Author’s Note

Dear Reader,

So, funny story… I didn’t actually set out to write a World War II novel. It just sort of happened.

AUDREY AND MONA

I’m always on the lookout for untold—or undertold—stories, and while meandering down one of my frequent Historical Facts Rabbit Holes, I came across a woman named Mona Parsons. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, she was the only Canadian civilian woman to be sentenced to death and imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II. After learning about her, I found I couldn’t not use her story for inspiration. She lived an incredible life, a story you almost wouldn’t believe if someone told you (or wrote a novel inspired by it), and I was honoured to borrow from her experiences to construct Audrey’s character and story line. Mona’s biography is extensive, but to summarize: She was born in Nova Scotia, Canada, and became an actress and then a nurse before marrying a millionaire in New York and moving to the Netherlands. She and her husband joined the Dutch resistance and sheltered downed Allied airmen, smuggling them to safety.

While Audrey’s story certainly doesn’t follow Mona’s at every turn, I did fold several elements of Mona’s life history into Audrey’s character, including her theatrical and musical skills, her involvement in a resistance movement against the Nazis, her arrest for anti-Nazi/traitorous actions and subsequent imprisonment, her remarkable escape from prison during an Allied air raid, and her discovery—half-starved and bleeding—on a dirt road near Vlagtwedde by the North Nova Scotia Highlanders who had just assisted with the liberation of the Netherlands.

If you had difficulty believing that a judge would commute a convicted traitor’s death sentence, you would be wrong. This indeed happened to Mona; she apparently responded to the death sentence with such stone-cold courage that the judge told her to appeal, and it was later commuted to life with hard labour. For the sake of brevity, I depicted Audrey imprisoned only at Vechta, but in reality, Mona Parsons was moved around to several different prisons over the course of a few years before she was finally transferred to Vechta, where her weight reduced to about ninety pounds but she continued to try to effect some change via resistance. She incorrectly spliced wires while manufacturing German bomb igniters, just like Audrey did, hoping she might be able to save some lives from a distance. Mona escaped during an Allied air raid, making her way across Germany to the Dutch border. The prison director at Vechta did in fact open the gates when the men’s wing of the prison caught fire, telling the women that they could stay and be killed by the bombs, or take their chances on foot.

However, to the best of my knowledge, Mona never sprinted across a German minefield. That scene comes from my own family history. My grandfather was a bombardier in World War II. His Lancaster was shot down over German-occupied France, and of the seven men on the plane, only he and one other man survived. They became separated in the immediate aftermath of the crash, and my grandpa got up and ran through a field, watching in terror as armed German soldiers laughed at him. They weren’t shooting because they didn’t want to waste their bullets. They were waiting for him to hit a mine, but he never did. By some miracle or outrageous stroke of luck, he got safely to the other side, where he was then captured, given a cigarette in acknowledgement of his recent feat, and taken as a prisoner of war. He spent nearly a year eating rotten Brussels sprouts in a POW camp (the inspiration behind Audrey’s hatred of potatoes) before he was traded for medical supplies. Like so many people who served, my grandpa rarely talked about his experience in the war, and only opened up about these shocking stories as he was nearing the end of his life.

I wouldn’t be here, and you wouldn’t be holding this book, if my grandpa had hit one of those mines. So when I found myself writing a World War II novel, I decided I wanted to include that piece of my family history in the narrative, and it dovetailed so naturally onto Mona’s real-life escape from Vechta prison. I also thought it particularly fitting for a story that explores the nature of luck, chance, and accidents, and the often cruel—but occasionally wonderful—randomness of life.

Among other smaller details, the water ring on the piano that holds some significance in the novel was also borrowed from Mona’s history. When she and her husband were arrested, a group of Nazis occupied their house, and at some point left water rings on top of Mona’s prized, rare honey oak piano. When she returned to Canada from the Netherlands after the war, she brought the piano back with her and never had the water rings removed, as a reminder of the wounds the war had inflicted. This is one of the reasons I chose to make Audrey a pianist and pull the thread of the piano through the story, all the way to its connection with Kate, her father, and “Ilse’s Theme.” So much of the story touches on the scars we bear after trauma, and how we learn to live in new skin that will never be quite the same as it was before the injury.

After the war, Mona Parsons received citations from both the Royal Air Force, on behalf of the British, and President Dwight Eisenhower, on behalf of the Americans, for her outstanding courage in aiding the Allied effort and saving the lives of those soldiers. To date, she has never been officially recognized by the Canadian government, though in 2017, a statue in her honour was unveiled in her hometown of Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and in 2023 she was recognized on a Canada Post Remembrance Day stamp. Her tombstone names her as “wife of Major General H. W. Foster,” with no reference to her extraordinary life and heroism.

You can learn lots more about Mona Parsons online, or pick up the biography by Andria Hill-Lehr.

THE WOMAN IN THE ATTIC

There are so many stories to tell about World War II, partly because the collateral damage and reach of the war was so extensive. But it means, as a writer and an historical researcher, that there is such a rich pool of inspiration to draw from, and I’m always keen to braid as many stories together as my editors will allow.

Audrey’s efforts to try to protect Ilse were inspired by the true story of Elsa Koditschek, a Jewish woman who managed to hide from the Nazis in her own attic in Vienna, even after a high-ranking Nazi officer—Herbert Gerbing—moved in downstairs when the SS confiscated her home. Elsa fled upon receiving a deportation order, and spent years hiding with non-Jewish friends before desperate circumstances pushed her to leave. Out of options, she returned to the last place anyone would look for her: her own attic. She was kept hidden by a sympathetic tenant who lived on the second floor of the house while Gerbing occupied the main floor. He entertained other officers in Elsa’s back garden and organized the deportation of Jewish people across Europe from the comfort of her sitting room below. There’s also a fascinating piece of this story that involves an Egon Schiele painting Elsa had to sell to help herself survive, the long road to discovering the provenance of the artwork decades later, and the sale of the multimillion-dollar piece. I wasn’t able to squeeze it into this narrative (believe me, I tried), but I highly recommend you look it up for further reading.

KRISTALLNACHT

The research authors undertake as part of the writing process can be distressing, but it’s necessary in order to craft stories that animate the history books and move readers on a very personal, human level. I knew, when I set out for greater detail about Kristallnacht than I had learned during my own education about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, that it was going to be emotional. But as I got into the weeds on this research, I was more deeply disturbed than I had anticipated by the witness and survivor accounts of home invasion and destruction. It was beyond what I had imagined, because a great deal of the coverage of Kristallnacht focuses on the destruction of Jewish synagogues, businesses, and schools on November 9–10, 1938. But with lists provided by Nazi Party officers and city officials, thousands (if not tens of thousands) of Jewish homes and apartments were also destroyed, looted, and vandalized beyond repair, in many cases making them uninhabitable and rendering the families homeless. Survivor accounts detail the beatings, sexual assaults, and murders that occurred during these home invasions on this night of systematic terror.

What happened to the Kaplan family home was not uncommon during the pogrom, and carried devastating consequences for the families.

THE GERMAN RESISTANCE

When I began my research for this book, digging into the types of resistance groups that existed during the war, I found a reference to a group of rebel cells in Germany and German-occupied Europe that were collectively called Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra) by the Nazis, who believed they had ties to the Soviets and were far more closely connected than they actually were. I was so intrigued by this piece of history that I decided to place my character inspired by Mona Parsons within a resistance organization in Germany instead of the Netherlands.

Some of these resisters were Nazi officers themselves, who, like the characters in the book, had diverse reasons for fighting back against the Third Reich and Hitler. Many believed that he would end up destroying Germany itself. Others had more altruistic and humanitarian motivations, and I’m sure others dreamed of usurping Hitler and seizing power for themselves. Among the general public, several different types of resistance groups existed outside the Rote Kapelle, mostly made up of Jewish people, Sinti, Roma, scientists, artists, humanists, youth, communists, workers’ unions, students, and those who resisted the regime based on their Christian faith and passivism.

The White Rose resistance group that makes a cameo is pulled right from the history books. They were a small association of students at the University of Munich who distributed leaflets, openly decried the Nazi regime and its genocidal actions, and urged students and other members of the German public to defy and sabotage the government in any way possible. The text Audrey finds pasted to the column of the Brandenburg Gate is a direct quote from the first leaflet of the White Rose. Two of their founding members, siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, were executed alongside a third resister, Christoph Probst, in February 1943. The rest of the members—along with the philosophy professor who supported their actions—were also eventually arrested and murdered. Hans Scholl’s final words before his execution by guillotine were “Let freedom live!”

Many individuals made attempts on Hitler’s life throughout the war. There are dozens of documented assassination attempts from 1932 onward. Some readers may be familiar with the culmination of these, what came to be known as the July 20 Plot, in 1944. It was an intricate attempted coup carried out by a group of Nazi officers who aimed to end the war by murdering Hitler at his East Prussian headquarters at Rastenburg. They tried to kill him with a bomb in a suitcase, but he escaped the blast with minor injuries. More than six hundred people who were in some way involved in the coup attempt were arrested in the aftermath. More than a hundred were sentenced to death and immediately murdered, and far more died later by suicide or in prison.

The German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin has permanent exhibits to commemorate all of these courageous resisters, and their online resources were invaluable in my research process for this book. I would strongly encourage you to learn more by accessing their online exhibit at gdw-berlin.de.

TAKING LIBERTY

One of the biggest challenges for historical fiction authors is choosing when to stick close to the historical record, and when to bend or ignore the facts and dates for the sake of fiction. The Reich Security Office (within the SS) did actually refer to radio operators as pianists, their radios as pianos, and their leaders as conductors, but I’ve taken liberty with the timeline, as those code terms were only used once Germany finally decrypted radio transmissions in 1942. I also took creative license to use the White Rose group in 1939, though they operated over the course of 1942–43, and The Great British Bake Off premiered in August of 2010, not November. But those poor delicious lemon cupcakes did get eliminated.

ON A PERSONAL NOTE

In grade eight, we were learning all about Canadian Confederation, and the men who made it happen. During that class, I stuck my hand in the air and quite innocently asked my female teacher, “What were the women doing?” You see, I was wondering what their wives and daughters were up to while these Very Important Men met and drank scotch in Very Important Rooms to discuss politics and make decisions for everyone else. In answer to my question, I was sent to the principal’s office for insubordination. For posing questions unrelated to the course content. For daring to ask what the women were doing.

Needless to say, I wasn’t in trouble with my parents, who congratulated me and took me out to Pizza Hut. But ever since that day, I have not stopped asking what the women were doing. It’s the question that drives my research and my novels, and I will keep asking it over and over again to try to help fill in the blanks of our history books where no one bothered to talk about what the women were doing.

I can’t wait to share my next novel with you, which brings us back to Toronto in the 1960s and covers the historic treatment of women’s mental health and incarceration (spoiler alert: it’s been awful).

I hope you will continue to join me.

P.S. Enjoy the Easter eggs.