I had thought I was finished with WWII, and I'd already completed two
novels in the WWI series. I was about to tackle 1914 when this idea for
1938 muscled its way to the front of the queue.
In
my family, there's a story that one of our aunts traveled to Germany in
the late thirties and became good friends (you can read into that
whatever you want), with a German boy. He is said to have asked her,
when she returned home, to warn her government that Hitler had eyes on
Britain.
What she did with this warning is
not known, though I doubt she was in a position to do anything – a
middle class teenager with no connections in government. But I've seen a
film shot on her new movie camera (her dad worked for Kodak in London),
showing the two of them windswept and happy. He was either wearing a
Boy Scout uniform, or, more probably, that of the Hitler Youth.
This,
understandably, had stuck in my mind. But on its own it was not enough
to carry an entire novel. (It did, however, bring to mind a cultural
exchange in the other direction. When I was a teenager we had a German
boy stay with us for a couple of weeks. It did not go well, and I was
not invited back to his place.)
It was not
until I attended a Bat Mitzvah of a friend in San Pedro, California,
that the rest of the story clicked into place. One of the rescued
torahs from Czechoslovakia (a story – or rather, several – in itself)
was passed around, and I found the moment profoundly moving. It was
then that I knew I had my story.
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