I knew that when I decided to write a novel, it had to be Holocaust-related. I have been obsessed with the Holocaust ever since I read The Diary of Anne Frank in the sixth grade. I have studied it, read about it, researched it—even taught it. What could be more sensitive than the genocide of six million Jews and its impact on the survivors and their children? In The Takeaway Men, there are a number of other sensitive topics covered, including: intergenerational trauma, religious identity, immigration, the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and attitudes toward mental illness.

As a longtime writer of non-fiction, I have always wanted to be fair—as well as sensitive—both to the topic and to the people I write about. As I began to tackle a different genre, historical fiction, I found that while it’s your story, you really don’t have free reign if you want to accurately portray your story and characters. You actually have an enormous responsibility to get the time, place, plot, and characters’ feelings and reactions right. While there’s a great deal of latitude—because it’s make-believe and you are making it up—if the affect is wrong, it won’t ring true for readers. The Jewish community, in particular, pushed back against the 2018 best-selling novel, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, by Heather Morris. Part of the reason is because she claims it’s a true story. But she also experienced a barrage of criticism about the lack of veracity in her descriptions of Auschwitz. As a student and teacher of history—and as a Jew—it was important to me to write my story as sensitively and as true to the historical background as possible.

First and foremost, when you’re writing historical fiction, research is key. As I noted, I have been researching this topic for many years, and I continued doing so before I started writing and during the writing. My profound interest in the subject (as well as the possibility of writing a sequel) makes me still read and watch everything I can having to do with World War II, the Holocaust, and its aftermath. For example, I felt a particular responsibility to paint an accurate picture of survivors and their children, who are referred to as The Second Generation or 2G. I have both survivors and their children as friends and acquaintances. I have spoken with them extensively, interviewed them, and read non-fiction books about their experiences. I learned that neither survivors nor their children are monolithic groups. Hence, I chose to portray the two children of the refugees, Aron and Judy, as fraternal twins so that they could display a wide range of behaviors and feelings towards their parents, their environment and their search for truth. A number of 2Gs read the manuscript and I was gratified—and relieved—that they said I got it right. I know this was due both to my research and using the vehicle of twins.

Extensive research also prevents you from making up things from whole cloth. For instance, when I decided to have the twins born in a Displaced Persons Camp in Europe after the war, I researched the history of DP Camps. I ended up not choosing a particular camp but rather combined aspects of a few different camps to make a composite. I named this DP Camp Warteplatz, which means “waiting place” in German. And to make the dialogue realistic, I researched not only German words, but Yiddish and Polish because many survivors speak in halting English as well as their native languages.

While in theory your characters can do whatever you want them to do, it’s better to choose from the wide range of experiences people had during the time period of your novel. So while many residents of Nazi-occupied countries participated in, ignored, or turned away from the atrocities, there were others who risked their lives to help Jews. Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, honors them today as Righteous Among the Nations. I studied many portraits of rescuers and crafted my fictional character and her actions on these.

So, too, I have a scene where a former Nazi hiding in plain sight is confronted in a Jewish deli. Did this ever happen? It’s unlikely, but again I believe that the feelings and words that came out of my characters’ mouths ring true.

In addition to research, I learned in one of the fiction-writing courses I took that in order to capture the emotions of your character, writers should think of a time when they experienced that same emotion they are writing about. Whether it was anger, rejection, fear, love or passion, try to remember what you felt like. Then, give your characters those feelings in the time, place, and situation in which you have placed them. I utilized this technique time and again throughout The Takeaway Men and found it was the best way to capture a character’s feelings sensitively. In fact, the title of my novel and the metaphor of “the takeaway men” throughout the book are based on the feeling I remember as a small child when a man came to our front door and I asked him who he was. “I’m the takeaway man,” he said. “I’ve come to take you away.” Although I was about four-years-old, I still remember the sheer terror I felt. Channeling that not only allowed me to portray my character, Bronka, with all of her fears and anxiety, but it provided me with a title for my first novel.