Category: Learn History Through Fiction

In April 1945, the United National Relief and Rehabilitation administration (UNRRA) entered the American zone of Germany and registered between 6,000 and 7,000 displaced children. Both Jews and non-Jews, they included survivors of concentration camps, forced child laborers, and children whose parents were sent to forced labor camps. In July, not far from the Dachau death camp, UNRRA created an international pilot program in Kloster Indersdorf, a former monastery closed by the Nazis. Between 1945 and 1948, it became home to more than 1,000 refugee youth. Led by a disciple of Anna Freud, the institute served as a model for five other centers in Europe. Groups of 12-15 orphans were organized into surrogate families led by an adult parent figure. Said one staff member, “The first thing was to give them plenty of food, clothing, and listen to their stories, days and nights. It had to come out. Sometimes it took hours. You could not interrupt.” Photos of the children were posted in hopes that relatives, if alive, would recognize and claim them. In a few cases this happened, but for most of the Jewish children, “their dark suspicion grew gradually into the horrible certainty, that from now on each was all alone in the world.” Read more in BEHIND THE STORY.

 

In honor of International Women’s Day (March 8) – Many suffragettes were also prohibitionists, defending women against drunken husbands who abused them and protecting children from fathers who spent food and rent money on alcohol. Men were opposed to both movements and the liquor industry was a powerful anti-women’s rights force. Temperance proponents like Susan B. Anthony and Frances Willard took up the cause of women’s suffrage to enact laws against alcohol. Read more about early women activists in On the Shore (see NOVELS).

Researching the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II for my novel-in-progress, One Person’s Loss, I discovered that many famous people worked as agents — that is, spies — for the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Among them was chef Julia (McWilliams) Child; supreme court justice Arthur Goldberg, film director John Ford, Hollywood actors Sterling Hayden and Marlene Dietrich, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Ralph Bunche (who was paid $5,600 a year). They were primarily recruited for their “intellectual sweat.” The 35,000 OSS personnel files in the National Archives were not released to the public until August 2008, more than sixty years after the agency ceased wartime operations.

For a contemporary story I’m writing about a civilian father whose wife is deployed in Afghanistan, I researched the changing role of women in the U.S. Armed Force. Women have played a role in military conflicts since the American Revolution, but World War II was the first time they served in an official capacity. Beginning in December 1941, 350,000 women were active in four branches established exclusively for them: Army WACS, Air Force WASPS, Navy WAVES, and Marine and Coast Guard SPARS. About 70% held traditionally “female” jobs as typists, clerks, and mail sorters. Only those working in the Army and Navy medical corps made it close to the front lines. Today, by contrast, women account for one-sixth of active-duty personnel (up from one-tenth in 1970), with the largest number serving in the Air Force and Navy. Since 2001, over 200,000 female soldiers have served in Afghanistan and/or Iraq, including more than 100,000 mothers.

Do you find the modern-day multiplex too sterile for your taste? Picture yourself at the Loew’s Paradise, considered the Taj Mahal of movie and stage show theaters, when it opened in the Bronx in 1929 at a cost of $4 million (equivalent to $57.7 million today). The 4,000 patrons entered this veritable palace under a Seth Thomas mechanical clock, where St. George slew a fire-breathing dragon each time the hour chimed. The lobby looked like an Italian palazzo with marble pillars, a goldfish pool, a marble fountain with the figure of a child on a dolphin, tapestries, and three domes with murals depicting Sound, Story, and Film. At the base of the carpeted staircase, one passed beneath an oil painting of Marie Antoinette as the Patron of the Arts. Inside the auditorium the aura was a 16th century Italian Baroque garden bathed in Mediterranean moonlight with stars twinkling in the ceiling as clouds passed by, hanging vines, cypress trees, stuffed birds, and classical statues. The theater opened with a screening of The Mysterious Dr. Fu-Manchu, accompanied by live music played on a Robert Morton “Wonder Organ.” Loew’s theater features prominently in my WWII-era story-in-progress, “Orphan Camp” (see STORIES and my blog post on 01/29/18). Now hush. The velvet curtain, a Venetian garden scene, is going up.

 

Inspiration for “Orphan Camp,” a story-in-progress (see STORIES): In 1946, a “summer camp” opened in an abandoned YMCA building in the Bronx (not far from where I grew up) for European World War Two orphans. While other displaced persons needed individual sponsors to enter the U.S., a December 1945 directive from President Truman allowed charitable organizations to sponsor children, provided they paid for their visas and tickets, and guaranteed the children would not depend on public welfare. Obtaining visas was difficult since most children lacked birth certificates. Some were too young to know their identities, so the staff gave them names. Because the children spoke many different languages, communication depended on gesture, facial expression, action, and posture. Playing the universal string game, Jacob’s Ladder, was the initial means of building trust among the children and their caregivers. Over a two-and-a-half-year period, nearly 1,400 children, ages one to 18 years, were brought to the U.S.

 

In many of New York City’s Lower East Side tenement buildings, electricity was not installed until mid-1924, and that was only after pressure and legal threats from City Council. Gas lighting was added abut twenty years earlier to comply with the Tenement House Act of 1901, which required a light source on every floor from sunset to sunrise. Tenants paid for gas through a coin-operated meter in the kitchen of each apartment. Before electricity, they navigated the building’s dark hallways and back rooms using kerosene or oil lamps. Read more about the hard lives of immigrants on the Lower East Side at the turn of the last century in On the Shore (see NOVELS).

Proofing pages for my upcoming historical novel Tazia and Gemma (Vine Leaves Press, May 2018), I double-checked to make sure I wasn’t anachronistically using the word “nerd.” The relevant scene is set in 1956. To my relief, I confirmed that the word was in common use at the beginning of that decade. Nerd first appeared in the Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo (1950) when narrator Gerald McGrew says he will put “a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too” in his imaginary menagerie. Within a year, nerd was a popular term for a drip or square in Detroit and then spread to the rest of the country, and beyond. Read more about the evolution of “nerd” in BEHIND THE STORY and about Tazia and Gemma in NOVELS.

 

In the early 1900s, garment sweatshops on New York’s Lower East Side had no ventilation and poor lighting. Immigrant laborers worked 12-16 hours a day, 6 days a week. Weekly sweatshop wages were $6-10 for men; $4-5 for women, and less than $1 for children. Minimum age for workers was 14 years old, but this law was routinely violated. Read more about the Lower East Side at the turn of the last century in On the Shore (NOVELS).

New York City’s Central Park was the first landscaped city park in America. It opened to the public in 1858. The Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883. The Statue of Liberty, across the East River, was dedicated in 1886. Not until twelve years later (1898) were the five boroughs — Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Kings (Brooklyn), and Richmond (Staten Island) — consolidated into one municipality. Read more about New York City history and the immigrants who were welcomed by the Statue of Liberty in On the Shore. To learn why NYC is called “Gotham” see BEHIND THE STORY.