The Ragged Edge of Night(103)

When his happy days as a friar ended, Anton found himself conscripted into military service, forced to fight for the government he hated, the people who had taken and destroyed everything he had loved. He did complete one paratrooper’s jump and the march to Riga but left the Wehrmacht immediately after, with an injured back for an excuse. Both Rita and Angie maintain to this day that his back was fine; the lie was his first overt resistance against the Nazi Party (known in this book mostly as the NSDAP, short for the German name: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.)

No one is entirely sure why he did it, but at some point after leaving the Franciscan Order, Anton answered a personal ad in one of the few remaining Catholic newspapers, exchanging letters with Elisabeth Hansjosten Herter, a widow struggling to care for her three children in the tiny village of Unterboihingen. Elisabeth’s past—and the story of her first marriage—were exactly as I portrayed them in this novel. My only alteration to Elisabeth’s past was to change the date of her marriage to Anton. They married in April instead of October, and in 1941. As far as I know, Anton never proposed a companionate marriage, nor faked any incapacity—that was a device I added at the recommendation of my editor, who felt truth was stranger than fiction, and their first meeting needed a little more tension.

That was all I knew of Anton’s life for many years, and goodness knows, it’s interesting enough on its own to carry a novel—the story of a slowly blossoming wartime romance between two unlikely partners, the widow and the ex-friar. But despite my publisher prodding me to dip my toe into World War II, I didn’t feel the time was right to develop my notes about Anton and Elisabeth into a book. Most of my historical fiction has focused on figures whom history remembers as larger than life—powerful, important, far from ordinary. I didn’t yet feel enough drive to tell Opa’s story—the story of an ordinary person who fought back against some of the worst impulses of the human heart.

It wasn’t until the 2016 election that I knew the time had come.

As I watched the US I thought I knew devolve, seemingly overnight, into an unrecognizable landscape—a place where political pundits threw up Nazi salutes in front of news cameras, unafraid—a place where swastikas bloomed like fetid flowers on the walls of synagogues and mosques—I knew the time had come. I called Jodi Warshaw, my first editor at Lake Union Publishing, and told her I’d finally found a World War II subject I wanted to write… and I wanted to write it now. Jodi agreed that the time was right for a story of resistance—of an ordinary person taking a stand against hate. Within weeks, my proposal for The Ragged Edge of Night was approved, and I began to research and develop the book in earnest.

I have written many historical novels over the years, and have enjoyed researching them all, but never has the research process touched me so deeply. Rita and Angie were both excited that their family history would soon be a novel, and I was humbled that they trusted me to tell the story well. My mother-in-law and aunt were overwhelmingly generous with their knowledge, time, and irreplaceable family artifacts. Rita gave me a whole bag of Anton’s personal items, and while I worked on Ragged Edge, I kept them spread out across the bed in my guest room, which doubles as my office. Whenever I felt stuck or disheartened, I would look through these artifacts of Anton’s life. I could all but sense his presence, then—a feeling no doubt helped by Paul and the striking resemblance he bears to his astonishingly brave grandfather.

I was moved—so moved, I can’t find the words to describe it—by Rita’s gift of Anton’s Wehrmacht workbook. I can’t read the notes he wrote inside, but the blank spot on the cover, where he scratched away Hitler’s swastika, speaks plainly across our language barrier. Just as touching are Anton’s photos—the story they tell, if you look closely enough. There is an image of a church spire in Riga, wreathed in flames—and a picture of his classroom at St. Josefsheim, empty of children. Anton kept a few photos of his life as a friar, but there are no pictures of any of the children he cared for while he was with the order. Clearly, their loss was a pain so great he couldn’t bear to relive it in later years.

In the spring of 2017, when I was deep in the development phase of this book, Paul and I welcomed Rita and Angie to our home on San Juan Island. They had come to tell me more stories about Opa and the bells—and I was delighted by what they told me.

“You know,” I said as they settled in, “this book I’m writing—it’s fiction, not a biography. So I’m going to take some artistic license. I’ll need to make a lot of things up, for the sake of telling an exciting story.”

“Like what?” Rita asked.

“Well…” I paused, worried about how they would react. “I thought I might add some drama by involving your dad in a plot to assassinate Hitler.”

Angie shrugged. “You don’t have to make that up. He was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler.”

My eyes must have nearly popped out of my head. “What? Are you kidding me?”

“No,” Rita said, “it’s true. He told us a few times that he was wrapped up in something like that during the war.”

“But he never went into much detail,” Angie added. “He didn’t like to talk about it.”

I couldn’t believe my good luck.