Eating the Heart of the Dog

Eating the Heart of the Dog is about trust, betrayal, anger and revenge. It involves three survivors, one from a POW camp and two from the holocaust. They all want a better life, but for one it will come at a price.

18 year-old Harry survives a Japanese POW camp and returns to the ruins of Manchester. After a year of struggling to get a career, he hears of possibilities in East Africa and persuades Julie, his newlywed wife, that it is worth a try. On their journey through Egypt, they pick up two travellers going to Kenya. Moshe and his 11-year-old sister, Halina, are Jewish survivors of the Pinsk massacre. Moshe has work as a merchant seaman in Mombasa and intends to put Halina into boarding school in Nairobi. As Harry and his wife get to know them, they hear about their harrowing escape from Pinsk and the SS officer who murdered their family.

After finding work in Uganda, Harry and Julie befriend an English doctor. Harry discovers the doctor owns a small plane and is keen to learn how to fly. Once Harry gets his pilot’s licence, he helps the doctor take up a lucrative offer to transport clients who want to keep their identity and journey discrete. The doctor says their clients are mostly businessmen escaping their debts, Russian criminals and Eastern Bloc nuclear scientists defecting to South Africa.

After Harry reads in the newspaper, that one of the men he helped transport to Pretoria is a Nazi war criminal, he shows the article to Moshe. Harry is horrified to find out that it was the SS officer from Pinsk. Determined to make amends, he flies with Moshe to Pretoria to seek revenge. Harry questions his mistakes and whether he can ever put things right.