more than seventy years later, survivors still speak of their “sisters” in the camp, so I thought it fitting to use two sisters as the focus of my story. Kasia Kuzmerick and her sister Zuzanna are loosely based on Nina Iwanska and her physician sister Krystyna, both operated on at the camp. I shaped these characters from the qualities and experiences of the seventy-four Polish “Rabbits” I grew to love through the course of my research, and I hope they serve as exemplars of the spirit and courage every one of the women showed. Having two beloved sisters of my own, five sisters-in-law, and two daughters whose sisterly bond I’ve watched blossom over twenty-four years, it was impossible to remain unmoved by Nina and Krystyna’s story.
I first learned of Caroline Ferriday through an article in Victoria magazine published in 1999, “Caroline’s Incredible Lilacs.” The article showed photos of Caroline’s white clapboard home in Bethlehem, Connecticut, which the family called The Hay, now known as the Bellamy-Ferriday House. There were also photographs of her garden, filled with antique roses and specimen lilacs. A longtime fan of all things lilac, I carried the article with me until it was worn smooth. With three young children, I had little spare time, but I visited the estate a few years later, unaware that that trip would lead to the novel you hold in your hands.
I drove up to Bethlehem one May Sunday and pulled into the gravel driveway. I was the only visitor that day, so I was able to breathe in the essence of the house, which remained as Caroline left it when she died in 1990: The faded wallpaper. Her canopy bed. Her mother Eliza’s hand-sewn crewel draperies.
At the tour’s conclusion, the guide paused on the landing outside the second-floor master bedroom to point out the desk, her typewriter, medals, and a photo of Charles de Gaulle all arranged there. The guide picked up a black-and-white photograph of smiling, middle-aged women huddled together, posed in three rows.
“These were the Polish women Caroline brought to America,” she said. “At Ravensbrück they were known as the Rabbits for two reasons. They hopped about the camp after they were operated on, and because they were the Nazis’ experimental rabbits.”
As I drove home on the Taconic Parkway, with the lilac plant I bought, which had been propagated from Caroline’s lilacs, filling the car with sweet perfume, the story pestered me. Caroline was a true hero with a fascinating life, a former debutante and Broadway actress who galvanized a jaded postwar America and dedicated her life to helping women others forgot. Strongly influenced by her staunchly abolitionist Woolsey ancestors, she’d also worked to help bring the first black bank to Harlem. Why did it seem no one knew about her?
I devoted my spare time to research on Caroline, Ravensbrück, and World War II. Any afternoon I could get away I spent in the cool root cellar under the ancient barn attached to The Hay, which today serves as the welcome center, paging through old rose books and letters, absorbed in Caroline’s past. Once Connecticut Landmarks and their site administrator Kristin Havill cataloged it all and placed it safely in archival boxes, Kristin would lug them up and down the stairs for me to comb through. Caroline also left additional archives at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and at Nanterre, outside of Paris, a trail of clues I felt was calling me to follow.
As I discovered more about Caroline’s life, it intersected with others’ integral to the story, especially those of the Polish women subjected to operations at Ravensbrück. I began to discover their journeys through memoir and other accounts and learned how Caroline grew to love them as her own daughters. I taped photographs of all seventy-four Polish ladies around my office and planned to go to Poland to see Lublin, where many of the girls lived when they were arrested, for myself.
A third person kept coming up in my research on Ravensbrück, the only woman doctor in the all-female camp and the only woman doctor tried at Nuremberg, Dr. Herta Oberheuser. How could she have done what she did and especially to other women? I taped her photo up too, along with photos of the other Ravensbrück camp staff, but on a separate wall, and added Herta’s to the stories I’d tell.
I moved from Connecticut to Atlanta in 2009 and began writing, at first sitting in the concrete and chain link dog kennel