A Feather on the Water(106)

The writing blurred as Delphine read on. She was smiling and crying as she laid the letter down. There was something else inside the envelope. A copy of the snap Charlie had taken that first Christmas at Seidenmühle of the three of them, all smiling as they raised their glasses in a toast.

There was something on the back of it. Turning it over, Delphine saw what Martha had written: “To life—wherever it takes us.”





AUTHOR’S NOTE

The idea for A Feather on the Water came from a photograph I found by chance. I was searching for an image of Marie Louise Habets, the former nun who inspired my earlier novel The House at Mermaid’s Cove. I came across a black-and-white shot of her with another woman, both wearing military-style uniforms with the symbol of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration on their caps. The other woman was Kathryn Hulme, the American journalist who wrote a book based on Marie Louise’s life, The Nun’s Story (which became a film starring Audrey Hepburn). I discovered that the women had met while working in a DP camp in Bavaria at the end of WWII, and that Kathryn had written about their experiences in another book, called The Wild Place. While the protagonists in my novel are purely fictional, many of the challenges they face reflect what Kathryn and Marie Louise encountered when they became aid workers.

Some of the characters in A Feather on the Water are not imaginary but real. Mr. Ho, the Chinese diplomat, is one of these. Feng Shan Ho helped thousands of Austrian Jews escape the Nazis by issuing them transit visas. In trying to discover why he did so, when other embassies in Vienna refused to help, I found out that Mr. Ho was born into poverty and lost his parents at a young age but was helped by Norwegian missionaries based in the Hunan Province of China. They gave him an education and taught him to give back to society in return for the gifts he had been given. In issuing the visas, he disobeyed the instructions of his superiors. Two years into the war, he was removed from his diplomatic post and sent back to China. In 2000 he was posthumously awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem for his humanitarian courage.

Another character who really existed is Laura Margolis, the representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. She arrived in Shanghai in 1941, and of the approximately twenty thousand German and Austrian refugees then living in the city, eight thousand received at least one meal a day from the Joint’s soup kitchens. Despite being interned for a time by the Japanese, she managed to keep the soup kitchens running.

I have used some literary license in the dates of certain historical events outlined in the novel. The evacuation of Shanghai began in October 1948 (not 1947, as I suggested). The sinking of the steamer Kiangya during the evacuation happened in December 1948. An estimated two thousand to three thousand passengers drowned—a higher death toll than that of the Titanic.

The DP Act allowing refugees into America wasn’t passed until June 1948 (a year later than in my story). In October that year, the ship General Black arrived in New York Harbor—the first to bring DPs to the USA after WWII. Soon after, other ships arrived in Boston and New Orleans. It wasn’t until February 1949 that the first Jewish refugees from Shanghai arrived in San Francisco, to be transferred to sealed trains that took them to Ellis Island in New York.

It took a long time for the millions of people displaced by WWII to find new homes. There were still camps operating in Germany in the 1950s. The last one closed in 1959, fourteen years after the fighting had ended.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In addition to Kathryn Hulme’s The Wild Place, Ben Shephard’s book about the aftermath of the Second World War, The Long Road Home, was an invaluable source of information about Displaced Persons camps and the people who ran them. When researching the Kindertransport, I learned much about how it felt to be a child taken away from Nazi-occupied Vienna by reading Lore Segal’s Other People’s Houses. I also gathered vital information for the creation of the character Delphine from Anne Sebba’s fascinating book Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died.

Thank you to Jodi Warshaw and everyone at Lake Union Publishing for the great job they do. I’m also grateful to Christina Henry de Tessan for her perceptive suggestions during the editing process.

Huge thanks to my family for their unwavering support—particularly my daughter, Ruth, who made exploring Brooklyn so much fun, and Steve, my husband, for all the early-morning coffees and his unfailing good humor. Finally, thank you to my mum, my champion and my number-one fan: I’m heartbroken that you passed away before you got to read this.