C.F. YETMEN
In a nation eager to forget, one young man dares to remember, risking everything to make the truth impossible to ignore.
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ABOUT
I came to understand how unspeakably lucky my family was, even in their hardship and the survivors of WWII suffered from an inherent guilt simply for having made it through the nightmare when so many had not. I also learned about the work of the Monuments Men. I realized that in the face of such degradation and horror, the fact that leaders mustered the political will to save thousands of works of art and of Jewish cultural heritage is more than just noble. It is essential. Wiping all evidence of Jewish and “degenerate” culture off the face of the Earth and severing the connections these things provide to our history, our mythologies and to each other, is a form of spiritual genocide.
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So, my grandmother’s circumstances met the work of the Monuments Men. Vanquished German culture met American ascendancy. Anna Klein met Henry Cooper. And readers met them, as well as Amalia and Oskar, whose stories continue on.
The Anna Klein Trilogy books were inspired by my family’s circumstances at the end of World War II. My German grandmother and my mother, then just five years old, found themselves displaced and dispossessed in a strange city, with nothing more than a suitcase full of random belongings to their name. And yet, they survived. For one simple reason: My grandmother could speak English. This meant she got a job working for the American occupiers. It meant they got a roof over their heads and a glimpse of a salvaged future.
