Stephen Poliakoff and an odd moment in the trees of Vienna

Here's a strange thing. Jonathan Wilson's novel The Hiding Room, first published in 1995, has been republished. Its most dramatic moment is when Esta Weiss, a Jewish refugee from Vienna, tells her lover what happened to her and her mother in Vienna after the Anschluss: '"First, they stood over us and made us eat the grass. We were animals, you see. They stood on our hands with their boots and cracked the bones. They they put a blue ladder against the trunk of a tree and made us climb into the lower branches. We had to twitter and croak like the birds."'

But what is intriguing is that Esta's story is identical to a story that the Michael Gambon character tells Joe in Stephen Poliakoff's Joe's Palace (BBC, 2007). It is one of those classic Poliakoff scenes, when suddenly we move into pure storytelling, as a character tells a dramatic and strange story about something terrible which happened in the past.

I am not suggesting that Poliakoff stole the story from Wilson's book, published 12 years ago. It may well be a familiar story to those who know about antisemitism in post-Anschluss Vienna, but it is a strange coincidence that the wording is so similar. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that neither writer really does very much with it. It stands out as a strange, grotesque moment in two curiously flat narratives.