Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

And so Anna and Callum had a son with a name that was uncommon in Scotland, but sometimes made Anna smile when she said the full name aloud. On occasion those smiles were wistful because she was contemplating all that was gone from the world, or she was recalling in her mind's eye Uri's grave, well-chiseled face; but other times, especially as days passed and small hints of her baby's own personality began to emerge, those smiles would verge on the ecstatic because she was pondering all that nevertheless remained.

Nearby the dog barked and Uri opened his eyes. Blinked. Rolled his small head slightly toward the sound. Then he closed them again, as he slowly began to reacclimate himself to the waking world. She decided if she was going to finish the letter from Cecile, she had better return to it right now. And so she picked up the paper and started to read, catching up with the Frenchwoman with whom she had been friends since their paths had crossed at the very end of the war. Once Cecile had left the displaced-persons camp outside of Lübeck, she had returned to Lyon. Her fiancé had indeed perished, as had her mother and father, but she remained surprised by the number of friends who had somehow survived. She worked now as a secretary in a small publishing house and had a cat and a boyfriend. Cecile made the future, as always, sound promising.

Anna had almost finished the letter when Uri once again opened his eyes and looked up at her. He shaped his impossibly small mouth into an oval. A greeting, she thought, though she presumed he might simply have been hungry and in a moment would use that mouth to cry out for food. She loved the glimmer of recognition she saw in his eyes when his lids first rolled back after a nap and he recognized her.

Now she lifted the boy up and into her arms, brought his face to hers, and thought of nothing and no one-not Cecile or parents or siblings or in-laws or even her husband-but her baby, and how remarkably warm this small person's skin was against hers.

A GIRL STOOD beside one of the pomegranate trees on a narrow street in Beersheba, savoring the shade she had found and watching the long parade of captured Egyptian trucks passing by. The trucks were filled with victorious Israeli soldiers now, whooping and hollering and singing. The driver of every second or third truck would press exuberantly on the vehicle's horn. She herself had been on one of those trucks until a few moments ago, when she had hopped off.

She wiped the sweat from her brow with the sleeve of her shirt, made sure that her machine gun's safety was on, and then wandered down the street to the gray-green awning of the restaurant. The ground was so hot that she could feel it through the soles of her boots-a sensation that she knew well, and one that always reminded her of how profoundly different the Middle East was from Europe. She couldn't imagine ever living in Germany again. She knew she was young, but she was confident that she would never again want anything to do with that country-or, for that matter, with the whole European continent.

The café was a joyous mob scene in which every table was taken and the bar was filled with young and old soldiers who were toasting to victory and the Negev and the future of Israel, and everybody was at least as happy as the soldiers who had just ridden by on the trucks. She found a table with three soldiers, including the lanky fellow whom she had agreed to meet here today, God willing. She saw him before he saw her, and so she snuck up behind him and kissed him on the cheek, pressing her lips against the coarse stubble there. He hadn't shaved in two days.

“Ah, my Rebekah,” he said, standing and smiling. He took her in his long arms and embraced her. “I knew you would make it.”

SKELETONS AT THE FEAST HAD ITS ORIGINS IN 1998 when good friends of my family, Gerd and Laura Krahn, first shared with me the diary that Gerd's East Prussian grandmother kept from roughly 1920 through 1945. Eva Henatsch raised her large family on a sugar beet farm in a tract of land that in her life-time was a part of Germany, then Poland, and then Germany once again. Much of the diary chronicles the day-to-day minutiae of helping to manage a sizable estate in a remote, still rural corner of Europe; but then there are the pages that chronicle 1945, and her family's arduous trek west ahead of the Soviet army-a journey that was always grueling and often terrifying.

When I first read the diary in 1998, translated into English by Eva's daughter, Heidi Krahn, and enhanced with the memories of other family members, I was fascinated. But I certainly didn't anticipate that it would ever inspire me to embark upon a novel.

Eight years later, however, in 2006, I read Max Hastings's remarkable history of the last year of the war in Germany, Armageddon, and I was struck by how often the anecdotes in Hastings's nonfiction chronicle mirrored moments in Eva Henatsch's diary. Apparently, the horrors in Henatsch's diary-as well as the more ordinary moments in her life-were not unique. It was thus almost out of intellectual curiosity that I asked Gerd if I could revisit his grandmother's diary. And then, on that second reading, I began to imagine a novel.

In addition to Armageddon, there were a great many books that were helpful to me while writing Skeletons at the Feast. Among them were D-Day, June 6, 1944, by Stephen E. Ambrose, which offered descriptions of paratroop landings that I used to create the chaos that surrounded Callum Finella's drop; Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, by Jan T. Gross; Hitler's Willing Executioners, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen; On Hitler's Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood, by Irmgard A. Hunt; What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany, by Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband; Sins of the Innocent: A Memoir, by Mireille Marokvia; The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, by Daniel Mendelsohn; German Boy: A Child in War, Wolfgang W. E. Samuel's memoir of his life in the final days of the Second World War (with, coincidentally, a foreword by Stephen Ambrose); and The Holocaust: Personal Accounts, edited by David Scrase and Wolfgang Mieder.

Three novels I read in the past two years also helped guide me through this period in history: Wartime Lies, by Louis Begley; Crabwalk, by Günter Grass; and Suite Française, by Irene Nemirovsky, which is set in France in 1940 and 1941, but includes some of the most haunting scenes I have ever read of a scared people on the move.

One memoir that I found both informative and inspirational was Gerda Weissmann Klein's poignant and powerful account of her adolescence and young adulthood, All but My Life. The fictional character Cecile Fournier in this novel owes much to her-as well as to my neighbor here in Vermont, Gizela Neumann, a Holocaust survivor whose memories are moving and whose wisdom is extensive. Neumann and Klein attribute their survival to both the profound and the prosaic: The profound was their faith; the prosaic was their shoes. Klein wore what she calls ski boots in her memoir; Neumann, meanwhile, had her hiking boots. On the death marches of early 1945, those shoes made all the difference for both women.

I also want to thank some of my earliest readers, including Dr. Michael Berenbaum, creator of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., as well as a rabbi, an author, an editor, and an award-winning filmmaker; Larry Wolff, a professor of history at New York University and a scholar on the history of Poland; Johanna Boyce; Stephen Kiernan; Dr. Richard Munson; Adam Turteltaub; my editor, Shaye Areheart; my agent, Jane Gelfman; and my wife, Victoria Blewer. I owe much also to the guidance of Jenny Frost at the Crown Publishing Group and Dean Schramm with the Jim Preminger Agency.