Louise turned to Alice. “My little Valkyrie. Mission accomplished!”
“No Valhalla for him!” Alice muttered. She sighed. “I’ve been to hell and back.” Then she sighed again. “I’m retiring.”
“At the ripe old age of fourteen, you’re retiring?”
“Almost fifteen,” Alice replied. “Remember—or maybe you don’t—you missed my fourteenth.”
“And your face?”
“I like my face—just the way it is.” She paused. Then, in barely a whisper, she said to herself, “Yes. Just the way it is.”
Acknowledgments
I have had an endless fascination with World War Two. So Faceless is my fourth book about this war. I would first like to give thanks to those who are not here—the Greatest Generation. From that generation I need to single out a few: my uncle Jack Hurwitz, who was in the Battle of the Bulge and served as a radio operator; my aunt Mildred Falender Hurwitz, who enlisted as a WAVE, a branch of the United States Naval Reserve unit; and my cousin Jack Lasky, who served in North Africa under the command of General George S. Patton.
I would also like to acknowledge the lives of more than a dozen distant cousins who died in the Nazi concentration camps.
These people are all gone, but thank you, Uncle Jack and Cousin Jack and Aunt Mildi, for your service. And to my cousins who died, a blessing on your memory.
But there are those who are living who helped me so much with this book. First, my editor Alyson Day at Harper Collins: thanks for her expert eye and delicate touch with a manuscript. Also, eternal gratitude to Tom Ricks, who knows wars and warfare and has deep insights into military history. Tom graciously allowed me to poke around in his cellar library and sift through his enormous collection of books on World War II, secret intelligence agencies, and spycraft.
A deep thanks to my son-in-law, Andrew Nelles, who has seen war up close as a photo journalist and has twice gone to Afghanistan to document that war. Andrew’s deep knowledge of aircraft and weaponry, both past and present, was very important for this book. Whom else could I have asked about the minutia of details concerning the Lysander aircraft that dropped Alice and her mom, Posie, into Germany?
And finally, I am eternally grateful to my husband, Christopher Knight, who has for more than fifty years encouraged and cheered me on. No one matches Chris for patience with a wife who is a total Luddite when it comes to electronics and basically other technology ranging from toasters (yes, I consider a toaster not high-tech but still a problem for me) to computers.
Author’s Note
The novel Faceless is the fourth book I have written about World War Two—a war that started six years before I was born and ended two months before my first birthday. What did I know about this war at a very young age, growing up in Indiana, so far from those battlegrounds?
I knew that my uncle Jacob Hurwitz was a radio operator during the Battle of the Bulge, scrambling around in the Ardennes with a transmitter radio strapped to his back, dodging land mines and Nazis. This was Hitler’s last gasp. Nineteen thousand American troops killed in action, 47,500 wounded. I knew that my Aunt Mildred Falender Hurwitz was a lieutenant in the WAVES, the women’s branch of the United States Naval Reserve, and that she was married to Jacob in her snappy WAVES uniform. And that she sometimes wore it after the war for Thanksgiving dinners.
I knew that my cousin Jack Lasky, twenty years older than me, was one of the 33,000 men who served under General George Patton in the North African Campaign.
That’s what I knew.
This is a war that has endlessly fascinated me. When I was in the fifth grade, I started reading books about the war, both fiction and nonfiction. Yes, I did read a lot about the Holocaust. But I actually read more about the war itself. I read Stalag 17 and Slaughterhouse Five. I had to read Slaughterhouse Five because it was by Kurt Vonnegut, who came from my hometown! I read From Here to Eternity. I read The Naked and the Dead when I was in the sixth grade. Why did I read it? Because my parents were reading it. I read The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw and A Bell for Adano by John Hersey. And of course I read The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, and in the seventh grade I read Elie Wiesel’s book Night.
I liked battle books more, and I was simply crazy for Winston Churchill. I read everything I could about him. But I did not read The Gathering Storm, which both my parents read and of which we had two copies. My mom moved one to my bedroom, knowing how much I loved Churchill. I tried. I was in the sixth grade then, but I couldn’t get past the first ten pages. However, The Bridge Over the River Kwai had been translated from French into English when I was ten years old, and I read that and then saw the movie three times.
I was steeped in these war stories since I was a middle grader. It came as no surprise to me that when I grew up and became a writer, I would eventually write a war book. Now I’ve written four. The first book was Ashes, set in Berlin in 1933. It centered around the Nazi book burnings in May of that year. The second book, The Extra, was the story of a Roma who was plucked from a Roma internment camp and forced to work in a movie being made by Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl. The third was Night Witches, the story of the heroic young Russian women who flew intrepid bombing missions in the defense of Stalingrad and then chased the Nazis all the way back to Germany.
What is interesting is that I have never told any of these war stories from a Jewish point of view, yet eighteen cousins of my generation perished in extermination camps. Why would I not tell a story from the Jewish point of view? The answer is simple. I always wanted to explore what non-Jewish people were thinking. Were they merely complicit? Or was there something deeper? What was going through their minds? Did they have any empathy, like Oskar Schindler, in some way?
In my own World War Two novels I wanted to get beyond the tropes, the predictable narratives, and find the one narrative of empathy—empathy from the least expected sources. For me it is this search for empathy that is inspiring and can be extraordinary.
There is a question that I often have to field: “You’re Jewish, so why don’t you have more Jewish content in your war books?” The answer is that I want to explore more than just writing about my Judaism. And I have written about my Judaism in many books—The Night Journey, Broken Song, Marven of the Great North Woods, Blood Secret. I’ll continue to do so.
But it is when I am not in my own skin but writing through the eyes of another that I am at my most revolutionary, my most authentic, and able to upend traditional perspectives.
I know that I can tell a more compassionate war story if I step into another person’s skin and begin to search for the humanity, the empathy that I continue to believe lurks in every human’s soul.
Historical Figures Featured—Background Information
While many of the characters in this book are made up, some are real people. Here is background information on some of the historical figures that Alice encounters.
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming chancellor in 1933 and then Führer in 1934. During his dictatorship, he initiated World War II and the Holocaust, the genocide of six million European Jews during the war.