Excerpts from the Forward

Much of this novel is based on actual events. The nations and agencies in the story are real but the characters are compilations of the many people met as we pursued our family’s property claim in what had been the German Democratic Republic – East Germany – prior to the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

While this work is fictional, The Jewish Cemetery in Weissensee, Berlin, does exist and was essentially abandoned from the early 1940s until after German reunification in the 1990s. We trust that no one or no group will take offense that it is used as a major theme of this novel. It is our hope that all readers will understand that our intention is to honor Weissensee Cemetery’s past and its future.

This fascinating journey started with the United States Foreign Claims Commission. It took us along a path of history and of people that created the environment and the context for this work, a fictional account of what might have been, could have happened, and quite possibly did, at least in some world.

Lily spoke of those who died, and in her telling I knew that those long dead haunted her. She crossed an ocean on a journey into the past and came home with what had been for her an unknown history.

She also became one with the thousands from a particular era in Germany’s history who are scattered around the world who know they are heirs to the sorrows of an earlier generation. They were born by chance to be young witnesses on whose minds, conscious or unconscious, are imprinted the crimes of the past which neither time nor its forward motion can erase. There are not too many left to remind us of this era, fewer every day.

But there was nevertheless a difference in our reaction from  that of most Americans who watched these events. First, Lily wondered whether old ethnic hatreds would emerge from under the cover of government-ordered harmony. The Communists had kept a tight grip over people’s urge to act on old, remembered hatreds.

With new freedom came freedom to carry ancient hatreds into the present.

Lily’s second thought was rather a question: would her mother’s claim for property in what had been East Germany be honored?

The world in the west, immediately jittery at the possible menace posed by a unified, powerful Germany, was assured by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl that the new Germany would be a peace-loving, honorable country.

But the disappearance of the Wall also removed the blinders from history, raising many of the same questions in 1990 and 1991, which had dominated days in West Germany after the defeat of the Nazis in 1945. Even as the Wall came down, the questions were coming up.

It has to be understood that in the swift shift at the end of World War II from Nazi to Communist control, neither the government nor the people of East Germany were ever required to address the roles they had played in implementing Nazi policies from 1933 to 1945.