By the time I arrived at Lublin’s outskirts, it was still dark, that time between when the streetlights turn off and dawn’s first light when anything seems possible.
I coasted down the streets so as not to wake the city, past the silent milk women coming with their cows, bells clanging in the dark.
I passed the square under Lublin Castle where the ghetto once stood, now gone, demolished by forced laborers during the war, leaving only a brass plaque. Past our old pink sliver of a house where, at Felka’s grave in the backyard, Caroline’s lilacs had already taken root, on their way to growing into the prettiest, strongest plant. I rode down the street where Matka once walked me to school. I smiled at the memory of her, no longer a hot knife to the chest. I passed the new hospital and thought of Zuzanna with Caroline and hoped she was well. Maybe Halina and I would go to New York one day. She would like the art museums.
Once in the apartment, I slipped out of my shoes and padded down the hallway to Halina’s room. I stood in the darkness and watched her chest rise and fall. Matka’s ring sent gleams of light across the bed as my daughter rested there, her hair fanned out like liquid gold. She didn’t stir as I slipped the red-flannel bundle of brushes under her pillow, tucked her in tight, and kissed the top of her head.
I went to Pietrik’s bed, where he lay in the almost darkness, one arm across his eyes. I unbuttoned my dress, let it fall to the floor, and climbed under the sheets to meet the smoothness of him, breathing in his sweet scent of sweat and Russian cigarettes and home.
He pulled me close, and for the first time in so long, I felt the compact go click.
Lilac Girls is based on a true story. Caroline Ferriday and Herta Oberheuser were real people, as were all the Ravensbrück staff mentioned, as well as Herta’s parents and Caroline’s mother and father, Eliza and Henry Ferriday. In bringing them to life as characters, I have done my best to represent all of them in the fairest, most realistic way possible. Through reading Caroline’s letters, the Nuremberg Doctors Trial testimony, and testimony of the survivors themselves, I found clues to what their motivations might have been. The dialogue throughout is of my own making, but I used actual testimony when possible in the Doctors Trial chapter and some of Caroline’s own words from letters and stories she wrote and the stories of those who knew her.
At Ravensbrück, Hitler’s only major concentration camp exclusively for women, a prisoner’s life depended on her relationships with other women. Even 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 behind our home, hoping it would evoke what it was like to be imprisoned, to feel what the Ravensbrück Ladies felt. But as I read more firsthand accounts of the women’s stories, I realized I didn’t need to sit in a cage in order to feel their story. They brought me there all too well. The terrifying uncertainty. The rip of losing their friends and mothers and sisters. The starvation. I found myself eating constantly, trying to eat for them.