Steve Watkins is the author of the new young adult novel Stolen by Night, which is set during World War II. His other books include the YA novel On Blood Road. He is the co-founder and editor of the magazine Pie & Chai.
Q:
What inspired you to write Stolen by Night, and how did you create your
character Nicolette?
A:
One of the inspirations was our two youngest daughters’ involvement in the
Black Lives Matter movement. They were out marching and sitting in and
protesting shortly after it was discovered that police had murdered George
Floyd in Minneapolis—less than a mile from where one of their older sisters was
living at the time.
And
they kept it up for months as they and others across the country sought to
change the national consciousness about police violence and racial inequality
in America.
Our
daughters, then teenagers, were willing to put themselves in harm’s way--with hundreds
of other young people in our town--in their principled and passionate stand for
racial and social justice. They twice just missed being tear-gassed by local
police in military-style riot gear.
Many
of their fellow protestors weren’t as fortunate. A couple of their friends were
arrested. A number were doxed and harassed—two of them on national TV, on The
Tucker Carlson Show, after which they had to go into hiding due to anonymous
threats until the false criminal charges against them were dismissed.
(The
woman who brought the false charges, and was sympathetically interviewed on
Tucker Carlson, went on to be elected to the Virginia state senate.)
At
the time, I was reading Caroline Moorehead’s A Train in Winter, about the 230
women in the French Resistance who were captured during World War II and sent
to death camps. Only 49 of them survived. All were broken in one way or
another.
All
who lived credited their friendships with their fellow prisoners for sustaining
them through the horrors of the women’s camps at Ravensbrück and Birkenau.
The
men in the Resistance who were captured—those who weren’t tortured and killed
outright—were sent to Natzweiler-Struthof, the only German SS-run concentration
camp on what is now French soil, and where Nicolette in Stolen by Night is sent
by mistake where she is both an abused prisoner and in some small but
life-saving ways an insulated observer.
There,
too, it is the friendships she forms, and the fragile but enduring solidarity with
the other prisoners, that sustain her.
Like
Nicolette, many of the Resistance figures, men and women, especially in
Occupied Paris, were young, often just teenagers.
Their
sacrifices went far beyond most of the young people involved in the BLM
actions, but it struck me as I read more about the Resistance, and as I brought
water and other supplies for my daughters and their friends at lengthy BLM
protests, that teenagers in both movements were motivated by a similar spirit,
one I wanted to explore, and honor, in Stolen by Night.
Q:
How did you research the novel, and what did you learn that especially
surprised you?
A:
I started out by reading Ronald Rosbottom’s important historical account When
Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944, and
Nikolaus Wachsmann’s definitive study KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration
Camps.
In
addition to two histories of the French Resistance by Caroline Moorehead—A
Train in Winter and Village of Secrets--I read a number of memoirs by
concentration camp survivors, most importantly Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and
After, Boris Pahor’s Necropolis, and Jacques Luseyran’s And There Was Light.
I
read excerpts from Nuremberg Trial transcripts and the original liberation
report on KL-Natzweiler-Struthof, which I also transcribed, and about which I
wrote a long article for Pie & Chai Magazine.
That,
of course, was just the beginning of my research, as I also spent considerable
time reading any number of other online posts, magazine articles, reports, and other
accounts of Paris in the 1940s, the Resistance, clothes, modes of
transportation, food, architecture, the Paris Catacombs, the history of bicycle
racing, the fate of Jews in Occupied France….
What
surprised me the most, I suppose, but really shouldn’t have, was how docile,
cooperative, even collaborationist most French people were under German
Occupation.
Also
the degree to which anti-Semitism ran among the French, and how when the order
came to round up Jews living in Paris to be sent to the death camps, the German
Occupiers didn’t have to lift a finger. The French, who had their own system of
internment camps for “undesirables,” were happy to do it themselves.
Though
these historical truths run counter to deeply held myths about the French
Resistance, I was nonetheless determined in writing Stolen by Night not to
romanticize in any way the very real, and terrible, sacrifices of those who
actually did put their lives on the line for the cause of liberation.
Too
often in books about the Holocaust and the concentration camps—especially in
books for young readers--authors look for ways to elide hard truths, and
sidestep awful details. Writer Ruth Franklin talked about this a few years ago
in The New Yorker. Many writers use dreams. Time travel. Multiverses.
Ahistorical plots.
But
in exploring the character of Nicolette, I felt it was important to keep in
mind this haunting line from Charlotte Delbo’s concentration camp memoir:
“Looking at me, one would think that I’m alive…. I’m not alive. I died in Auschwitz,
but no one knows it.”
Yet
Delbo was still alive after surviving Auschwitz. Not just physically, but
through her indomitable spirit, giving witness in her memoirs to the horrors
she endured, and witnessed, and refused to let herself, and others, ever
forget.
This
is the struggle for the fictional Nicolette as well: to survive, and to bear unwavering
witness. And perhaps it’s why I was recently uninvited from giving a series of
author talks about Stolen by Night at a school in Richmond, Virginia, which had
already purchased copies of my book for all their advanced 8th-grade history
students.
Some
of the teachers—possibly after complaints by some parents—said they found the
story “too disturbing.”
Another
surprise that perhaps shouldn’t have been. But so be it.
Q:
In our previous Q&A, about your novel On Blood Road, you said you weren't
sure how the novel would end before you started writing it--was that also the
case with Stolen by Night?
A:
Strangely, no. Without giving too much away, I knew from the outset that
Nicolette would survive Natzweiler, and that she would make her way to Strasburg
to find the anatomy lab of the notorious August Hirt at the Nazi-run Reich
University.
I
knew that the Allies would be bombing the city in advance of the liberation
forces, and that when Nicolette finds Hirt’s opulent home, it would already have
been destroyed.
And
I knew that the bicycles that are central to the beginning of Nicolette’s story
would play an important role in the end.
Q:
What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A:
Reinforcement for what I hope and pray they already have: a deep and abiding
sense of personal responsibility, and agency, to save the world from the dark
forces that threaten us all.
Q:
What are you working on now?
A:
I have two more books coming out this year, The Mine Wars: The Bloody Fight forWorkers’ Rights in the West Virginia Coal Fields, a nonfiction account of the
largest armed insurrection in America since the Civil War—and a vitally
important but mostly buried chapter of America’s labor history. That’s being
published by Bloomsbury Press in May 2024.
Then
in November, Scholastic is publishing another historical novel of mine, Wolves
at the Door, about the Wolfskinder, tens of thousands of children orphaned or
abandoned at the end of World War II when the Red Army invaded the northern
German state of East Prussia, which no longer exists.
Many
of these Wolfskinder, or Wolf Children, were forced to live feral existences in
the forests of East Prussia and neighboring Lithuania, scavenging, begging,
stealing, and ultimately, if they were lucky, assimilating into Lithuanian
families—unless they were killed outright, as many were, or caught and sent
deep into the Soviet Union to work camps, or orphanages in Communist East
Germany after the war.
Wolves
at the Door explores this forgotten story through two young sisters, Asta and
Pieta, and the children who band together with them in their struggle to
survive.
With
my wife Janet, I’m also editor of and regular contributor to Pie & Chai
Magazine, for which I’ve researched and written dozens of articles and
long-form personal essays over the past year and a half, including It Could Have
Happened Here,
The Beavers of
Accokeek Creek,
The Far Right
Spammers of Falmouth Bottom, How to 1971-72
Underground High School Newspaper, and an India memoir, A Land of the
Living.
Q:
Anything else we should know?
A:
Yes! I’m helping organize the Virginia chapter of a national organization of
published writers, Authors Against Book Banning, and we’re here to help schools
and libraries and teachers and students and librarians and administrators and
whoever else is standing up to oppose this wave of book banning and mindless
restrictions on reading that has been sweeping across America in recent years.
Feel
free to get in touch. You can email me at swatkins000@gmail.com. (That’s three
zeroes, btw.) And thanks!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Steve Watkins.