She stares up at the house, a large grey-brick structure, and thinks of her father’s birth family, the grandparents and aunts and uncles she would never meet. Kate and Ian will be going to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe later in the week, before they head back home. She wants to see if she can find the Abramses’ and Kaplans’ names. It would soothe her to pay her respects and honour her lost family. She carries their legacy in her veins, and so does the baby girl growing inside her.
She runs her hand over her gently swelling belly now, thinking of her father, left alone somewhere upstairs in this very house, soiled and screaming and orphaned at not even a year old. Her face crumples.
“Come here,” Ian says, pulling her into a tight hug. Kate takes a minute to let it out, but as she buries her head in Ian’s chest, something catches her eye on the pavement below.
“Ian, look.”
She blinks through wet lashes. Inlaid in the cement are six small square brass markers with inscriptions. The names of Ezra, Zelda, Sarah, Samuel, Reuben, and Rebecca Abrams are engraved in capital letters on each of the stones. Beneath the names are birth dates, deportation dates, and death dates.
A tear drips onto Sarah’s name, and Ian rubs soft circles on her back.
“Do you know if your dad ever came here?” he asks.
Kate shakes her head. “Audrey didn’t say, but I think he would have told her if he had. In his letter he just said he’d finally learned they all died, and where. Maybe it was just too much for him to come.”
As Kate stands, Ian snaps a photo of the plaques. The front door of the house opens, and a middle-aged woman walks out onto the step in slippers and a red apron.
“Can I help you?” she asks.
Kate opens her mouth to apologize, then doesn’t. “Hi,” she says instead. “My dad’s family lived here. Before the war. The Abramses,” she says, indicating the plaques near her feet.
“Oh, my,” the woman says, coming down the stairs. “I’m so sorry. Welcome. They’re called stumbling stones,” she explains. “They’re all over the city. Markers for the victims.” Her face is pained. “I knew they were Abramses. Knew they were here, but… which one was your dad?” she asks.
“He’s not here, actually,” Kate says. “His name was Daniel. He was rescued from the house. He was just a baby.”
She leaves it at that. The woman nods, doesn’t press the matter.
“Mazel,” she says, indicating Kate’s belly.
“Thank you.”
“Please stay as long as you like.”
Ian thanks her, and she disappears back into the house.
It takes Kate a while before she’s ready to move on, then they walk a few streets over, to the Kaplans’ large row house.
“There it is,” Kate says.
It looks just like its fellows, lined up like spines on a bookshelf all along the street, but to Kate, it seems to shine with some inexplicable, radiant light.
Birds sing in the trees along the boulevard. A breeze flutters the leaves, and Kate can almost hear the music from Ruth’s piano floating on it, the notes from “Ilse’s Theme” that led Audrey home to her loved ones.
Kate rests her hand on the curved stone railing of the porch, cool beneath her fingers, thinking of all that happened here. It fills her up now, with grief and love and something warm that stings. She runs a hand over her belly again, knowing she’ll want to bring her daughter back here someday, when she’s old enough to learn.
To understand, and remember.
Author’s Note
Dear Reader,
So, funny story… I didn’t actually set out to write a World War II novel. It just sort of happened.
AUDREY AND MONA
I’m always on the lookout for untold—or undertold—stories, and while meandering down one of my frequent Historical Facts Rabbit Holes, I came across a woman named Mona Parsons. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, she was the only Canadian civilian woman to be sentenced to death and imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II. After learning about her, I found I couldn’t not use her story for inspiration. She lived an incredible life, a story you almost wouldn’t believe if someone told you (or wrote a novel inspired by it), and I was honoured to borrow from her experiences to construct Audrey’s character and story line. Mona’s biography is extensive, but to summarize: She was born in Nova Scotia, Canada, and became an actress and then a nurse before marrying a millionaire in New York and moving to the Netherlands. She and her husband joined the Dutch resistance and sheltered downed Allied airmen, smuggling them to safety.
While Audrey’s story certainly doesn’t follow Mona’s at every turn, I did fold several elements of Mona’s life history into Audrey’s character, including her theatrical and musical skills, her involvement in a resistance movement against the Nazis, her arrest for anti-Nazi/traitorous actions and subsequent imprisonment, her remarkable escape from prison during an Allied air raid, and her discovery—half-starved and bleeding—on a dirt road near Vlagtwedde by the North Nova Scotia Highlanders who had just assisted with the liberation of the Netherlands.
If you had difficulty believing that a judge would commute a convicted traitor’s death sentence, you would be wrong. This indeed happened to Mona; she apparently responded to the death sentence with such stone-cold courage that the judge told her to appeal, and it was later commuted to life with hard labour. For the sake of brevity, I depicted Audrey imprisoned only at Vechta, but in reality, Mona Parsons was moved around to several different prisons over the course of a few years before she was finally transferred to Vechta, where her weight reduced to about ninety pounds but she continued to try to effect some change via resistance. She incorrectly spliced wires while manufacturing German bomb igniters, just like Audrey did, hoping she might be able to save some lives from a distance. Mona escaped during an Allied air raid, making her way across Germany to the Dutch border. The prison director at Vechta did in fact open the gates when the men’s wing of the prison caught fire, telling the women that they could stay and be killed by the bombs, or take their chances on foot.
However, to the best of my knowledge, Mona never sprinted across a German minefield. That scene comes from my own family history. My grandfather was a bombardier in World War II. His Lancaster was shot down over German-occupied France, and of the seven men on the plane, only he and one other man survived. They became separated in the immediate aftermath of the crash, and my grandpa got up and ran through a field, watching in terror as armed German soldiers laughed at him. They weren’t shooting because they didn’t want to waste their bullets. They were waiting for him to hit a mine, but he never did. By some miracle or outrageous stroke of luck, he got safely to the other side, where he was then captured, given a cigarette in acknowledgement of his recent feat, and taken as a prisoner of war. He spent nearly a year eating rotten Brussels sprouts in a POW camp (the inspiration behind Audrey’s hatred of potatoes) before he was traded for medical supplies. Like so many people who served, my grandpa rarely talked about his experience in the war, and only opened up about these shocking stories as he was nearing the end of his life.
I wouldn’t be here, and you wouldn’t be holding this book, if my grandpa had hit one of those mines. So when I found myself writing a World War II novel, I decided I wanted to include that piece of my family history in the narrative, and it dovetailed so naturally onto Mona’s real-life escape from Vechta prison. I also thought it particularly fitting for a story that explores the nature of luck, chance, and accidents, and the often cruel—but occasionally wonderful—randomness of life.
Among other smaller details, the water ring on the piano that holds some significance in the novel was also borrowed from Mona’s history. When she and her husband were arrested, a group of Nazis occupied their house, and at some point left water rings on top of Mona’s prized, rare honey oak piano. When she returned to Canada from the Netherlands after the war, she brought the piano back with her and never had the water rings removed, as a reminder of the wounds the war had inflicted. This is one of the reasons I chose to make Audrey a pianist and pull the thread of the piano through the story, all the way to its connection with Kate, her father, and “Ilse’s Theme.” So much of the story touches on the scars we bear after trauma, and how we learn to live in new skin that will never be quite the same as it was before the injury.
After the war, Mona Parsons received citations from both the Royal Air Force, on behalf of the British, and President Dwight Eisenhower, on behalf of the Americans, for her outstanding courage in aiding the Allied effort and saving the lives of those soldiers. To date, she has never been officially recognized by the Canadian government, though in 2017, a statue in her honour was unveiled in her hometown of Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and in 2023 she was recognized on a Canada Post Remembrance Day stamp. Her tombstone names her as “wife of Major General H. W. Foster,” with no reference to her extraordinary life and heroism.
You can learn lots more about Mona Parsons online, or pick up the biography by Andria Hill-Lehr.
THE WOMAN IN THE ATTIC
There are so many stories to tell about World War II, partly because the collateral damage and reach of the war was so extensive. But it means, as a writer and an historical researcher, that there is such a rich pool of inspiration to draw from, and I’m always keen to braid as many stories together as my editors will allow.
