The Konars, Cruzes, Kims, and Sos. Grandmama and Grandpapa — słońce i księżyc. Jonathan and Coco (for always taking the funny and the future).
My parents, whose optimism and attention to beauty have been my preservation. (Special thanks to Dad for giving me a field when I needed it most.)
Philip Kim — for the genius, animals, comfort, and jokes. How anyone writes without you is beyond my understanding.
And here, words can only fail. But I must try to thank Eva Mozes Ker and Miriam Mozes Zeiger for the inspiration of their sisterhood and their girlish spirits. And I must try, again, to thank Zvi Spiegel, Gisella Pearl, Alex Dekel, and the innumerable, unnamed witnesses whose stories have compelled these pages. This book lives only in the presence of your memories.
Author’s Note
Mischling’s initial inspiration can be found in the remarkable Children of the Flames by Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel. Tremendous debts are also owed to the following: Sara Nomberg-Przytyk’s Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land; Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen; Eva Mozes Kor and Mary Wright’s Echoes from Auschwitz: Dr. Mengele’s Twins; Arnost Lustig’s Children of the Holocaust; Elie Wiesel’s Night; Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s Wife; George Eisen’s Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games Among the Shadows; Isaac Kowalski’s Anthology on Armed Jewish Resistance 1939–1945; Rich Cohen’s The Avengers; Mary Lowenthal Felstiner’s To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era; Dr. Gisella Perl’s I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz; Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces; Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide; Primo Levi’s The Truce, If This Is a Man, The Periodic Table, and The Drowned and the Saved; and the works of Paul Celan and Dan Pagis.
About the Author
Affinity Konar was raised in California. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program.