The book is inspired by real life events and the extraordinary lengths that librarians and other people took to save books that were slated for destruction by the Nazis. Can you talk about how you first found out about this movement to oppose the book banning in Poland during World War II?

One of the things that was interesting as I first started reading was about the books that were being pulped. I was like, “Pulped? That’s so weird.” We’re all so familiar with the book burning that happened in Berlin, so it was weird that they would actually be pulped. But apparently, they were not only banning these books, they were also completely destroying them.

When the Nazis first came and occupied Warsaw, their ultimate goal for Poland was to completely kill off 85% of the Poles, keep the remaining 15% for slave labor, and pretty much turn Poland into a new Germany, another place for Germans to settle into. One of the first things they attacked was the culture. They wanted to get rid of the music, the books. They really wanted to dig the Polish culture out by its roots and completely demoralize everybody. Books were a major part of that. When they did the first round of banning—because there were several rounds of it—they ironically had books that they published that contained the names and titles of books they wanted to have banned. Generally these were people who were writing about topics and ideals that Hitler did not agree with. Of course, there were Jews who were on that list, there were Poles that were on that list. Anything that they felt could essentially detract from a Polish-German relationship, which is ridiculous because obviously their very cruel and aggressive oppression did more damage than any books possibly could. Essentially, it was attacking ideals that they didn’t believe in.

Not only was it that, but I feel like when you read books, you get to really walk in somebody else’s shoes, especially with lives that you will never have the opportunity to live. Oftentimes that gives a face to something that would otherwise feel faceless. That gives us an open mindedness and an acceptance of others that I feel like people who don’t necessarily read a lot of books have the ability to feel. To be honest, I really think that was a big part of the reason why book banning was so huge. Essentially Hitler was getting rid of this opportunity for people to know other people in a way that they would never have the opportunity to, to walk in their footsteps.

Initially they were just sending these books to be pulped. Then they found out that the drivers would actually pull over, steal the books back, and sell them on the black market because people still wanted to read these books. When that started happening, they had the Hitler Youth Movement come into libraries and manually rip these books in half, so that they wouldn’t have any more street value. They threw them into a pile and then those were sent for pulping. It was a complete eradication of this reading material that they felt was so harmful for essentially building empathy in people, in my opinion.

Zofia and her friends starting this book club where they’re going to be read banned books is such an act of defiance. Can you talk what these young women risked by starting this club, especially in 1939?

In the very beginning, they weren’t necessarily risking anything. When I create my characters, I look at the entire history of the country, rather than just looking at the time period that I’m writing in. With Poland, they’ve had a very tumultuous history, one that has really been filled with the fight for freedom. They were occupied by Russia for over 120 years before finally being granted their independence after the Great War and the Treaty of Versailles in 1918. They had just celebrated twenty years of independence when the Nazi occupation rolled in. Even after the Nazi occupation, the Soviet Union really had control over them until 1990.

So you had this pocket of essentially twenty years of freedom. Twenty years after generations and generations of fighting for it, and Sophia and her friends were born in this tiny little pocket of freedom, this little bubble. When I was initially thinking about her character, I was thinking what kind of a person would she be? I thought, “She’s going to be rebellious. She’s going to be a fighter, because [her generation’s] been raised their entire lives hearing about how brave everybody has been to get them to the point where they are.” When she’s hearing about Hitler—and, of course, they’re hearing about all of these things that are happening against their country— it’s like the writing’s on the wall, that they know it’s coming. Her little act of defiance, especially as a reader, is to read these books that Hitler’s banning. When the club first starts off, there’s really no danger to them whatsoever, but it’s basically them staking a claim and saying, “Even though this is happening in another country, we’re going to read these books in solidarity.”

The book takes place from 1939 to 1945 and Zofia and Janina are on the verge of graduating from high school when the book begins. How did you approach the changes that your characters would undergo, not only because of the war, but also because of growing up?

I have to say, first of all, it was really hard to write the teenage years because teenagers, unfortunately, can be very mercurial. I love to read YA and when I read YA, sometimes I get frustrated with the characters. I have to remind myself, “Madeline, they’re teenagers. They’re acting exactly how teenagers act.” But I also know that I’m writing for an adult audience. So while YA readers are a little bit more forgiving of that [temperamentality], I knew that adult readers wouldn’t be. I had to have Zofia avoid a lot of the teenage roller coaster ups and downs and getting mad for no reason kind of thing. And I say this as a mother of two teenage daughters, by the way. (laughs)

There really was just such a range of emotions that these characters experienced while they were going through all of this. In writing this book, I had to let myself experience those ranges. One of the hardest things for me to wrap my brain around—and it almost it felt like trying to think in 4D—was what it would be like to be born into freedom and stripped of that freedom after you’d had it your whole life. That was really one of the biggest things in Zofia’s life as she’s going through this book. First of all, they think, “We are definitely going to win this war. We have the best army in the world. There’s no way Germany can defeat us.” And then, not only do they get defeated, but all of these horrible atrocities start to happen. When they do stand up and fight back, they’re not just brushed aside, they’re crushed.

When you think about that, that’s when the realization of your freedom being completely stripped away really hits. It’s just all consuming, because what do you do when you’re one voice and everybody else around you is so scared that they won’t fight. How are you supposed to fight for what’s right? Especially when they see their culture start to disappear under the heel of a jackboot, that’s when they start doing little things like continuing with the book club, or trying to make sure that the books that are being destroyed are hidden away. As these experiences happen, every little victory that you have also starts to be a little bit more empowering. “What can I do next time, what can we eventually do together?” Ultimately that leads up to August 1944, when after five years of oppression, they finally get to stand up against the Nazis and fight back with the uprising.

I just have to say a little thing about that. [The uprising] happened on August 1^st at 5pm, which was W hour. To this day, on August 1st at 5pm In Warsaw, the entire city goes completely silent, except for all of the alarms and sirens that blare in honor of the Poles who fought back against the Nazis in World War II. The fact that my book comes out on August 1st is honestly such a special, special thing for me.

Was that by design?

No, ironically it was supposed to come out on the Fourth of July. The funny thing is that when I was writing this book, I had a completely different idea that I was going with. It was going to be a dual POV with Sophia and Janina. I always keep researching while I’m writing. I got halfway through writing the book when I found these amazing diaries from librarians. They were talking about their time in World War II, working with the Warsaw Public Library, and how they had these secret warehouses and ran these secret libraries. I thought, “Oh my gosh, there has to be more!” I stopped everything and I dug and I dug and I unearthed so much amazing information. I’d already been to Warsaw by that point and I was like, “I need to go back!” But, of course, I didn’t have a chance to. I threw out the entire half of the book that I had, I redid all of my character charts, I redid my entire plot, and I rewrote the entire thing. I needed an extra month to work on that. It actually ended up being sort of serendipitous because the extra month bumped me from the Fourth of July to August 1st.

Reading the book, you get the sense of being plunged into every aspect of life in Warsaw from the siege to the occupation, and especially all the granular details of the resistance movement. What was your research process to unearth all these details that really bring the book to life?

Well, as a total research nerd, thank you. (laughs) I spent about ten months thoroughly researching this and had over 100 non-fiction books that I used. One of the interesting things about that is because Poland was really controlled by the Soviet Union until 1990, if I had a book that was published in Poland, I couldn’t use what it said, because it could have been censored by the Soviet Union. I had to use publications that were done either in America from people who published after the war, or things that were published in England. The Polish government, in exile, was located in London at that time, so there were a lot of publications coming out.

I have this massive, massive collection, and I bought them all because I love to keep them. I’m one of those people who’s like, “I knew it was in that one book on this one page!” I can find it and see exactly what I need. (laughs) There was over 100 nonfiction books. I didn’t read all of those cover to cover—I wish I was that good. A lot of times I’ll need it for just a paragraph, but it will have such a powerful piece of information that it’s worth it.

Like I said, I did get to go to Warsaw. I went for two weeks and I stayed in Old Town. One of my favorite things to do when I get to a new location is go to my maps, type in museums, and see how many museums pop up near me. There were a dozen museums that were less than a mile away, so it really was the perfect location. I hired a private tour guide who had a laundry list of things that I wanted to get more information on. Her tours went anywhere from eight to sixteen hours, and she talked almost the entire time, just this just wealth of knowledge. Any questions I had, she had answers. I even sent her questions after the fact. She really was such an invaluable source of information as well.

I didn’t get a chance to visit the library because unfortunately I’d already visited Warsaw when I decided to go that route. The Warsaw Public Library has this amazing [online] collection of historical photographs. I went through and printed out every picture that was from 1938 to 1945. I actually put together a map for myself where I had every single floor [displayed], so that while I was writing the scenes in the library, I could stay true to the actual layout even though I didn’t get a chance to visit.

I wanted to get back to it to the friendship that propels the book between Janina and Zofia. Can you talk about what went into creating Janina?

Initially when I was going to do a dual POV with this book, I was going to have Janina’s POV and I was going to have Zofia’s POV. Going from 1939 to 1945 was already like trying to put lightning in a jar. Once I realized I had all the information about the library, adding in the additional elements of the library was too big for two POVs. I had done significant amount of work on Janina’s character, including doing research not only on Jewish life before the war, but also during the war in the ghetto and after. I actually have one book that details out all of the different vending stalls—who owned what and what they sold the goods for. It was just amazing.

With Janina’s character, it’s interesting because after the Treaty of Versailles was signed, there were supposed to be pure equality through Poland. By pure equality, I mean between Poles and Jews. I’m trying to think now, but I think 30% of the population of Warsaw was Jewish. Even still, there was a lot of antisemitism that they faced. They had pogroms, which is why I had Janina’s uncle having been in one. That’s really why her parents assimilated a little bit more. They have a toe in the Jewish community, but ultimately, for the most part had assimilated. As I did my research, I found that even though you could have some friends who were Jewish and Polish, it really very segregated unless there was assimilation.

Another significant relationship Zofia has is with her favorite author, Marta Krakowska. I’m sorry for asking such an ignorant question, but is she a real person?

No, she’s not. With Marta Krakowska, I really wanted to have a mentor for Zofia when it came to her writing. The goal of it was always for her to find her way and finally write this book of her heart, being the book that I basically wrote for her. I wanted her to have an author who was a mentor to guide her in that direction. I knew from the very beginning that [Marta’s theory of writing that] you have to die 1000 deaths was ultimately going to be you have to live 1000 lives. I wanted Marta to be a little bit harder and a little bit skeptical. I didn’t ever want to impose that kind of personality on any other authors who were in existence, especially an author who had lived during World War II who would have fought for being able to publish books and for the freedom of others. It just felt like that’d be wrong, so I made up my own character. That way I could do whatever I wanted with her and it didn’t feel like I was soiling anybody’s memory. It was just a safer route to go.

Finally, what role has the library played in your life?

The role of libraries for me has been huge. Honestly, librarians are my superheroes. I was an Army brat growing up, and that meant that we had to move every four years. It was especially hard when we would movie in America because you would go to American schools where everybody had been best friends since they’d been born. It was really hard for a painfully shy little girl. I’ve gotten a lot more outgoing—I feel like the military kind of forced me in that role—but as a little girl, I was very, very shy. I was not the type of person to walk up to a table full of girls and ask if I could be their friend, so I always found myself in the library at every new school. As a result, I got to know the librarians more than I got to know my classmates when I first moved, because I would read about a book a day. I’d go back in there with my next book, ask what should I read next, and they would guide me toward another book. In the pages of those books, that’s where I really found acceptance. All those wonderful librarians and school librarians really helped guide me through some of the more difficult parts of my childhood with all the moving that we did. I think that’s something for librarians to keep in mind, that when they are helping these kids pick books, you never know what they’re going through and what an impact it can make on their lives. So, thank you, on behalf of all little kids.

The post Madeline Martin On The Unexpected Discovery That Made Her Change Course Midway Through Her Novel first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Where did you first get the idea of writing about a character like Danielle, a “hidden child?”

The idea started with my stepmother, who was a hidden child in World War II. She was a five-year-old Jewish girl in Hungary, and in the early days of the war, her mother took her down to a farm in the countryside and left her there with a family who had agreed to take her in. She needed to present as a little Catholic orphan. They changed her name, they taught her the Catholic prayers, and they warned her, “Don’t talk to the police and don’t ever cry.” I learned that when I was about twelve-years-old, Danielle’s age when the novel starts. That just struck me as an extraordinary experience. I wanted to write a story about it, [although] I want to be clear, this not my stepmother’s story at all. I changed the age of my character to twelve, which I felt would allow me a little more complexity. I feel that age is already such a time when identity is still forming. To take an adolescent and put them into a situation where now they have to take on this other identity struck me as a really interesting psychological experience.

We see Danielle progress from a fairly sheltered and innocent adolescent in Paris to someone who fully embraces the antisemitic propaganda the government produces. What was it like writing from the perspective of an adolescent and teenage girl?

I think I tapped a little bit into my own experience as a twelve-year-old, to start with. I wanted to start Danielle as a rather sophisticated, cosmopolitan, secular, rather spoiled twelve-year-old girl who is thrown into this situation. The paradox that happens over the course of the novel is, in many ways, she becomes a better person. She becomes more generous, more giving, more loving, and more selfless as she bonds with this “adoptive” family and matures into a fourteen and fifteen-year-old under the extraordinary experiences of the war. But at the same time, the antisemitic, fascist, and extremist ideologies of the time have a really insidious influence on her still-developing psyche, especially because the stakes are so high. She really is told if she can’t inhabit this new personality as a good little Catholic orphan, everyone is going to get killed because of her. I was interested in the idea of her getting lost in this new identity, buying in to the warped psyche of the time, and—this is a cliched phrase—swallowing the Kool-Aid. France was undergoing a very similar split identity where, as this all was happening, half of France wanted to resist and created the anti-Nazi resistance. Yet the other half of France, especially in the early days of the war, went along with the Vichy idea of collaboration, that the only way we are going to survive is becoming friends with German Nazi regime and doing what they want. I think that is reflected in Danielle also, that split of identity.

In Danielle’s new village, we meet many characters who fully support, or are at least curious about, the beliefs of the Nazi party. How did you approach creating these characters?

The novel is in third person, but I really wanted us limited to what was going on in Danielle’s head and her perspective. I really wanted the reader to stay deep in her perspective. But the other characters—it was uncomfortable. I’m Jewish, but I’ve always been very privileged. I don’t feel like I’ve ever experienced anti-Semitism. It was very uncomfortable for me to get into the mindset of people who embraced this kind of ideology. I’ve always been able to stay on the outside of it. For me, the secret to it was to really get inside of the epigraph to the novel, which is the quote from Solzhenitzin, and I’m paraphrasing, “to do evil a person first has to believe they are doing good.” I had to find the emotional logic behind the characters thinking. For the characters who embraced anti-Semitic, fascist extremist ideology, I had to come at it from the perspective of why they thought that was honorable. Why did they think that was in the service of a public interest and the good? Again it was very uncomfortable to get myself to that place. I didn’t want to simply parrot the kind of propaganda that was out in the world at the time and unfortunately is rising in the world again. I didn’t want to just take the slogans, I didn’t want to just take the fascist, Anti-Semitic talking points. I wanted to really understand why these characters felt that they were doing good.

So many of the characters surprise the reader. Not only Danielle is going through these huge changes, but everyone else in the village is going through big changes as well. What went into crafting the book in terms of tracking those people’s changes through Danielle’s eyes?

I think, initially, we can take [her adoptive brother] Luke at face value. He is a fourteen, fifteen-year-old boy, an only child, and here comes this twelve-year-old intruder into his house. He has an anti-Semitic mindset. He resents, I think, both the danger he feels she is putting the family in, but he’s still a boy himself. I think he resents her taking attention away from him. [Luke’s mother] Gert is so happy to have a little girl and I think he very much resents that. I think Luke’s arc is very, very personal. Initially he so wants his parents to be proud of him. He so wants to be a grown-up man. The antisemitic fascist propaganda is a way for him to prove his manhood in his eyes, go along with what his father says, and make his father proud of him. But his core conflict happens before the novel begins. We don’t learn this for quite some time, when he met Genevieve, another little twelve-year-old girl in the village. She’s such a symbol to him of goodness, beauty, and hope. He’s so drawn to her, but now he’s in conflict. I don’t want to spoil anything, but Genevieve is a girl who he’s not supposed to be associating with. I think that his arc becomes very, very personal. I don’t think it’s initially ideological for him in the true way. I think this is true for adolescents, it’s through relationships that children—and a lot of adults—change their perspective.

You give the reader such a tactile experience of the day to day life in a French village during the war. Can you talk about your research process?

What the sunflower stalks looked like and what kind of jam they made. I have been working on this book for twenty-five years, which included obviously a massive amount of research. I was slightly familiar with France and French culture when I began because I spent a year in France as a student on a Rotary scholarship. I’ve always loved the country. I’ve always felt an affinity for France.

My research was very comprehensive. Obviously it starts with books. Also movies, documentaries, articles, so much traditional scholarly type research. I was fortunate enough to be able to make several trips to France, which gave me access to a lot of other research materials: museums, archives, monuments, libraries, bookstores. At the same time, I allowed it to be experiential, not informational. I traveled down to the area and was trying to decide where in France to set the novel. At one point, I was traveling with a friend down to Limoges. We had a car and we traveled around to some of the local villages. It felt right. It felt right geopolitically, in that it was initially part of the free zone or the unoccupied zone, but then later became occupied. It’s beautiful, for one thing, but of course all of France is very, very beautiful. I spent as much time as I could just listening to the sounds, looking at the cobblestones, smelling the air. What did the withering sunflower stalks look like? Sitting outside in a café in a small village and listening. Do I hear music? Do I hear the sound of footsteps? Do I hear someone singing? Do I hear people talking? I think those sensual details—what is my character tasting, touching, hearing, feeling—are so critical, because otherwise it’s a history book, it’s a documentary. One of my all-time favorite quotes is by E. L. Doctorow, who said. “The historian will tell you what happened, the novelist will tell you what it felt like.” That has always, as a fiction writer who loves doing research, resonated with me.

So many of the reviews have talked about how timely the novel is, especially with the rise of far-right ideologies. What was it like writing this book and then realizing so many of its themes resonate so strongly today?

When I started writing this book, I never set out to write a political book. I was interested in the psychological transformation of the character. I would work on the book, put it down for a while, work on another project, pick it up again, and then put it down. I picked it up again probably five or six years ago. I hadn’t looked at it for maybe a year or two and was shocked at how characters in  the novel are saying things that I’m hearing on the news now. [The characters were] saying things and reading articles in the newspapers that feel like virtually the same articles being published right now. It was disheartening, disturbing. At the same time, it was extra motivation to finish this book and get it out in the world, because we aren’t learning our lessons. My tools as a writer are stories. I felt extra motivated that this book and what this book was exploring—basically how to turn people into fascists—I felt that I had an obligation and a responsibility to finish this book and get it out in the world. Will it change one mind? Will it illuminate anything for anybody? I don’t know. But as a novelist, that’s what I can do. I can try.

You have a lot of moments of hope in the book. Can you talk about where you decided to end Danielle’s story?

I thought about that a lot. At one point, I thought about doing a bookend device, but I decided not to do that. I wanted to stay in the moment, but it was tricky to find the right balance. If her “epiphany” was too strong that can feel, I think, very false. To have a character suddenly become again a new person, after we have spent three hundred pages watching her transform into a certain kind of person, would have felt very false to completely change her back again. I did feel it was important to end the novel with a glimmer of light and a glimmer of hope. [I wanted to] create the feeling that this is the very first step in what is going to be a very long road for Danielle to rediscover who she is, what she believes, and what is good and what is evil. I just wanted to open the door and let in a beam of light where we know she understands that this has to be the beginning of a new identity. She’s no longer Danielle, but she also knows that she cannot continue to be Marie-Jeanne. Also, I think her awakening has a lot to do with her personal relationships. When she starts to truly understand the effects of some of her actions on people she has had an intimacy with, I think that’s a critical step towards her being able to look at things with a different perspective and come to a new understanding of how she now has to change. She doesn’t know how. She has no idea how to start a new life, to recreate herself, but she knows she has to try.

I want to believe in hope. Especially right now, in this moment, I want to believe that positive change is possible. I want to believe—again a cliché—in the goodness in people’s hearts. She’s not Anne Frank. I’ve joked a little bit that in a way she’s the anti-Anne Frank. Although now there’s some controversy about this interpretation, but Anne Frank seems to have held on to her belief in the goodness of people throughout everything she suffered. That’s not who Danielle is. She thinks that’s who she is, but she’s the opposite of that. Danielle has to learn what Anne Frank knew in her heart all along.

Finally, what role has the library played in your life?

First of all, thank you librarians for all you do. When I was a kid I was fortunate that my parents were readers and encouraged me as a reader. There was a public library a couple of miles away from my house on a main street that went from my junior high school. I could take the bus after school. I don’t know how often I did this, at least once a week. I was maybe ten, eleven, twelve-years-old. I would take the bus to my local public library and turn in the books that I had read and check out the new books. I’ll never forget the smell of that library and how that opened these other worlds and other experiences to me. I felt from a young age the library allowed me to understand that there are other people in the world, you know? And other stories and other histories and other experiences. I will forever be grateful for that. As I’ve gotten older, I purchase books when I can, but wherever I’ve lived I’ve taken out a membership to my local public library. Obviously now as a professor I have access to my university’s library system, but I’m still a member of the local community library, who finds books for me. It’s so critical, even in the age of the internet. That’s great, but there’s nothing like the smell of the library. There’s nothing like the smell of a book in your hand. I don’t think this is a luxury for people, I think it’s part of what makes us human.

The post Tara Ison On Finding The Emotional Logic Beneath Her Characters first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

How did you first hear about Freddy Mayer?

I had never heard of Freddy before a couple of years ago. I was having coffee with a source for my last book, Eli Rosenbaum, who has been at the Justice Department for many years investigating Nazi war criminals. I had seen an obituary on a person I had never heard of who had just died in Europe who had saved many, many Jews. I was embarrassed not to have known of this person who had done such heroic things and frustrated with myself that these people could live and die in anonymity. I asked Eli, “Who am I going to wish I met before they die who’s still alive today,” because so many of their generation dying every day. He said, “Well, there’s a guy you should meet named Fred Mayer.” He told me a little about his story, what he had done in the war with the OSS, and that there was a movement in a survivor’s group to get him the Medal of Honor. I went out to see him in West Virginia.

He was in remarkable shape, both physically and mentally. We spent hours talking about the war, his espionage mission, his upbringing in Germany, and made plans to meet again soon. Sadly, two months later he passed away. I had the chance to write his obituary for The New York Times, where I was a reporter for the Washington Bureau. I decided fairly soon that it was such a compelling and little known story to most people that it had the makings of an important book, so I decided to write it.

What about Freddy’s personality and background made him the perfect candidate for this mission with the OSS?

I talked afterwards to one of the surviving members of the mission who put it very well: “He was born without the fear gene in his DNA.” He just took incalculable risks. He was obviously driven by this deep-seeded hatred of the Nazis, because he and his family were forced to flee Germany when he was just sixteen-years-old. He saw the anguish that caused his father, in particular, who really resisted leaving Nazi Germany for years after Hitler took over. His father believed—somewhat naively in hindsight—that because he was a decorated World War I officer that the Nazis would never come after him. Even as the Nuremburg laws were having a direct impact on him and Jews around him—they were losing their rights and freedoms by the day—he still hung on to the belief that he would be okay. Freddy saw the toll this took on his father even after they fled to Brooklyn. His father would say he was never the same.

Freddy seemed to have a genius for problem solving in the moment and adapting to any situation thrown his way.

He really did. First of all, he was mechanical. That helped him in Basic Training when it came to problem solving and occasionally bending the military rules—jumpstarting a Jeep, even stealing a Jeep when he needed to. He faced this whole series of obstacles on the mission itself in Austria, beginning with having to get down from a height of 13,000 feet on a glacier that they had parachuted onto and missing some of their equipment, including a set of skis that was supposed to help them ski down.

He overcame one obstacle after another and managed to talk his way into and out of any number of situations. He got hold of a Nazi officer’s uniform and snuck into this Nazi officer’s club. He managed to get vital intelligence from a drunken engineer who had just been at Berlin working on the fortification of Hitler’s bunker. He talked up the train engineers at a yard outside Innsbrook to find out intelligence on the train lines and munitions that were headed to Italy; that led to the bombing of one very important train line with artillery that was supposed to replenish the Italian front. He switched disguises midway through his mission and became a French electrical engineer. He was able to provide cables back to the Allies in Italy revealing that one of the factories was basically at a standstill in producing these jet planes that were seen as really vital to the Luftwaffe. That was critical to knowing what Germany couldn’t do, as well as what they could do. It was one scene after another where he would get intelligence and pass messages back to a second member of the mission who would cable them back through Morse code to Italy. It proved vital for the OSS.

Can you talk about this other member of the mission, Hans? What was he like?

He came to idolize Freddy, even though he technically outranked him in OSS. He really followed Freddy’s lead, first from the United States where they were in training together outside Washington D.C., then on to Africa where they were sent waiting for assignment. He came to trust Freddy with his life. Long after the mission he would say he wasn’t doing anything daring or courageous, it was Freddy who was taking all the risks. It was true to some extent that Freddy was even more in harm’s way, but Hans was in quite a bit of danger himself. He was hiding out in an attic outside Innsbrook surrounded by Gestapo for more than two months. Had he been found out, he certainly would have been killed on the spot. He took enormous risks himself. He did that without knowing what had become of the rest of his family in the Netherlands, where he had fled. His father was a businessman in the Netherlands, and like many people surrounding him had come to fear Hitler’s rise from a very early point, years before the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in ’39. He sent his twin sons, Hans and his brother Luke, to America months earlier. He had to stay behind with his wife and their younger son for financial reasons and difficulties getting visas, with the hope that they would be able to get out soon. He would write them these heartfelt letters to America asking about their lives, school, and telling them about what had become of them after the Nazis invaded.

Hans’ role in this mission is pretty incredible, considering he was able to get a working radio to function from his hiding place in an attic.

It took them so long to get a working wireless radio. That was his main job, as the radio man, but it malfunctioned for days on end. [It took] so long that the OSS based in Italy had basically given up on them as dead, because they were ordered to cable back immediately after landing in Austria. The OSS had not heard from them for nearly a week. At that point there was some manpower issue to man the line by which the cable was supposed to come over and they had given up on them. There’s a scene in the book where the commanders are pulled out of the movie they were watching on rec time and told that they had got a cable from Freddy saying, “Don’t worry, we’re okay.” Shouts of jubilation erupted in the movie theater.

You also talk about the people who made up the cutout system that assisted the mission. Who were these people and what did they do?

There were about a dozen or so anti-Nazi resistors who were really integral to the success of the mission. A lot of the credit for that goes to the third member of the OSS team, a Nazi defector by the name of Franz Weber. He was born and raised in a small town about two miles outside of Innsbrook called Oberperfuss. The model for some of these parachute missions was to develop small teams and find a Nazi defector who knew the area, act as almost a tour guide, and connect them with locals. Unlike in parts of France, where you had a fairly strong contingent of resistors on the ground, in Austria and Germany it was believed—correctly, for the most part—that you were dropping into overwhelmingly hostile territory. There was not going to be a greeting party saying, “Lets help them fight the Nazis and collect intelligence.” Franz was vital to that. Freddy went undercover into the POW prison and identified Franz as someone who would come to truly turn against the Nazis. This was a crapshoot by admission of many of the OSS officers. In a number of the other missions it was disastrous, where Nazi defectors who were working with the US would either simply flee once they got on the ground, never to be heard from again, or sometimes actively turn against the Americans violently. It was an incredible risk to put any trust at all in a Nazi defector.

In this case, it worked almost exactly the way they had envisioned. Franz had known some people in this town who he believed were opposed to the Nazis, although there were very few in the countryside. These were farmers for the most part whose livelihoods had been decimated by the Nazi rule in Austria. He immediately connected with one of them; that set in motion connections with a whole series of people, many of them women, including Franz’ own fiancée, who were under somewhat less suspicion by the Gestapo and could take more evasive maneuvers without coming under scrutiny. They were critical in passing messages back and forth; acting as lookouts; and putting Freddy, Hans, Franz up in hiding places in attics around town.

One of Franz’ sisters worked in a hospital and was able to get the Nazi uniform that Freddy used to make himself into an officer. A soldier in the hospital had died and she was able to sneak out the uniform. These were individual acts of bravery driven, I think, by a mix of true anti-Nazi sentiment, family loyalty, and personal interest. It was this hodgepodge of motivations. There were also a few people who were driven strictly by money. They could get paid off.

In the end, the further out that the network became and the more people they roped in, there were greater risks of being exposed. With every successful step, Freddy became a bit more brazen. By the end, he was cabling back to Italy that they should send a trunk of guns and explosives because he was prepared to take Innsbrook. He got a bit too big, and that led to his eventual capture and torture. The Nazis beat the crap out of him, waterboarded him for a number of days at Innsbrook.

That whole section was horrifying to read, but it’s also amazing his ingenuity negotiating the peaceful transfer of Innsbrook.

“Just incredible chutzpah,” as he said at one point of his own instincts. Even as a captive of the Nazis he thought he could leverage the situation: making promises, offering deals that he had no authority to make. Somehow in the end it worked. It turned into the bloodless surrender of Tyrol, in what Americans had feared was going to be the last bloodbath of the war.

In your opinion, why does Freddy and Hans’ story resonate after all these years?

I think first of all their plight as immigrants certainly echoes in some of the policy divides we have today over refugees. For me it resonated with the plight of people trying to escape the genocide and almost not doing it. There’s a quote that I used to end the book from Freddy, where he’s asked about coming to America, going back to fight the Nazis, and what he wanted people to remember. He said that he hoped that people would realize that they did their best to repay their debt to America. I think that’s still true of many of those coming here today to escape persecution and violence. For me, that is the biggest takeaway that we’ve often forgotten: the heroism and the obstacles that people from the war and the Holocaust faced and somehow overcame.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The post “Just Incredible Chutzpah”—Eric Lichtblau on the Real-Life Hero at the Heart of His New Book first appeared on Public Libraries Online.