’s past was deeply troubling and may have been behind Barnes wanting to escape to Spain, where she lived for a decade, returning with a five-year-old daughter in 1997.

“It wasn’t an overly affectionate environment,” she says, though quickly adding “I still felt loved, I didn’t feel unwanted.”

She puts her mother’s emotional limitations down to the fact that she’d grown up without her own mother. “How could she have been any different? I don’t blame her for anything, but the more I learn, the more sad I feel. And the more admiration I feel for how she managed to live her life. She didn’t consider herself a survivor. The attitude was to consider yourself lucky and get on with it. So nothing but love and admiration.”

But Barnes grew up with a sense of guilt and also “that I needed to do everything in my power to make her happy”.

Eventually, after Barnes had been back in the UK for several years, the story of Paulette’s past began to emerge. Over in the USA in 2006 a cousin decided to do a search on the internet using the name of the orphanage in the Paris suburb of Louveciennes in which the little girl had spent the last part of the war.

“She found this book”. Barnes holds up to the camera a softback volume titled Je ne vous oublierai jamais, mes enfants d’Auschwitz, which means “I will never forget you my children of Auschwitz”. On the front cover is a black and white photograph of an older girl with a group of young children. “And,” says Barnes “on the back row are my mother and her twin sister Annette”. It was an unforgettable moment.

Paulette had never seen a photograph of herself at that age. “She wasn’t even sure if it was her — she had no memories, no memories at all. Obviously, the trauma. She was five or six years old here, and had just blocked it all out.”

Barnes managed to contact the woman whose memories had inspired the book. Denise Holstein turned out to be the older girl in the picture. In the orphanage she had taken care of a group of younger children including Paulette. The emotional reunion of the two women in 2006 becomes the opening and closing scenes of The Young Survivors.

After the meeting, Barnes continued to dig further into her mother’s wartime history, travelling to France several times to meet Denise and a number of other people who started to come forward with their own accounts. The vignettes and histories she collected would be woven into the complex narrative, and it is the availability of such rich material that made Barnes choose to write the story as fiction rather than memoir, changing all the names. She also had to use some creativity, she says, because despite what became many years of research, “there were so many gaps”.

When the book was finally finished, Barnes sent it off to 15 literary agents, hoping for great things. But all she got was rejections. Then one day she was in hospital, when she overheard voices from the next cubicle. One of the staff was taking a patient’s details. “What’s your profession?’”came the question.

“The answer was ‘historical novelist’, and I couldn’t help myself shouting out ‘I am too!’” Later in a waiting area, Barnes spotted the fellow author — they started chatting — and Barnes confessed that she was on the verge of self-publishing.

“And she said get an editor to have a look at it before you self-publish because you may have missed something.” It seemed like a good idea, then the editor she found said “I’m also a literary agent, do you want me to try to sell your book?” And he found the publisher.

Paulette died long before the work was written. Barnes says “I wouldn’t have been able to write it while my mother was still alive. But on the other hand, I’m very sorry that she won’t be able to read it. I know so much more about her life as a child than she ever knew. The only thing she remembered about the whole war was taking holy communion while she was hidden by nuns and that it was nice. It was nice because they got something to eat, something to drink.

“And now I know everything —apart from one missing piece in the puzzle, which is the convent she was in during the last year of the war.”

Barnes is planning another novel, inspired more overtly by the testimony she’s heard at the AJR. It will be based on experiences of the Kindertransport. “I’ve heard so many amazing stories,” she says, “I feel I’m doing my bit to keep these important accounts alive”.

The Young Survivors is published by Duckworth (£8.99)