Zibby Mag

By Eve Karlin

The landing was timed to coincide with the new moon. Periscope jutting inches above water, the U-boat crept toward shore. When the hull scraped sandy sea bottom, the captain ordered all motors cut. The submarine surfaced at midnight, depositing four Nazi saboteurs and their deadly cache onto an American beach where—decades later—my sister and I would build sandcastles.

I had spent every summer of my life on the shores of Amagansett on Long Island’s East End and had heard stories about Operation Pastorius since I was little. In the summer of 1942, Nazi saboteurs spent seventeen days at sea before disembarking onto our beach with crates of explosives. I grew up in a house with my sister, my parents, several dogs, and my maternal grandparents, Jews who had escaped Germany during the Second World War. As a child, I was haunted by the notion of Nazi invaders infiltrating our home.

Decades later, the irony that my grandmother watched my sister and me play on the same stretch of sand where Nazis had once stepped struck me as significant. I set about weaving the stories together in what became Track 61, a work of historical fiction centered around the real-life characters caught up in Operation Pastorius. To me, that’s the magic of historical fiction: integrating events and adding personal experiences to deepen their significance.

After a harrowing landing in dense fog, the saboteurs were intercepted on the beach by a lone American Coastguardsman. The four men managed to avoid capture, and they made their way on the morning train to New York City. Their target: M42. A secret subbasement that lay ten stories below Grand Central Station, M42 housed rotary converters that supplied power to trains and aluminum plants. Had the saboteurs succeeded in blowing up M42, as much as eighty percent of troop and equipment supply would have been stopped and airplane production would have ground to a halt.

The men arrived in the city in time to blend in with two million spectators who had turned out to watch marching bands, troops, and floats parade up Fifth Avenue. This massive display of patriotism seemed like a perfect opportunity to heighten narrative tension. I created a character based on my grandmother, Grete, who would have been a young woman at the time, and staged an encounter between her and Peter Burger, one of the saboteurs. On a warm June afternoon, amid the pageantry and crowds, Grete meets Peter and becomes entangled in his plight.

A 3,000-page military trial transcript that had been declassified in the 1960s included Peter Burger’s personal statement. This allowed me to hear events in his own words. In this way I was able to incorporate actual details from his week on the lam—dining at an automat, shopping at Macy’s, holding a clandestine meeting at Grant’s Tomb.

A curious thing happened as I began to delve deeper into the human side of the story. Though I had set out to write a spy novel, I found myself drawing more and more on my grandmother’s experiences as a German Jew and incorporating many stories she shared with me when I was young.

Personal anecdotes can breathe life into dry facts, and historical fiction can transform history into stories with laughing, crying, loving characters.

Growing up, my grandmother—we called her Omi—had a beloved German Shepard named Stromer, German for tramp. She showed me an old black-and-white photograph of Stromer wearing a party hat and told me how the Gestapo had ordered her family to turn him over to them. It was a test of loyalty for a young Nazi soldier to adopt a dog, earn its trust, and kill it. Instead of letting that happen, her father—my great-grandfather—took Stromer out to the backyard killed him nobly. As Omi shared Stromer’s sad story with me, I found that I was able to hear Stromer bark, stroke his soft fur, and scratch him behind the ear where he most liked it. When I was growing up—and even today—it was difficult to grasp the terror of Kristallnacht, gas chambers, and six million murders, yet I could relate to the story of a girl sacrificing a cherished pet.

Another story that humanized the horror of my grandmother’s youth was that of the boy next door to her who had polio. “He was a bright boy,” Omi used to say. “He simply required crutches.” The Nazis had labeled him “feeble” and denied his family travel papers. The boy threw himself out the window, leaving a note behind explaining that he could not burden his parents any longer.

Omi’s eyes always welled with tears when she spoke of the day strangers overtook her swim club on the Rhine and tossed her into the river’s swirling waters. After struggling against a powerful current to make it to shore, she was forced to walk home barefoot in her bathing suit while jeering neighbors threw rocks at her. As I researched my book, I came across several references to the “expulsion of Jews from the Rhine swimming pool” and realized that many survivors had experienced similar abuse that day.

Personal anecdotes can breathe life into dry facts, and historical fiction can transform history into stories with laughing, crying, loving characters. I thought I had finished writing Track 61 when the book was published last June, but new chapters keep cropping up.

Recently, the niece of the Coastguardsman who met the saboteurs on the beach reached out to me and shared that one of her greatest childhood entertainments was reading the fan mail that arrived at her grandparents’ house on “pink, lilac, and yellow-colored stationary” from females across the country describing themselves as her uncle’s “potential fiancée.” I also met with the sons of one of the FBI men who had interviewed the saboteurs. They showed me a wedding gift Peter Burger had sent their father, as well as a letter their father received from J. Edgar Hoover praising his accomplishments. And the daughter of a saboteur’s girlfriend shared a chilling photograph of the engagement ring that had been sent to her mother from the execution chamber. She also told me that, following her mother’s death, she learned she had a half-brother who had been given up for adoption.

June 6th marks the two-year anniversary of my Omi’s death. My grandmother lived to be 101 and had a fortunate life, yet she was scarred by the trauma of her youth. Her experiences shaped her, and her stories shaped me. Now that firsthand witnesses to the Holocaust are dying out, it is essential to keep not only their memory, but their memories, alive.

Eve Karlin is the author of Track 61, a work of historical fiction about Nazi saboteurs landing in Amagansett, New York, and City of Liars and Thieves, a novel about New York City’s first murder trial. She is a bookseller in East Hampton, New York, where she lives with her husband and their triplets.