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.)

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