How to be an Alien

The book is a partly humorous memoir, with reflections on refugee policy and being ‘not quite one of us.’ It delves into how refugees survive and thrive in a strange new country and to better understand the long-term impact of historic trauma. The book also aims to shed light on shifting perceptions of being Jewish in Aotearoa. It moves between the personal and the political; the ridiculous and the profoundly serious and between past and present.

The book is Beaglehole’s family’s story and her community’s. However, in several sections, she turns to history and to her imagination to fill in gaps in her memory of events and people of long ago. How to be an Alien begins amidst the chaos of revolution and counter revolution. A family must make an urgent decision to leave, or not to leave, their country. On a winter night in 1956, a mother, father and their daughter step over the barbed wire fences at the border in Hungary and make their way to Austria. Noone knows what the future holds, not for the family who have escaped a tyrannous regime, not for the grief stricken grandmother left behind.

Ann Beaglehole, historian and former public servant, was born in Hungary. By the age of eight, when she settled in Aotearoa with her family, she had experience of two totalitarian regimes : Hitler’s indirectly, through her traumatized family, and Stalin’s more directly, as a young child already subject to brain washing at school and in her communist youth group. Ann Beaglehole is the author of Refuge New Zealand: A Nation’s response to refugees and asylum seekers.

The book will be launched on 18 November 2025.