Writing is a sort of lonely process, because at the end of the day only one pair of hands can fit on a laptop, and most of the time—at least midproject—I wish they were anyone’s but mine. For this book, I am grateful for the people who symbolically shared the keyboard and made writing feel like a team sport.
My agent, Ginger Clark, read three paragraphs of an early plot description and immediately informed me that the book I was describing should be about teenagers, rather than the adults I’d been envisioning. She was right, as she is about most things.
My editor, Lisa Yoskowitz, was instrumental in suggesting so many plot and character developments that I hesitate to enumerate them here, lest I reveal myself to be a total idiot.
Robert Cox, my husband, offered scrupulous notes over multiple drafts, and pancakes at IHOP when they became necessary. I could not have asked for a smarter reader or a better partner.
It’s daunting, and perhaps a little presumptuous, to try to tell a story about a culture and time that don’t belong to you. But I knew from the beginning that I wanted this story to be set in Amsterdam, in World War II, and I wanted it to feel authentically Dutch. Getting the dates and geography right was one thing, but getting the Dutch sensibility right required an entirely different level of nuance. And so I am grateful to the tour guide in Amsterdam who first introduced me to the phrase “God made the world, but the Dutch made the Netherlands.” I am grateful to the cyclists in the city who gently chided me when I misunderstood the rules of bicycle culture. I am grateful for Amsterdam’s exhaustive, absorbing museum collections, and for the private citizens who bothered to create websites—in English!—on topics ranging from the proper pronunciation of Dutch names to the fate of each naval torpedo ship during the German invasion.
I am deeply grateful, on a literary and on a humanistic level, for the Dutch resistance workers who later wrote about their experiences, which provided such rich, textured accounts of a time and place. Reading the memoirs of Miep Gies, Corrie ten Boom, Hanneke Ippisch, and Diet Eman, among others, taught me a great deal about what it felt like to live through World War II in Amsterdam. And finally: So much of what the world knows about the war, the city, and the human experience is because of one particular book, written from an attic, in the middle of the occupation. I am most profoundly grateful to Anne.