The most frequent questions, Pt. 2

Why would a nice person like you write about Nazi Germany?

  I've written (and published) fiction and non-fiction short pieces for all ages, preschool through adult. Risking Exposure is the only one set in Nazi Germany. The others aren't even remotely similar in time or place or even in tone - Chicken Soup for the Soul for audiences seeking inspiration, Highlights High Five for preschoolers, Advance for Physical Therapists for PTs and PTAs, Discovery Years and Thriving Family for parents, Hopscotch for kids, plus a few currently on Wattpad. I think across genres, I read across genres, so I write across genres too.

I love stories, real or fictional, in which an unlikely hero must pull himself up by his bootstraps and become more than he was, in which an ordinary person is forced to rise above her circumstances in order to stand up for what is right.
That means the hero would have to be in a time and place in which doing what's right comes at great personal risk. Nazi Germany was just such a place.

All four of my grandparents emigrated to the US from Germany in the 1920s. One grandmother lived in our apartment building when I was a kid, and the other one moved in with us when I was a teen. So we got a good dose of the language, food, music, and culture of the homeland they loved. When I learned of the Nazi years in school, I asked the same questions many have asked - How could that happen? How could the country which produced my own family, plus geniuses like Bach and Goethe allow such horrors to occur right under their noses?

The answers are complex of course, spanning decades of Germany history and the culture of everyday life in a police state and dictatorship. But in exploring the answers, I found some simple themes which resonated with me -
it was a time and place of blind allegiance to an ideal;
in which some people held more value than others;

in which people were brainwashed by a flood of government-controlled information;
in which the voices of those who spoke against the regime were silenced through threats, violence, or detention.

It was and still is a perfect storm to use as a backdrop for a hero story. That's probably why so many of us writers choose to set our stories there.

Raised in a German household, pt. 3

One of the things I learned on this journey of reading, watching documentaries, and listening to survivor interviews was that people who were Jewish were not the only targets of Nazi aggression. Gypsies were also rounded up and sent to work camps or killed, along with political prisoners (anyone who spoke out or acted against the Reich), people who were deaf, homosexual, physically or mentally disabled, or mentally ill. This first happened to German citizens inside their own country, all part of the horrific Nazi push toward 'racial purity.' The violence escalated as the Wehrmacht pushed into other countries - those citizens were considered lesser humans too, just on the basis of nationality. But it all started with that single concept: 'The only people worth anything are the ones just like me.'

Here in 21st century America, we know better. We teach cultural diversity, we practice religious and ethnic tolerance, we have laws that uphold the rights of all people, regardless of persuasion or ability. Right? Not so fast.

This week, I met with a highly educated woman who expressed this concern (paraphrased): "My son rides the school bus with those children in wheelchairs. I don't want him to catch anything from their germs, because their germs are different than his."

I don't want to minimize the experiences of victims of the Nazis by comparing them to a transportation request, but to me, the attitude is all too familiar. Intolerance is intolerance, like the crazy culture of George Orwell's Animal Farm, where one of the laws posted reads: "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."

So intolerance and prejudice are alive and well in America. I personally believe that prejudice against the disabled tops the list.