One morning in early 1940, Rainor Schacht and his friends in the ward for disabled children are taken by bus to a remote hospital, Trutzburg, completely unaware of the horrors that await.
Years later, Rainor, now an adult, with Down Syndrome, with that bus driver’s coded diary in hand, goes looking for his friend Emma, a fellow survivor of Nazi Germany’s Aktion T4 — a program of extermination of disabled people, including children.
“When We Were Ashes,” Andrew Boden’s new novel is a dive into the nightmare of the 20th century. Even so, his mission is to find the beauty and magic that can co-exist with the darkness and help us through it.
Boden, who grew up in Cranbrook and now lives in Burnaby, has been thinking about his story for years, and researching and bringing his characters to life. “When We Were Ashes” follows upon his recent book “The Secret History of My Hometown,” a counterfactual history of Cranbrook. But this is different fare, no doubt.
“It’s a heavy subject, and there’s no real way around it,” he said. “But what I’ve tried to emphasize in the book is the beauty I put into it, and the emphasis on the beauty, even in these tragic moments of darkness.
For example, one of the motifs thought the book is music. In this case, it’s Eric Satie’s Gymnopédies, which one of the characters plays for the children.
“It’s really the anthem of the children’s love for the hospital staff member who plays it,” Boden said.
“Usually I’m a fairly intuitive writer, and the motif that flowed throughout the novel was this Eric Satie piece. I realized it was there to contrast this awful time, with the fact that there can still be these beautiful moments, there can still be love and tenderness in the midst of it.”
There is almost a fairy tale quality present in “When We Were Ashes,” a lightness of magic realism that contracts with the darkness.
“The young protagonist, Rainor, 13, he’s at the hospital, and later becomes one of the victims of Action T4,” Boden said. “He’s in love with one of the other children at the hospital. Magical things happen — flower petals fall from the sky, invisible pianos play that the other children can hear. All this is happening when he is surrounded by what we as 21st century readers would conclude is horror. And it’s his love that carries him through.”
Nonetheless, the horrors of the Holocaust aren’t easily diminished by shining light on them. Aktion T4 was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany, targeting individuals with psychiatric, neurological or physical disabilities — those who eugenicists and their supporters deemed "unworthy of life” — who represented a genetic and a financial burden on Germany. Among the victims, at least 10,000 children were taken to and killed in special “paediatric clinics.” Killing wards.
And these are the most vulnerable characters, not the kind usually found in literature. Disabled children, with less power to challenge and control their course of their lives.
“I think these kind of characters are under-represented in literature,” Boden said. “I wanted to tell their stories as best I could. This is the story that chose me, in a sense, to write. The characters have to be children, with their disabilities, so I can put the reader in their shoes and show them what it was like. So in a sense, both I and the readers can bear witness to the worst horrors of the 20th century.”
Can you look into the abyss and not be touched. How can you create characters with such empathy, and then send them into the Holocaust?
“When I was researching it and writing it, and creating, even though the material was horrific, I sort of plowed through it in almost a disassociated state. And it wasn’t until several drafts later, and working with an editor who was pointing out several things to me, that I kind of realized what I had written. There were some real moments of heartbreak, where I felt just terribly for my characters, awful for subjecting them to what I did.
“I’ll also note that the world being what it is today, and the shifting attitudes towards people with disabilities, and so on … my publisher did have a sensitivity reader go through the manuscript. The sensitivity reader was quite pleased with how I presented the characters with disabilities. I’m grateful for that.”
Andrew Boden is reading from his new novel, “When We Were Ashes,” on Thursday, Nov. 7, at 7 p.m., at Huckleberry Books in Cranbrook.
