Читать книгу What the Living Remember - Nancy Gerber - Страница 9

Author’s Note

What the Living Remember is inspired by my father’s experience as an adolescent who came of age in pre-war Nazi Germany. Born in Frankfurt in 1922, he fled Germany with his father and sister in late October 1938, a few short weeks before the smashing of synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses in the national government-sponsored pogrom known as Kristallnacht. My father rarely spoke of his past, and I know few details of his early life. The characters in this novella are products of my imagination and my desire to understand what it might be like to grow up as a Jewish child during the Nazi era.

In order to better understand what was happening to Jews in Germany in the years 1933 to 1936, the period in which the novella is set, I consulted a number of books. Those most helpful to my research were Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Harvard University Press, 2008), Doris L. Bergen, War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), and David M. Crowe, The Holocaust: Roots, History, and Aftermath (Westview Press, 2008). The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum provides a useful timeline of events on their website.

—N.G.