Mike Bernhardt

Confirming Anecdotes with Evidence

The novel I’m writing about the Moser family is closely based on the truth. That’s perfect for me as someone whose experience has been mostly narrative non-fiction. I try to learn what really happened, and then turn it into a scene that might be fictional but at least has elements of the truth.

Before she died in 1989, Edith had begun writing a memoir for her children.  She said that a week before Kristallnacht, her father had returned from the U.S. after trying to get visas for the family to leave Germany.

I know now that because she was only thirteen during the alleged visit, she probably didn’t understand the complexities of immigration in 1938—there was no way for him to speed it up. But perhaps he was able to connect with people who could help improve their chances of actually getting the visas they wanted.

I’ve never found records of that trip in records available through Ancestry. But in the stash of papers I found in my father-in-law’s closet, I discovered this receipt. It proves that he really was in New York in October 1938. But much more valuable than the confirmation of his travel was the fodder it provided for my novel: Ernst brought jewelry with him for safekeeping in a New York bank vault, so that the Nazis couldn’t steal it from them later.

He would have had to smuggle it out of Germany—Nazi customs would have searched his luggage and confiscated it before his departure. So I’ve imagined Margaret sewing it into his overcoat, and his nervousness as his luggage is searched before he’s allowed to board the ship.

Researching WWII Lives

Both for my Hidden Compass stories and for my upcoming novel about the same people, deep research has been essential, exciting, and exhausting. I thought it would be cool to share some of what I’m learning along the way.

One incredible source has been a stash of letters and documents I discovered, literally in a shoebox, in my father-in-law’s closet. The box belonged to my wife’s late mother Edith, who died in 1989, before I met the family.

Today I translated several letters sent between teenaged Edith, who was hidden in the south of France, and Margaret, her mother  who was a refugee in England. If you want to understand this situation better, read my latest Hidden Compass essay.

The letter you see on the left was sent via the International Red Cross, which limited a sender to only 25 words. This one struck me because of the first line: “Address of loved ones in Theresienstadt.”

Theresienstadt was a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, near the border with Germany. Tens of thousands of Jewish prisoners died there, including Edith’s grandfather Gustav Heinemann, in December, 1942. That opened a mystery for me—if  Edith’s grandparents had been deported, how could her mother have received an address?

I’ve learned that the Nazis promoted Theresienstadt as a sort of retirement community for prominent older Jews (Gustav had been a respected member of  Hannover’s judicial council). Rather than be deported to Poland, they would have been told, they could buy a place to live at Thereseinstadt. It was a self-governing village. I imagine it sounded like a wonderful alternative to what they likely knew was happening by then in places like Auschwitz.

The Heinemanns would have signed a phony contract, paid the money, and notified Margaret of their new address.

In reality it was a cruel, horrible joke. On the order of the SS, a governing Jewish council organized concerts, lectures, and art exhibits. But these were designed to maintain a facade of “the good life” for people whose deportation could have drawn scrutiny from the outside world.  The Heinemanns had moved to a ghetto designed to passively kill tens of thousands of old people through malnutrition and disease. They arrived in September, 1942 and less than three months later, Gustav was dead (his wife died there in 1944).

Here is the part that was even more heartbreaking as I thought about Margaret as a character in my novel: The date she wrote the letter to Edith, just under the note itself, is October 15, 1943. By the time she received her parents’ supposed address, her father had been dead for nearly a year.