Now I know how it would save my life in a concentration camp.’ ” And how it might save Rose’s. “When I read that I thought, ‘Finally, I found a reason for my useless ability to recite yards and yards of poetry. “There was a Czech girl who loved poetry and swapped her bread for poems,” Wein said. “I didn’t really stop adding to the repertory of poems I could recite until I hit 30.” When she read Micheline Maurel’s account of her imprisonment at Ravensbrück, she felt an immediate kinship. “All through high school, I thought of myself as a poet,” she recalls.

It was in Harrisburg, too, that Wein developed an addiction to poetry. “Something about how they managed to maintain hope resonated with me.” “I was obsessed with her story, frankly,” Wein says. She read the book itself a few years later, and then drew her own illustrated version of Boom’s memoir about hiding Jews from the Nazis at the family’s watch shop in Holland. Harrisburg, the state capital, is where Wein grew up, and where, at age eight, she first encountered information about concentration camps, in a comic book adaptation of Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place. Rose is American (last name: Justice), a recent high school graduate who’s been flying since age 12, when she was taught by her father, owner of a flight school in central Pennsylvania. Instead, the Rose of the title is 18, a civilian volunteer, ferrying a Royal Air Force plane from France to England when she is captured by the Nazis. She was also, by that point, just too old for this story.” “I needed a new character because I wanted to include poems and I couldn’t make be a poet,” Wein says.

She tried writing a second novel with the same main character and. She was not yet finished writing it when she realized she was far from done with the subject matter. Many did not live to tell their own stories.Īnd then there’s Wein’s own Code Name Verity, a Printz Honor book and winner of the 2013 Edgar Award. Her fascination with women who were dropped behind enemy lines was stoked by The Women Who Lived for Danger, a collective biography about some of World War II’s female secret agents. She hit upon her main character Rose’s motivation for writing down everything she could remember about having been imprisoned after reading And I Am Afraid of My Dreams by Wanda Póltawska, a Polish survivor of the camps. Wein wanted to know more about Ravensbrück, the notorious women’s concentration camp, after reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. To find the inspiration for Elizabeth Wein’s latest novel, Rose Under Fire (Hyperion, Sept.), one need look no further than the shelves of her bookcase.

Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein