ACCIDENTAL FICTION

I wrote my novel by accident.

My goal was to address a gap in Holocaust education and encourage educators to consider two rarely asked questions:

When we teach about Holocaust history, what's the best way to include—alongside Jewish Holocaust narratives—the Roma, disabled, homosexual, political, and many other victims of Nazism? And why are these victim groups so often forgotten?

To address that gap, I started to create educational materials and easy-to-implement lesson plans for teachers and school districts interested in these hidden histories. But putting together an educational unit around historical data that relied on encyclopedic reports full of dry facts and figures wasn't cutting it.

After all, much of Holocaust education is taught through compelling film (Schindler's List, The Pianist, The Diary of Anne Frank, Fateless, and so on) and fiction (Number The Stars, The Book Thief, The Devil's Arithmetic, The Reader, and others), all of which humanize history through individual stories. These books and movies go beyond dates and events to underscore key concepts of human behavior in the lead up and response to genocide.

And so I began to write a series of vignettes to make the narratives of Roma, homosexual, disabled, political, and other victims of Nazism engaging and relevant to middle school and high school students. Based on historical truth, I created a handful of fictional characters—all teenagers—each of whom, through a compelling short story, would represent the central narrative of a distinct victim community.

To tie the stories together, I set the stories in Nazi-era Berlin. And I found a way to place them all in early 1943. To stress the immediacy of each narrative, I wrote each story in present tense, first person so that events were unfolding in the moment.

For example, here, nineteen-year-old Tsura, a young Romani woman, is plotting to free her family from Marzahn, a Nazi encampment for 'Gypsies' at the edge of Berlin:

     Biting the skin on my chapped lips, I walk almost as fast as
     the chilling wind slipping between my neck and turned-up collar.
     The woolen overcoat hides the curves of my breasts and my
     dark hair is tucked tight into a flat cap. I look like a man—
     intentionally so—and feel stronger for it.

Surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly), as those single stories developed, they became entwined with one another.

Ruth and Alex, I discovered, are step-siblings. And Elise saves the life of street-smart Marko after they run into each other in Berlin's Hakescher Market. Elise, I realized, is a member of the Nazi Girls' League, but rarely talks about it to her best friend, Ruth. Meanwhile, Marko's sister Tsura, a member of an anti-Nazi resistance group, is over-protective of her younger cousin Kizzy who hates being treated like a kid. I also discovered that two of the characters are in love (take a guess which two!).

I was suddenly writing my first novel and it was turning into a bit of a page-turner!

I shared my first draft of TRAIN with some friends, colleagues, and members of my family who were as excited to read my book as I loved writing it. Their feedback led to a few more drafts and submissions to literary agents and a couple of publishers.

While I received flurries of rejections, a number of scholars and educators in the Holocaust education field were getting excited about the book and its accompanying curriculum.

A series of introductions and exciting moments led me to author and editor Christa Desir. Christa became my editor and, as soon as she took a look at my opening chapters, she pointed out a problem (echoed in the feedback I'd already received):

With multiple voices narrating interweaving accounts in present tense, first person, TRAIN wasn't working. The style was too jarring. And the individual voices sounded too similar. It all had to become one story.

I rewrote the first chapters of TRAIN in past tense, third person close point-of-view. The new style seemed to work. I was able to tell the story and still retain the important thoughts spinning inside the head of each central character. Here's the same scene as above, now re-written, plus a little more:

     They'll never know we were here.
         No sound. No impression in the dirt. Tsura had learned to keep
     her head below the brick walls of the city. To become the shadows
     and sidestep the light. She could recite each route by heart. Over
     railway lines and through private gardens, across main roads and
     public parks. But some checkpoints were impossible to avoid.
          A crowd had gathered close to the U-Bahn station. Two young
     soldiers blocked the entrance.
          "What's going on?" Tsura asked them.
          "The train station is closed," one of the soldiers said. He held
     out his gloved hand. "Papers?"
          Tsura handed over her identity documents for inspection. "What
     happened?"
          "Someone fell on the tracks."
          "Why are you dressed like a man?" the second soldier asked,
     rifle at his side.
          Tsura pointed at the sleeves of his jacket which didn't even
     reach his wrists. "Why are you dressed like a schoolboy?"
          The other soldier laughed. As he unfolded and checked her
     papers, his grin widened. "Nice to meet you, Greta. We share a
     birthday."
          "Lucky me," Tsura said. Her fake smile matched her false
     identity.

Today, I reached an exciting milestone. I've re-written all of TRAIN in the past tense, third person close. And I just sent the manuscript to Christa for comments.

Although anything could happen on this exciting journey toward publication, there's a chance TRAIN (and its accompanying curriculum) will be in print and online in early 2015. Stay tuned.


(Post updated in December 2014 to reflect recent manuscript edits.)

A SECRET MAP

For the last couple of years, I’ve been working on my first novel, TRAIN, a historical thriller for young adults, based on real events.

Lost In Berlin

A while back, eager for honest feedback, one of my readers suggested I do a better job with the novel’s “logistics of space.”

The Roma and Jewish teenagers at the heart of TRAIN are fleeing their homes. They crawl through the back gardens of Berlin and cower in damp basements. But, in an earlier draft, I hadn’t yet painted a clear picture of those houses, streets, and hiding places.

Despite chases across the city, I’d left out journey times across Hitler’s capital. I was depriving my characters—and my readers—of directions, times of day, proximity to key landmarks.

I’d paid lots of attention to character arcs and plot, and I’d ensured historical accuracy, but I hadn’t provided enough details of Nazi Germany to make those ten days in early 1943 come alive.

Writing From Photographs

I needed to get to know the geography of Berlin. But during the early writing phase, I was nervous to read beyond what was necessary for historical research, mostly because I didn’t want the descriptive prose of other writers to influence my own writing style or my characters’ voices.

First, I browsed photographs. Online searches brought up vivid black and white images of Berlin’s monuments and parks. Tram tracks embedded in the cobblestones crisscrossed and split, weaving themselves between grand buildings from which Swastika banners hung, dead, in the winter air.

I got the hang of describing the novel’s spaces. But I still needed to include journey times and directions for my characters’ routes of escape.

Finding My Way

I’d visited Berlin once before, but only for a week or so. I didn’t have a good sense of the city. There was no map in my head.

I searched online for precise directions—by foot—from the Moabit neighborhood to Charité Hospital; then directions—by car—from the Jewish Community Center on Rosen Street to Marzahn, the site of a Nazi camp for Roma families.

From my laptop screen to my head and into my manuscript, my characters began to find their way.

I created a single online map. On the map, I marked every event of my novel’s plot. And every home and workplace belonging to my central and minor characters. Every front step. Every meeting place. Every escape path, from Hackesher Market to St. Hedwig’s Cathedral, from Gestapo-raided homes to improvised hiding places.

I downloaded an up-to-date satellite image of the terrain; the ultimate bird’s-eye view of Berlin.

A Secret Map

But I had a problem. I’d superimposed Nazi-era history onto a contemporary landscape. My manuscript and I were full of doubts.

Did certain streets and public parks even exist in 1943? Had the West German or East German governments in post-war Europe moved a road? A bridge? Which neighborhoods had witnessed war up-close? Which buildings had the British warplanes destroyed?

When I noticed Google Earth’s “historical imagery” icon, I literally gasped and danced around my living room.

As if uncovering the key to a hidden passageway, caught in a sudden Internet-trance, I found myself sliding the years back to 1943 and staring in amazement at an aerial photograph of war-torn Berlin.

Comparing the modern-day map with this digitized historical artifact (the 1943 aerial photograph was likely taken from a British fighter plane), I discovered redirected streets and old buildings. I zoomed in on strange unfamiliar shapes. To figure out what they were, I compared search engine results with old-fashioned printed books in my home library.

I found that I’d placed the secret meeting place of two central characters, Alexander and Marko, close to a Nazi watchtower. I’d positioned the home of Elise and her fragmented Nazi family within walking distance of The Fountain of Fairy Tales. I realized that the British had bombed St. Hedwig’s Cathedral on the same day as a key turning point of my story.

Altered Fates

Just as some roads and houses of Berlin had been moved and rebuilt over seventy years, the plot of my historical thriller began to shift.

Tsura, a young Roma woman and anti-Nazi dissident, must now avoid certain cross-streets for fear of running into German soldiers.

Ruth, a Catholic girl dreading the deportation of her Jewish stepbrother, now becomes exhausted and pessimistic after a long trudge uphill as she passes bombed landmarks and houses that are still burning.

In moments of fear and reflection, the teenagers are now drawn to places of their childhoods. My rewriting of the story to reflect the nuances of history altered my characters responses, their decisions, and ultimately their fates.

While the key historical events of TRAIN stand in place, its fictional teenagers have become more real, their actions more credible. The precise moments, movements, and twists of the story are now more satisfying, more authentic, more compelling (to me, at least!).

As I work to finish editing my manuscript, I expect to discover a few more secrets of Holocaust history that, I hope, will surprise my future readers and, I know, will surprise me, too.

SYRIA & PILLARS OF SALT

When disturbing YouTube videos of atrocities go viral, should we hit “share” or should we look away?

Almost every week, I meet with artist and writer Ava Kadishson Schieber (her book Soundless Roar is exceptional) to learn about her experiences and memories as a Holocaust survivor. Once, during our conversation, Ava compared herself to the wife of Lot (the nephew of Abraham). Despite the warning, the biblical woman could not resist looking back at the burning cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, causing her to be transformed into a pillar of salt.

Twice a year, Ava visits my classroom to share with my students her experiences as a teenager during WWII when she hid on a farm for four years, pretending to be unable to hear or speak. Her father, Leo, was murdered in Auschwitz. Her older sister, Susanna, disappeared forever, consumed by Hitler’s war.

“How old are you?” a student asks. “I am fifteen,” the eighty-something-year-old woman smiles. When Ava turns to look back at her traumatic past, she is confronted by a reality that, in many ways, kept her girlhood frozen in time.

I’ve always thought of the story of the pillar of salt as a warning against human bystanderism. If we’re not prepared to take action against atrocities, then we cannot look only to be voyeurs. If we choose to look at violent scenes, we need to do so for the right reasons.

As we stare in shock at violent images that play on repeat on our television and laptop screens, we must know why are we watching. Are we fulfilling our collective responsibility to bear witness, or are we satisfying a collective morbid curiosity?

The photographs and videos of the recent Syrian attacks on civilians are omnipresent and continue to make headlines. Children and adults shake uncontrollably or lie still on the ground, asphyxiated on the fumes of chemical weapons. And YouTube views climb.

Smart phones and cameras in the hands of the world produce countless images that can go viral in minutes. This is both a blessing and a curse. The amount of evidence and publicity of these crimes multiplies, yet victims and survivors are captured and catapulted into the media at their most vulnerable; in ways they may not want to be seen or remembered.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many survivors were told to keep their heads facing forward. To look back on and talk about past trauma was once synonymous with opening—and reinfecting—old wounds. But, in just a few decades, our ideas of therapy have changed dramatically. Today, we encourage survivors of any traumatic experience to reflect on and to confront their psychological injuries. And rightly so. Ava Kadishson Schieber and other survivors of atrocity recall their experiences and losses in order to rebuild their lives—and in order to teach.

As we dare to look—and encourage others to look—at very real violent images, we must be prepared to respond beyond hitting “like” or “share”—to email our political representatives, to sign petitions, to educate others, to voice our disgust loud and clear. Otherwise, what are we turning into?

GAYS, GYPSIES & GENOCIDE

“How did you get into Holocaust education?” is a common question and I tend to answer differently depending on who’s asking and what’s on my mind.

Why I Do What I Do: Reason #3

Exactly 69 years ago, Nazi guards at Auschwitz murdered in one night almost all Birkenau prisoners categorized as “Gypsies.”

Three months earlier, when Auschwitz guards surrounded and sealed off the Birkenau Zigeunerlager (Gypsy camp), the prisoners armed themselves with shovels and iron pipes and refused to leave their barracks. In response, over several weeks, Auschwitz administrators transferred Roma and Sinti prisoners capable of work to other camps. Just under 3,000 people—mostly children, the elderly, and the sick—remained.

On the night of August 2nd 1944, Birkenau guards marched with their guns into the Gypsy camp and forced the women, men, and children toward and into the gas chambers.

Until a few years ago, I didn’t know that the Nazis had systematically sterilized, ghettoized, and murdered people of Roma and Sinti descent. Just as the Jewish community refers to the Nazi genocide as the Shoah—catastrophe—, the Roma community uses the Romani term Porajmos—devouring. The Nazi regime and its collaborators murdered approximately 25% of the one million Roma and Sinti living in Europe.

Yet the Roma and Sinti were not recognized as victims of Nazism until 1979.

The Nazi genocide of European Jewry echoed through familial and community memories into my 1980s childhood. The Holocaust films we watched in Jewish youth clubs, the Jewish Holocaust survivors we listened to at school, and the hushed conversations we overheard at home ensured that our Jewish identities would be molded by a Jewish responsibility to remember our dead. The dead Sinti and Roma were never mentioned.

It wasn’t until 2005 that I started to notice.

I’d just moved from London to Chicago. I was getting used to the larger food portions and the divisive politics. And I started to become involved in the gay and trans rights movement. I came across a news article that would change the way I think about Holocaust history: In January 2005, world leaders gathered at Auschwitz-Birkenau to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camp. But Polish authorities had prevented representatives of the gay community from attending.

I asked one of my professors if, instead of sitting an upcoming exam, I could research and write a paper on Holocaust memory, focusing on how and why the narratives of homosexual victims of Nazism had been pushed to the margins of genocide commemoration.

I knew a fair amount about the Jewish Holocaust narrative, but I felt embarrassed, as a politically engaged gay guy, that I knew so little about the Nazis’ persecution of homosexuals. I began to explore books and articles. I didn’t know about the origins of the pink triangle. Or the German anti-homosexuality law Paragraph 175. Or that the Nazis considered lesbians non-threatening—a euphemism, perhaps, for “easy to rape.” I learned about the Nazis’ forced castration and arbitrary torture of homosexual prisoners. In some concentration camps, concerned about masturbation, the Nazis forced homosexual prisoners to sleep with their arms outside of their blankets, even in the dead of winter.

My work led me to ask questions about collective memory and silenced histories.

I learned that, after liberation in 1945, British and American lawyers recommended that homosexual prisoners of the Nazi camps be re-incarcerated. Homosexual survivors were denied reparations. Paragraph 175 remained on Germany’s books for decades. And in the 1990s, Ultra-Orthodox rabbis and conservative Christian clergy protested against any inclusion or mention of homosexual victims in U.S. Holocaust museums. Homosexuals persecuted during the war were not considered victims of Nazism—and did not qualify for reparations—until 2002.

Marginalized victimhood became the focus of my doctoral research. And my work broadened. Surely, I began to argue, if a goal of Holocaust education is to identify warning signs of future atrocities, then students should learn about the relationships between different forms of Nazi prejudice, policy, and persecution. This approach is especially vital in the face of continued government-led oppression of Roma, LGBT, and other minority communities around the world.

We can’t understand—not fully—any one of these victim group narratives without the others. The Nazis conducted experiments with gas as a method of murder on people with disabilities before building the gas chambers and ovens that consumed the Jews, Sinti, and Roma. While the Nazis tried to find a “cure” for homosexuality, they considered people of Jewish or Gypsy or African descent as “incurable.” If we omit the non-Jewish victims of Nazism from our collective Holocaust memory, then we lose something critical to our understanding of the Nazis’ full intentions.

I understand why Simon Wiesenthal was frustrated with the insistence of some prominent historians and scholars that definitions of “The Holocaust” refer to only Jewish victims. Definitions matter. Definitions determine what and who makes it into history textbooks and exhibitions and remembrance ceremonies.

I now focus my work on helping educators find ways to include—meaningfully and appropriately—all of the Nazis’ victims within Holocaust commemoration and education. After all, if the Nazis made room for all of these categories of people in their concentration camps, if they made room for them in the same mass-graves, then we have a responsibility to make room for all of the dead in our classrooms, museums, and memorials.


What I Do What I Do: Reason #1

What I Do What I Do: Reason #2

CRYING TO BE HUMAN

As far as I can remember, learning about the Holocaust has never made me cry. How would I respond in Auschwitz?

I cried when I said goodbye to my friends and family before moving from London to Chicago. I’ve been known to cry when I've had a few too many drinks! I cried when my grandmothers died.

I teach about Nazi eugenics and the development of gas vans and Nazi experiments on pregnant women. And rail cars and Jewish and Roma and homosexual survivors and post-war suicide and inherited trauma. I’m an avid reader of Holocaust literature, particularly for young adults, and I watch and teach Holocaust films. I’ve listened to many Holocaust survivor testimonies—both recorded and live—and I’ve explored Holocaust museums around the world. I’ve tried to wrap my head around the fact that the Nazis murdered so many children who were disabled or Jewish or Roma or Sinti. I learned about the Holocaust in primary school and at home. But the horrific content of Holocaust history, testimony, film, and fiction has never made me cry.

Today, as we stood by the ruins of a gas chamber in Auschwitz-Birkenau, I talked about my personal connection to the Holocaust. My grandfather escaped Nazi-occupied Holland, I explained. But, as far as I know, he didn’t talk about his family’s story. We don’t know the details, but we’re pretty sure that many members of his extended family were murdered in the Nazi camps.

As a teenager, during an organized trip to Yad Vashem, I took myself up to the museum’s archives. The woman behind the desk warned me that finding information about my murdered family would be unlikely; unless, she said, they were Dutch and had an unusual name. “They were from the Netherlands,” I replied, “and the name is Ziekenoppasser.” She led me to the books of the dead. In the final book, on the final pages, I found a list of men and women with the last name Ziekenoppasser, deported from Amsterdam and other Dutch cities and towns, murdered at Sobibor and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Today, the Yad Vashem online database lists 33 entries for Ziekenoppasser. I suspect some of these people are our relatives, but we might never know.

This morning, in the Birkenau prisoner processing center, I found myself searching the anonymous family photographs for people who resembled my Mum’s side of the family. I felt sick as I looked at each image—children playing, weddings, family portraits. But I didn’t cry.

A little while later, standing at the ruins of Gas Chamber III, I recited to my group the little I know of my family’s story. As I did, I wondered if this was exactly where they were murdered and I felt—suddenly, unexpectedly—as if I was honoring their memory. But I didn’t cry. Instead—and this now seems absurd—I realized that I might want to return to Auschwitz, one day.

Yesterday, at Auschwitz I, we stood inside the still-standing gas chamber and walked through the reconstructed crematorium. We wandered into rooms displaying piles of adult shoes, stolen before their owners were gassed. The shoes of murdered children were displayed separately. When I saw the mounds of human hair, I felt a pain in my chest—like a punch. I found myself asking our guide a question about the exhibit, perhaps to prevent myself from crying.

In the Auschwitz prison block (a prison within a prison), we looked at the original bunks, we walked past standing-cells, and we stared at walls covered in official photographs of camp prisoners in their striped uniforms, emaciated men, androgynous women, all soon to be dead. I didn’t cry.

I followed our tour guide, as if in a trance, staring at a pile of hairbrushes and toothbrushes and shaving brushes. My mind took me to the perpetrators. How did the Nazi guards allow themselves to participate in these horrific crimes? How could human beings treat other human beings in these horrific ways? It’s unfathomable.

As I walked through Auschwitz, I thought about my family, murdered here. But I didn’t cry. And I thought about the Nazi guards who led them to their deaths. The Nazis must have been in some kind of trance, I found myself thinking. These murderers had hypnotized themselves. They weren’t thinking things through. They were confused, intoxicated by the mist that moved through the system of violence and murder that they had designed. If the Nazi guards and their leaders had stopped for just one second, surely they would have realized what they, as humans, were doing to other humans.

Last night, I shared this notion—of Nazi guards in a trance—with the rest of my group. “The Nazis knew what they were doing,” people in my group reminded me, “they knew what they believed.” I was listening carefully to what they were saying, but it didn’t make any sense.

When I teach about Holocaust history, I not only strive to humanize the Nazis’ victims; I also strive to humanize the Nazis themselves. Too often, through Holocaust films and museum exhibitions and fiction and the sensationalist media, we portray the Nazi leadership and lower-level camp guards as monsters. We display photographs of Nazi officers in their pressed uniforms, smiling with their fingers on the triggers of their guns, watching with cold eyes as children are marched to their suffocation. We call them evil. Monsters. As if their actions were inevitable, uncontrollable. By doing so, we excuse them; we ignore the decisions they made. The frightening truth is that the Nazis were just as human as their victims. Years before they became Nazis, as children, they played games and did their homework. They had life dreams and ambitions. They fell in love. They had children of their own. But if we paint these men and women as monsters, we keep the perpetrators at a distance. Look what they did, we say. This is what evil looks like! By painting the Nazis as inherently inhumane, we are saying that “real” human beings could never perpetrate or become complicit in genocide; we could never be capable of committing such atrocities, we tell ourselves.

The image of Nazi guards, walking in a trance, following murderous orders, replayed again and again in my head. How can it be possible to see others as anything but human? “It’s impossible,” I said to my colleague. “No. It’s possible,” he said to me, “—it’s just impossible for you.” I understood what he was saying and, for a moment, I choked on my tears.