Skeletons at the Feast

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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.

It is important to note that although characters in this novel endure some of the same trials as Eva Henatsch and her remarkable family, Irmgard Emmerich-Mutti-is not Eva. Nor is Anna Emmerich a re-creation of Eva's daughter, Heidi. But I hope the fictional Mutti and Anna have at least a semblance of Eva's and Heidi's monumental courage and resiliency and compassion.

Finally, I must express my deepest gratitude to the entire Krahn family for sharing with me Eva's diary and then reading this manuscript. Heidi Krahn, Gerd Krahn, and Laura Krahn gave me observations about this novel in its earliest drafts that were helpful and wise, and they always shared their thoughts kindly. Their graciousness, their friendship, and their candor have meant the world to me, and I thank them once again for being a part of my family's life over the years-and for their patience with me while I was writing this novel.