Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.
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Mindy: We're here with Erika Robuck author of many historical novels, including Call Me Zelda, House of Hawthorne and The Invisible Woman, which was a World War II novel, and that has led into the newest release, which came out at the beginning of March, called Sisters of Night and Fog. So why don't you tell listeners a little bit about what Sisters of Night and Fog is about?
Erika: Sisters of Night and Fog is the true story of two remarkable women in World War II, an American teacher who joins an Allied pilot escape network, and a Franco-British widow and mother who becomes a secret agent. Their clandestine deeds come to a staggering halt at Ravensbruck concentration camp where the true depths of their courage and strength are revealed.
Mindy: When people talk about the Holocaust, I feel like so many of the nooks and crannies and everything has been covered, but I don't think you can ever tell the stories of everyone, it's simply not possible. And of course, we are losing the people that were there first hand, and I think particularly the stories of women are always somewhat a little bit behind as far as being documented. So tell me, how did you stumble across these women, was it something that happened as an overlap of researching other books?
Erika: Yes, a lot of times that's what happens, it certainly happened with my American authors and the women in the shadows of them, and it happened this time when I was researching Virginia Hall for The Invisible Woman. First of all, Ravensbruck concentration camp for women resistors was not on my radar before I started that, and I read a tremendous book about it by Sarah Helm, and she had a hard time putting the biography and the non-fiction together because so many of the records were quite literally incinerated. So it was sort of in the back of my mind, and then when I was researching Virginia Hall, another American woman named Virginia, Virginia d’Albert-Lake, who was one of the women in this novel, she kept popping up along the way in different comparisons for how Americans were involved in World War II. And then Violette Szabo, she was another one who popped up in a very special way, which we can talk more about later, but very often research leads to more stories.
Mindy: Yeah, that's what I've discovered, not even necessarily in historical research, just reading about anything because I read widely and I will think, Well, that's interesting, and then suddenly you're in a little tiny corner of the Internet you didn't know was there before.
Erika: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Mindy: It's interesting, I actually just last night finished reading The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman, and I of course was a teenager during the 90s, so it was interesting to read about it. And he talks specifically about our generation and of the generation above us when the internet happened, they were just like, Okay, this is something I don't want to involve myself in. And of course, the next generation never knew a life without it, and how we're bridging that. We can very clearly remember before, but we're living in the after. And it was really interesting 'cause something I talk about all the time in terms of research is I cannot imagine doing this job without the internet.
Erika: No, no, I can't... Although I've always been a card catalog girl. That was one of my favorite things growing up, and I loved dusty archives. I've always got my nose in archives somewhere. for these books, it was the National Archives at College Park. I was able to visit the CIA museum, Library of Congress. I'm always poking around, so I do love that, but boy… during a pandemic, I couldn't have done it without the internet.
Mindy: No, definitely not. There's no way, some of the things that I'm looking into are so niche that they're fringe and the quality of the research or the information that you're going to find online become sketchy pretty fast, so sometimes that print record is the way to go.
Erika: Absolutely.
Mindy: So talking about Ravensbruck, I don't know if this is just a characterization of my experience about the history of a Holocaust, or more of a cultural ebbing and flow of interest, or just available research, but Ravensbruck is something that I remember being highly aware of as a teenager. I think it was because I have an older sister and she was reading a book about it, and she may have been in college and I was not, and so I was getting an exposure to a larger world and larger thoughts, and so she told me she was like, Did you even know that there was a concentration camp that was specifically for women? And I was like, No, and so it loomed very, very large in my mind when I was younger. And then of course, through my 20s, going out into the world and trying to forge my own way and create a life and not really having time to read or research or do much at all, and then I feel like Ravensbruck comes kind of back into the cultural conversation. Now, am I imagining this or is this something that you have your self experienced?
Erika: No, it's definitely coming back for a number of reasons too. There was also The Lilac Girls, which covers the Rabbits of Ravensbruck, the women whom medical experiments were done on. That novel really seeped into the book reading public. My sons... We live near Washington DC, so the US Holocaust Memorial Museum is there. And for the eighth graders, they were taken on field trips every year to go see that, so I'm so glad that we have that resource and that the memory is being kept alive because it needs to be talked about constantly. There really can't be enough talking about it so that we don't forget. Because as you said that generation is dying. It has been over 75 years since World War II.
Mindy: I worked in a school, the Holocaust is generally taught in junior high. I think it's appropriate because I don't think you should not teach it simply because it's horrific. History is horrific. I sometimes wonder if that age group is really ready to comprehend the true horror of it.
Erika: Exactly, I'm a teacher also, so I've taught in elementary, middle, high school, teach faith formation now to young women at my church, but just developmentally, the ability to process that level of emotional trauma, I don't think Eighth grade, I feel like 9th or 10th, they would have been a little more ready for it. Although it was a good experience, but just... There's always a little bit of silliness, particularly with eighth grade boys. But just to really immerse themselves in that, I do think it has to be done. In high school would be a great time to do that.
Mindy: My experience is the same. When it comes to watching the kids try to make sense of it, especially the boys, I think the silliness comes in because they're highly uncomfortable. They deal with it by making jokes and then it's viewed as disrespectful. I really, it's just they can't even begin to process what they're bringing in.
Erika: No, absolutely, and I think that this is true.
Mindy: Of course, we all emotionally develop as we get older, but I remember being in junior high and learning about the Holocaust and it not really having much of an effect on me, simply because I don't think I was processing this as something that actually happened. And also, I'm a middle class white girl from Ohio, I have no touch point for this to make sense to me.
Erika: Yeah, well, this is the power of historical fiction. So of course, growing up my whole life, I learned about slavery, a middle class, suburban white, Catholic young woman, and it was always sad, but it wasn't until I was in college, and I read Beloved by Toni Morrison, and you enter into the emotional experience of a mother who, to protect a child from a life of misery, would murder the child and then becomes haunted by the child. Then I had an emotional connection because I could step into another character's shoes. And I think that's the power of historical fiction, I think it's why I write historical fiction. You can read about something in a nonfiction capacity, but if you enter into a character and you can go through an emotional experience, it sinks deeply into your bones.
Mindy: Yeah, absolutely. I was talking to a group of teenagers a couple of weeks ago about dystopian literature, and it also, of course, has an ebb and flow where it goes in and out, but it has in the past 20 years been extremely popular. One of the highest search content that drives people to my blog is a blog post by someone else about why dystopian literature is so popular. And people seem to be stumped by this. Why do we wanna read something horrible... Reality is horrible. So I was talking to this group of teenagers, I was telling them about how reading and the brain works and how when you are in that emotional experience of the character, your brain is experiencing the emotions as if you yourself were experiencing them. So you read Beloved and you're in the shoes of this person, whether or not you could have historically been this person or racially been this person, you're having those emotions.
Erika: And that's where we develop empathy, so it's so important for all of us young readers and old to go to these places.
Mindy: Yes, exactly. And this is why I was telling the kids dystopian is so popular because so many of us wake up every day and we look at the news and we're like, Okay, this sucks and I can't do anything. And then you read a dystopian novel where the heroes strikes a blow for good and you get to feel it, too.
Erika: It's like a little healing exercise, and it's like, What would you do? And then you get to imagine what you would do, and then you get to have some sort of resolution.
Mindy: Yes, I think the resolution is key because in real life, we don't get that, not in a three act structure, anyway.
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Mindy: Tell me more about the two women that Sisters of Night and Fog is based on. I'm especially interested in how a regular everyday woman becomes a spy.
Erika: That's what drew me first to Virginia d’Albert-Lake. So she was born in Ohio, she was raised in Florida, was a teacher and went to an education conference, and her mother before she left said Stay away from Frenchman, you have to watch out for Frenchmen. So what did Virginia do? She fell in love with one, naturally. When she told her mother she was gonna marry Philip, her mother went to bed for two weeks. And he finally came over to the US and wooed everyone, so mom understood after that. So Virginia was in France at the beginning of the war, and her mother was begging her to come home and her husband was begging her to go home while she still could. She said, No, I'm married to you. This is my country. This is where I'm staying. She felt very relatable to me, not only because she was a teacher and an American, but just she was living in what she thought was her happily ever after, and then it came crashing down.
And for her, the character arc was really an evolution of how someone like that really gets into the weeds of resistance, and it was quite a journey for her. So I was exploring that, researching her, and I was convinced I was just gonna write about her. And then I started having these dreams. And so, Violette Szabo, is very different from Virginia d’Albert-Lake. She grew up between France and Britain because her mother was French and her father was British. And she was a very fierce young woman, five brothers, always getting in fist fights and climbing trees, skinned knees, really impetuous. And she became a sharp shooter. Her dad taught her how to hunt, and when her husband was killed in North Africa, she wanted vengeance.
And so she was a fascinating person to me, but one I didn't relate to as well. So I just kind of put her to the side as an interesting person, but then I started having these dreams. So the first dream, I'm Violette, I'm being pursued by a Nazi, he attacks me. I ended up wrestling with him and strangling him to death, and I woke up. It was so vivid and I'm sweating, and I was like, Wow, I don't wanna even go near that. So I continue my research for Virginia, and then I have another dream where I'm Violette at Ravensbruck concentration camp and that one was far more traumatic and I woke up far more disturbed and thought, I don't wanna write about that. And then as I finally got deep into the research of Virginia Lake, and I'm not spoiling anything by telling you she ends up at Ravensbruck concentration camp, I put it on the book because I want people to know where this goes. But she was writing or doing an interview about a woman in her work detail who motivated the women prisoners to get up, keep themselves clean, and stay as physically and mentally fit as possible. This one was always trying to escape and telling jokes and distracting the guards - and it was Violette.
And then I finally had a third dream and Violette said that she was proud of what she did and she wanted to be in this book, and so I put her in. Initially, I hadn't realized that their stories converged, and they did, and they did in a very powerful way, so it worked together beautifully actually. And they’re sort of foils for one another because they are so different, but I think what all of the characters in this book show is that no matter how you're wired, when you find what your vocation is and who you're meant to be, grace will come in and help you do what you need to do.
Mindy: When you were researching Ravensbruck, were there any qualities of it that were distinguishable from other concentration camps? Because one of the things that I have heard bandied about in erms of the Holocaust is that it really erased gender, it simply didn't matter in terms of if you were Jewish, there was no other classification for you.
Erika: I found that it mattered a lot because there's a very particular cruelty that women can be inflicted upon them, and it had to do with a lot of sexual violence and the use of prisoners in a brothel. There were certain women who if you agreed to go to be in the brothel, you would get extra food, so really reducing people to their most animal level to survive. And with women, there's always cyclically, monthly, there's very special humiliations and cruelties that can happen to you when you have no kind of self-care items. It was very stark. The things that happened there, there were photographs taken of female prisoners naked and passed around between guards.
But then what happened, interestingly in the women themselves is - the dominant personalities would assert themselves and almost become abusive within the women. So in that case, it was more of a personality trait of a more dominant, bullying female who would steal clothing from other women, who would get in line first for food, there were all these hierarchies created on that. ut the Nazis, like the devil, they know - If we divide we conquer. So they would divide them up by nationality, then they would divide you up by political prisoners versus people who are doing different things, and then they would isolate Jews even further, and so that even the prisoners would never feel camaraderie with each other, but always scratching and clawing to exist. It was just... It was inhuman. I always think I know the capacity for evil, and I just can't even comprehend how much worse it can go. That's the staggering part of the research, you just can't believe humans can do this to each other.
Mindy: Where I hit my wall is with children. I can't get my head around it, and it's something that people ask me all the time, because my own books are very edgy and they deal with hard topics and they deal with tough things. And everybody is always interested to see what are you going to do next? Because you don't really shy away from anything. And so I get the question often, is there anything you won't write? And I can't write violence against children, it's just... It just comes down to that absolute inability to defend yourself, that's where my barrier is. That's where I have to stop. It's not somewhere I want my mind to spend time.
Erika: With this book, I told my editor I am not writing a concentration camp book. So there are consequences to the resistance activity, I will address them and I will do it as quickly as possible. So the book is set up into three parts, it's before sort of the melding of character, then it's during the resistance activities. The last section, which is the smallest, are the consequences of those actions. There was a documentary called Night and Fog. It's a foreign language documentary that I watched in college that actually has to do with the title of the book, but that was the worst thing I've ever seen. I do remember the professor saying, this is the worst thing you've ever seen. But these people lived this... So don't turn away. He only watched the documentary once, he didn't stay in the classroom when he put it on for his classes every year, 'cause he just couldn't stomach it after one. But we all have to stomach it once.
Mindy: I think you run the danger if you expose yourself to something like that too much of it losing its impact, and so I think walking away and choosing only to see it once is probably pretty smart.
Erika: Yeah, it's probably a healthy response.
Mindy: Yeah, yeah, so I wanna talk a little bit about just the idea of resistance and of course, with everything happening in the Ukraine, when you are watching the news play out every day - What are those elements that you can see like, yes, the human spirit saying, Not today!
Erika: Well, when I started preparing my talks for this book, 'cause I just concluded the book tour, I was trying to say why World War II fiction was relevant to the present day, and I was focused on the pandemic rationing, the gradual shutting down of the world. And then all of a sudden the war started there, and so now it's staggeringly, awfully relevant. I told my husband, I was like, I almost had a trauma response seeing the bully rolling in and just praying so deeply for peace. Because the way this goes, I know how this goes as it becomes the black hole that starts sucking countries in one at a time. I can't go there again.
But in these moments, you do see a... Mr. Rogers always said, Look for the helpers. People banding together. So normally in the US, we're all fighting with each other all the time, but when you see people in need, I feel like all of us , we look, and we're like, Okay, what can we do? And that's the good thing that comes from it, where you see different work to help the refugees and different organizations, different branches of the military and political parties working together to support however it is possible. So those are the bright spots, but it's not worth it to have this one bright spot. We have to get out of this because of where we are now with weapons and the capacity to shut things down. I can’t go there in my imagination.
Mindy: World War 2 is something that we just return to all the time, books, movies, TV, documentaries, there's no corner of it that I feel has not been looked at, and no stone left unturned, but at the same time, you're right, this is exactly why.
Erika: And I know in terms of World War II fiction, people are like, Wow, how could there be another World War 2 novel? But it's a world at war, so every single continent essentially was experiencing some facet of it, and every time I think we've gotten through it all then these stories emerge and then more files are declassified and now the women in the different spy networks are really starting to get a lot of attention, which is awesome. So there's just endless stories.
Mindy: I agree, when I was reading about Sisters of Night and Fog, I had never heard of either of these women. As a person that has been reading books their whole life and has been exposed to I had thought every corner of World War II, here are two individual people that I had never heard of and doing remarkable things.
Erika: Yeah, and there's dozens and dozens more, and I know there's lots of novels coming out and it's so exciting, and for me, one of the most exciting things during all of this is I've become connected to the amazing women of the intelligence community, which is a group of women who have retired from different agencies of intelligence that work to foster young women getting into the field and bringing recognition. And it has been tremendous, these are incredible people who have answered this call to serve in a really unique way. And I'm working with them right now to actually try to get Virginia Hall’s Distinguished Service Cross upgraded to a Medal of Honor. So a lot of the research I've included, we had to put together narratives of combat experience and try to find those specific battles, so it's been a really challenging and fascinating journey, and one that I hope ends up with Virginia Hall having a Medal of Honor.
Mindy: That's awesome. I can't even imagine the amazing stories and things that you could learn from a group like that, they're phenomenal people.
Erika: We had a gala last weekend where for Virginia Hall, the first Virginia Hall Gala Award was awarded to her family for keeping her memory alive. And now they're going to start doing this gala and awarding it to a former intelligence woman every year. And to be there with those people, with Virginia Hall's family, it was on top of the International Spy Museum in DC, and there was a full moon, which is so relevant to resistance work in World War 2, because that's the only time the planes could fly. It was a magical night. It felt like she was there. So I'm just so grateful the places that the writing takes us to is so interesting.
Mindy: Last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find the book Sisters of Night and Fog, which is available now, and where they can find you online?
Erika: I have signed copies at my favorite independent booksellers, One is Park Books in Severna, Maryland, and I am there all the time signing stock. My whole back list, you can get signed and personalized there. Ships anywhere. And also Bethany Beach Books in Delaware, and then wherever books are sold in person and online. I spend the most time between Facebook and Instagram, so if you wanna connect with me there, I stop in daily to interact, that's what I have going on.
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