GROWING UP IN BUCHAREST, ROMANIA, gypsy music was an indelible part of my life. In summertime, I’d often hear it emerge from restaurant terraces or busy squares where players would serenade passersby, and I would stop to listen, enraptured by those soulful tunes of loss and longing.
Yet, despite the Romani’s unparalleled talent as musicians, I also witnessed far too often the way in which mothers would rush their children along while passing them on the street, the way others would walk right by them without a glance in their direction, as if they were invisible. Why were they treated with such disdain, such suspicion, when they did nothing more than bring some vibrancy to an ordinary afternoon? Why were they seen as outsiders in their own birth countries when they made up such a large part of the population? These questions, even in the years after I’d moved to California, never stopped haunting me.
It wasn’t until several years ago when I began researching the turbulent and complex World War II history of Romania’s neighbor Hungary that the idea of integrating this little-understood and mystical culture in my new novel solidified. It was important for me to portray not only the bohemian existence of the Romani in times of peace but also their cruel fate during World War II when, much as the Jewish population, they were persecuted, stripped of possessions and rights, and deported in mass numbers to labor and concentration camps. What I found most surprising—and equally disconcerting as my research progressed—is that while a quarter of Europe’s Roma reportedly perished at the hands of the Nazis, so little has been written on the subject. Ultimately, my hope is that through Aleandro’s heart-wrenching journey and losses, I could shed a little light on what some historians call “the forgotten Holocaust.”
While this is a work of fiction, it bears mentioning that many aspects of this novel are drawn from real life. For example, the art of Aleandro Szabó was inspired by that of Latvian artist Kalman Aron, who, after losing his parents when Germany invaded Latvia, was assigned to slave labor and moved through seven different camps in Poland, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. When his skill was discovered by the guards, he was exempted from hard labor and was given extra food in exchange for portraits or replicas of family photographs. In 2018, a New York Times article announcing Aron’s death at the age of ninety-three quotes him as telling documentary film maker Steven C. Barber: “I made it through the Holocaust with a pencil.” After the war, Aron moved to Los Angeles, where he began re-creating his painful memories in a series of paintings that garnered him worldwide acclaim. Today, one of his more prominent pieces, Mother and Child, is displayed at the entrance of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.
Much like Aleandro, Eduard Kovaks, Eva’s husband, is inspired by the real-life Dr. András Seibriger, who, during the fifty-two days of the Budapest siege, helped save the lives of thousands of soldiers and civilians in a subterranean hospital buried deep under Castle Hill. Originally, the Hospital in the Rock was equipped to accommodate no more than 120 people, but according to records, during the heaviest days of bombardment, its capacity was exceeded more than tenfold. Beds were pushed together to create extra room for the deluge of patients, while nurses and medics—like Eduard, Eva, and Tamara—endured the harsh conditions themselves, often working without running water or food for days and sleeping only sporadically on vacant stretchers. At the end of the war the hospital was closed, yet when the Hungarian Revolution erupted in 1956, Dr. Seibriger returned to help save the lives of freedom fighters who found themselves under relentless fire by Soviet troops. Unlike Eduard in the novel, Seibriger, who suffered from a heart condition, did not flee Hungary after the uprising (despite imminent danger of arrest or execution), but he did lose the right to practice medicine and was persecuted by the Soviet regime until his death in 1977. Today, the hospital is a museum filled with wax reenactments of those brutal scenes. One depicts a young Dr. Seibriger attending to injured patients during the days of the revolution.
Lastly, while Eva is drawn entirely from my imagination, she embodies the courageous, selfless spirit of wartime nurses and resistance fighters—many from noble families like her own—who stepped bravely in harm’s way to fight against injustice and persecution. She perhaps more than any character in the book exemplifies what we are capable of in times of crisis, and how it is that in the most desperate times we discover who we truly are. I hope her story has inspired you as much as it has me.