Audrey’s efforts to try to protect Ilse were inspired by the true story of Elsa Koditschek, a Jewish woman who managed to hide from the Nazis in her own attic in Vienna, even after a high-ranking Nazi officer—Herbert Gerbing—moved in downstairs when the SS confiscated her home. Elsa fled upon receiving a deportation order, and spent years hiding with non-Jewish friends before desperate circumstances pushed her to leave. Out of options, she returned to the last place anyone would look for her: her own attic. She was kept hidden by a sympathetic tenant who lived on the second floor of the house while Gerbing occupied the main floor. He entertained other officers in Elsa’s back garden and organized the deportation of Jewish people across Europe from the comfort of her sitting room below. There’s also a fascinating piece of this story that involves an Egon Schiele painting Elsa had to sell to help herself survive, the long road to discovering the provenance of the artwork decades later, and the sale of the multimillion-dollar piece. I wasn’t able to squeeze it into this narrative (believe me, I tried), but I highly recommend you look it up for further reading.
KRISTALLNACHT
The research authors undertake as part of the writing process can be distressing, but it’s necessary in order to craft stories that animate the history books and move readers on a very personal, human level. I knew, when I set out for greater detail about Kristallnacht than I had learned during my own education about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, that it was going to be emotional. But as I got into the weeds on this research, I was more deeply disturbed than I had anticipated by the witness and survivor accounts of home invasion and destruction. It was beyond what I had imagined, because a great deal of the coverage of Kristallnacht focuses on the destruction of Jewish synagogues, businesses, and schools on November 9–10, 1938. But with lists provided by Nazi Party officers and city officials, thousands (if not tens of thousands) of Jewish homes and apartments were also destroyed, looted, and vandalized beyond repair, in many cases making them uninhabitable and rendering the families homeless. Survivor accounts detail the beatings, sexual assaults, and murders that occurred during these home invasions on this night of systematic terror.
What happened to the Kaplan family home was not uncommon during the pogrom, and carried devastating consequences for the families.
THE GERMAN RESISTANCE
When I began my research for this book, digging into the types of resistance groups that existed during the war, I found a reference to a group of rebel cells in Germany and German-occupied Europe that were collectively called Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra) by the Nazis, who believed they had ties to the Soviets and were far more closely connected than they actually were. I was so intrigued by this piece of history that I decided to place my character inspired by Mona Parsons within a resistance organization in Germany instead of the Netherlands.
Some of these resisters were Nazi officers themselves, who, like the characters in the book, had diverse reasons for fighting back against the Third Reich and Hitler. Many believed that he would end up destroying Germany itself. Others had more altruistic and humanitarian motivations, and I’m sure others dreamed of usurping Hitler and seizing power for themselves. Among the general public, several different types of resistance groups existed outside the Rote Kapelle, mostly made up of Jewish people, Sinti, Roma, scientists, artists, humanists, youth, communists, workers’ unions, students, and those who resisted the regime based on their Christian faith and passivism.
The White Rose resistance group that makes a cameo is pulled right from the history books. They were a small association of students at the University of Munich who distributed leaflets, openly decried the Nazi regime and its genocidal actions, and urged students and other members of the German public to defy and sabotage the government in any way possible. The text Audrey finds pasted to the column of the Brandenburg Gate is a direct quote from the first leaflet of the White Rose. Two of their founding members, siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, were executed alongside a third resister, Christoph Probst, in February 1943. The rest of the members—along with the philosophy professor who supported their actions—were also eventually arrested and murdered. Hans Scholl’s final words before his execution by guillotine were “Let freedom live!”
Many individuals made attempts on Hitler’s life throughout the war. There are dozens of documented assassination attempts from 1932 onward. Some readers may be familiar with the culmination of these, what came to be known as the July 20 Plot, in 1944. It was an intricate attempted coup carried out by a group of Nazi officers who aimed to end the war by murdering Hitler at his East Prussian headquarters at Rastenburg. They tried to kill him with a bomb in a suitcase, but he escaped the blast with minor injuries. More than six hundred people who were in some way involved in the coup attempt were arrested in the aftermath. More than a hundred were sentenced to death and immediately murdered, and far more died later by suicide or in prison.
The German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin has permanent exhibits to commemorate all of these courageous resisters, and their online resources were invaluable in my research process for this book. I would strongly encourage you to learn more by accessing their online exhibit at gdw-berlin.de.
TAKING LIBERTY
One of the biggest challenges for historical fiction authors is choosing when to stick close to the historical record, and when to bend or ignore the facts and dates for the sake of fiction. The Reich Security Office (within the SS) did actually refer to radio operators as pianists, their radios as pianos, and their leaders as conductors, but I’ve taken liberty with the timeline, as those code terms were only used once Germany finally decrypted radio transmissions in 1942. I also took creative license to use the White Rose group in 1939, though they operated over the course of 1942–43, and The Great British Bake Off premiered in August of 2010, not November. But those poor delicious lemon cupcakes did get eliminated.
ON A PERSONAL NOTE
In grade eight, we were learning all about Canadian Confederation, and the men who made it happen. During that class, I stuck my hand in the air and quite innocently asked my female teacher, “What were the women doing?” You see, I was wondering what their wives and daughters were up to while these Very Important Men met and drank scotch in Very Important Rooms to discuss politics and make decisions for everyone else. In answer to my question, I was sent to the principal’s office for insubordination. For posing questions unrelated to the course content. For daring to ask what the women were doing.
Needless to say, I wasn’t in trouble with my parents, who congratulated me and took me out to Pizza Hut. But ever since that day, I have not stopped asking what the women were doing. It’s the question that drives my research and my novels, and I will keep asking it over and over again to try to help fill in the blanks of our history books where no one bothered to talk about what the women were doing.
I can’t wait to share my next novel with you, which brings us back to Toronto in the 1960s and covers the historic treatment of women’s mental health and incarceration (spoiler alert: it’s been awful).
I hope you will continue to join me.
P.S. Enjoy the Easter eggs.
Acknowledgements
First thanks go to my invaluable champion of an agent, Hayley Steed. There aren’t enough Reese’s peanut butter cups in the world for me to adequately express my gratitude, but I am the luckiest of authors to be able to call you my friend and teammate. Thank you, always, for everything you do (I know I’m probably only aware of about 70 percent of what you actually do behind the scenes for me and my career), and for so graciously putting up with me pitching you a new book idea approximately every 3.7 weeks.
Thanks to Sarah St. Pierre, Adrienne Kerr, Rita Silva, Cali Platek, and the team at Simon & Schuster Canada for your work on this project. To Olivia Barber and Olivia Robertshaw at Hodder UK for their valuable feedback on the first and second drafts, respectively, and to Kate Norman for guiding it to production. Thank you to my former UK editor and author friend Sara Nisha Adams for your support for the original story, its reimagination, and for taking the time to so eloquently describe what Islington smells like in the autumn (I’ve only ever visited London in the spring!).
One of the most wonderful surprises of my new career is the opportunity it’s afforded for me to really get to know some incredible women I otherwise would have only been able to admire from a distance. It’s an honour and a joy to be part of this community.
Thank you to my talented author pals Genevieve Graham, Charlene Carr, Natalie Jenner, Marissa Stapley, Amita Parikh, and Ellen Keith for your generosity of spirit and willingness to lend an ear, and to my additional early readers Kristin Harmel, Patti Callaghan Henry, Janet Skeslien Charles, Louise Fein, Karma Brown, Rachel McMillan, Caroline Bishop, Andie Newton, Roberta Rich, and Margaret DeRosia for taking time away from your own busy lives and projects to provide such generous endorsements for Audrey. And thank you to Kate Quinn for gently preparing me for the fact that the whole process of releasing a novel into the world will never become any less nerve-racking than it was the first time. Swallowing moths, indeed!
Special thanks to Jim for composing “Ilse’s Theme,” and somehow knowing precisely the sound I was going for. It was so special to be able to listen to it play in real life (and in my head) while I finished off this story.
I began writing the draft of this book when I was on maternity leave with my first child. As a rookie mum, I had no idea how difficult it would truly be to write a good novel with a newborn in tow, hormonal, and more bone-crushingly exhausted than I’d ever felt in my life. I’d written novels before, so I knew what was required to make that happen, but I’d never raised a baby before, and I still had a lot to learn on the job about being a mum. I also wildly underestimated the impact chronic, severe sleep deprivation and distraction would have on my mental energy and creative juices. I’m a firm believer that success rarely—if ever—happens in a vacuum, and I simply could not have accomplished this feat without the support of my family: the countless hours of quality childcare provided by my parents, Auntie K, and my mother-in-law, and my husband’s love, reassurance, and well-timed snack deliveries. I cannot thank you all enough for what you did to enable me to continue on with my writing career after having a baby.
If not for the pandemic and having a newborn, I would have been thrilled to visit the German Resistance Memorial Center in person when I first began writing the book. But when my brother announced that he was going to be visiting Berlin, I all but demanded he visit the GRMC for me to collect photos and hard copies of resistance documents. He also returned with several heartrending photos of the “stumbling stone” plaques around the city that commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, and which inspired the inclusion of the epilogue. So special thanks are due to my bro for being such a great bro to this housebound new mama.
And finally, thank you, readers.
I will be forever stunned by your response to my debut Looking for Jane. Many writers need to write, in the same way we need a myriad of other sustenance in our lives, from water, to love, and meaning. My heart needed to write Jane because I thought it was about time we started actually talking about the things we had only before whispered about. I hoped it might get published. I hoped a few people might read it. And then you took a story that, in my astonished mind, is still just scribbled sentences in my dogeared notebook, and you started talking.
You helped Jane reach tens of thousands of readers across Canada and around the world, you gifted it to each other, recommended it, waited months to check it out from your local libraries, and chose it for your book clubs because the themes in it resonated on a profoundly personal level. Since Jane’s publication, I’ve received hundreds of messages from readers sharing stories of heartbreak, horror, relief, connection, understanding, and hope—all the emotions I felt while writing it, and that is such a beautiful thing: that what I felt in my heart came out on the page and found its way into yours. For writers, having readers connect to our stories is the greatest professional joy and triumph, and we would be nothing without you.
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About the Author
HEATHER MARSHALL is the instant #1 bestselling author of Looking for Jane. She worked in politics and communications before turning her attention to her true passion: storytelling. Heather lives with her family near Toronto.
@HeatherMarshallAuthor
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