History is written by the victors. Whether youre a hero or a traitor depends on which side you were on.
Author Jennifer Nielsen tells the stories of heroes and traitors. She offered a bit of insight into both during presentations for the Iola Reads program at local schools Tuesday, with a community discussion at the Bowlus Fine Arts Center that evening.
Nielsens book, A Night Divided, is the featured book for this years Iola Reads program. Its a story about a family divided by the overnight construction of the Berlin Wall.
Nielsens meticulous research brings history to the page. She told the audience how historical events inspire the stories she writes for young adults.
TRAITORS fascinate Nielsen.
She told the story of Harold Cole, a thief who served with British forces during World War II. He impressed officers so much they put him in charge of finances, which he promptly stole. He was thrown into a cell as forces came under fire and abandoned him to his fate. He was found by French resistance fighters and served with them so successfully, they put him in charge of their money. Again, he stole the money and was imprisoned, this time to be found by German forces. He gave up the names of French leaders until he was eventually recognized by British forces and killed.
Clearly, Cole was a traitor, Nielsen said. But if the Germans had won, wouldnt he have been a hero?
Compare that to the story of Tokyo Rose, Iva Toguri, who was born in the United States to Japanese parents. She visited her family in Japan in 1941 but was refused re-entry to the U.S. after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She refused to renounce her U.S. citizenship; her family in Japan refused to accept her, so she went to work as Tokyo Rose, a radio operator broadcasting songs and propaganda to American soldiers. Her messages, though, included codes to alert the soldiers to pending attacks, likely saving thousands of American lives. Eventually, she was convicted of treason and imprisoned in the U.S. for more than six years but pardoned by President Gerald Ford in 1977.
She was branded a traitor, Nielsen said, but further research shows she was truly an American hero who was forced into an impossible situation.
Those stories inspired Nielsens trilogy, The Traitors Game series.
ANOTHER novel, Resistance, was inspired by the teenagers who worked with Shimshon and Gusta Dawidson Draenger as part of an underground resistance in Krakow, Poland. Her novel tells a fictional story of one teen, though the true story is dramatic itself.
German forces relegated the Jewish people to a small area, the Krakow Ghetto, which could not support everyone. Teenagers were sent away, and many found their way to the Draengers, a young couple who were among the leaders of the resistance. The teenagers became vital in transporting weapons, messages and more to the resistance in Krakow.
When the Draengers were arrested, Gusta dictated her story to others who wrote four copies on toilet paper. They smuggled those papers and transcribed it. Gusta escaped and updated the story, which is now an out-of-print book called Justynas Narrative. Nielsen displayed her copy of the book, which provided the basis for her novel.
Its one of her most treasured possessions.
POST-WORLD WAR II, specifically Berlin, became the setting for A Night Divided.
Nielsen said she started working on the book while in the midst of another novel. Her publisher didnt want her to be distracted, so she researched, outlined and wrote the book in six weeks in order to present A Night Divided before her editor took maternity leave. Her editor actually went into labor as she was selling the novel.
The novel tells the story of a young girl whose brother and father were working in East Berlin when the first barbed-wire fence of the Berlin Wall was constructed overnight in 1961, leaving the girl, her mother and brother in West Berlin. Years pass, and a plot is hatched to dig under the wall to help them escape.
The story was inspired by real escape stories during the Cold War era.
