Story ideas often come when I least expect them, and this book was no exception. In July 2019, my friend Teresa invited my family to join hers for a Saturday afternoon outing to Parkes, a small town about ninety minutes’ drive from our homes in Central New South Wales.
Parkes is famous for many things: a fierce rivalry with the nearby town of Forbes; an annual Elvis festival; and the two-hundred-foot telescope that juts out of the flat, sparse landscape to the north. The CSIRO Parkes radio telescope, known to Aussies as “the Dish,” helped broadcast the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. The Parkes Observatory was hosting a festival for the fiftieth anniversary of that event. As I wandered the exhibits with Teresa and our respective children, I saw a display about the history of the US space program. It mentioned beginning in 1950, German scientists worked with American scientists to develop the rockets that would ultimately see humankind reach the moon.
I was immediately struck by how unlikely that arrangement was. Just a few years earlier, those men had been on opposing sides of a horrific war—but they worked together and achieved one of humanity’s most astounding technological accomplishments. I started researching as soon as I got home that night and fell down something of an Operation Paperclip rabbit hole.
I learned that Operation Paperclip was a program to bring the most valuable German scientists across the Atlantic to work for the US government. It was an immense undertaking, involving more than 1,600 German scientists and engineers across many disciplines, from chemistry and physics to architecture and medicine and, of course, rocketry. Most of those German scientists ultimately lived out their lives in freedom and comfort in America, their pasts rewritten so they could be of service to the US government. Many were complicit in war crimes. Others were complicit through their silence.
Just like Jürgen and Sofie, many of these German men would argue that they had only done what they felt they had to in order to keep their families safe. Does that rationale hold out in the face of unfathomable suffering and death? Is there a point where we are morally obliged to take a stand, whatever the cost?
In writing this book, I wanted to show Jürgen and Sofie caught in an unimaginably difficult situation through the Nazi years, as so many German citizens were. But given the choices they make along the way, I’m still not sure my characters deserve the happy ending they find. It’s historically accurate that Jürgen’s past would be “erased” once he arrives in America, but is it just? I only hope readers will ponder this too.
Nothing about Operation Paperclip was simple—not the politics, the mechanics, or even the ethics. It has been fascinating, frustrating, and heartbreaking to explore some of these issues in writing this book. Thank you so much for taking that journey with me.
History buffs may recognize that Jürgen’s career loosely follows Wernher von Braun’s career path, although the character of Jürgen, his family, and his reaction to those career events are products of my imagination. And aspects of Mayim’s survival and escape were inspired by Gerda Weissmann Klein’s experiences, including the ski boots that saved her life—in Mrs. Klein’s case, her father insisted she wear them when she was captured. More information about Gerda Weissmann Klein and her incredible life and advocacy work can be found at citizenshipcounts.org/our-founder.
Finally, the character of Aunt Adele was inspired by my husband’s late grandmother, Vera Harabajic, who we all knew and loved as “Baba.” Baba was one of the fiercest women I have ever met—a matriarch of brutal honesty and boundless love. I hope to have honored her memory by sharing something of her spirit in this book.
Kelly