(Un)knowns

Dave Mason

It’s where (un)knowns overlap that historical fiction comes alive.
The return of German prisoners of war from Soviet camps, 1955
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I don’t know about you, but I’m fascinated by history as much for what we think we know as I am for what we know we don’t know. For me, it’s where (un)knowns overlap that historical fiction comes alive.

My recently-released novel, Between the Clouds and the River, delves into (un)knowns via an intertwined story involving characters struggling through harsh realities. In settings ranging from 1940s North Africa and Montana to 1960s British Columbia, it’s a tale of imagined human outcomes grounded in a documented historical “known,” into which I accidentally stumbled one day, most likely while avoiding actual work.

During the Second World War, more than 450,000 German and Italian prisoners of war (POWs) were held in some 700 camps across the United States and Canada.

Most were paid to go to work.

By the end of hostilities, POW employment in the US was around 90%, and reliance on that cheap labor delayed tens of thousands of repatriations for a year or longer. America also handed over German prisoners to France, which, despite being a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, used them as forced laborers. And though the Soviets had never signed the conventions, the US transferred several hundred thousand German prisoners to them in 1945, about 6,000 of whom were imprisoned in the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which had become an NKVD (future KGB) “special camp.” After European newspapers reported that German POWs were being mistreated, Judge Robert H. Jackson, chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg, informed President Harry S. Truman that the allies themselves were doing some of the very things for which Germans were being prosecuted.

Some 2,200 German POWs escaped from US-based camps during the war. Seven were never accounted for. Seven!

Boom! The (un)knowns grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.

What happened to those guys? Where did they go? What did they do? Whose lives did they impact, for better or for worse? Are there families out there who have no idea who or what their grandfathers might have actually been? If there are, what are the implications around concepts like nationality and citizenship? When I began to layer in the incredibly challenging life circumstances those escapees might have had to navigate, the foundations for a story began to form. Then I discovered an old newspaper article.

In September, 1945, after the war had officially ended, a 24 year-old Afrika Korps soldier named Georg Gärtner—captured by British forces in 1943—escaped from a New Mexico POW camp and disappeared. Forty years later, in 1985, an American named Dennis Whiles, then living in Hawaii, confessed his hidden past.

That incredible human story collided with another history-related fascination.

I’m often struck by the virtual invisibility of older people. Most contemporary cultures seem to be youth centric, with little attention directed toward those with more years and fewer follicles. I’m fortunate to have spent time with people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s who’d seen and done things that no one who met them at their advanced ages might have imagined. They flew anti-shipping missions over 1944 oceans. They led covert night operations in the jungles of Vietnam. One had captained a US nuclear submarine to a Cold War rendezvous with a Soviet sub at the top of the world. Others had been surgeons, scientists, engineers, or professional athletes. As time had marched on, once vibrant lives had simply faded into the grays of history—a distinct advantage to someone like Georg Gärtner / Dennis Whiles.

Historical events basically exist as findings constructed from overlapping remembrances, written or image-based records, and sometimes physical or scientific evidence. We can and should accept sufficiently cross-referenced, corroborated and / or evidence-based findings as “knowns,” leaving room for additional information that might shine a new light on them. But how much can and should we accept if the remembrances are those of an individual—unsupported by other evidence? Law enforcement knows there’s nothing less reliable than eye-witness testimony, because everyone views events through a single, blurry lens. If the owner of a single lens—say, that of an escaped German POW—is intent on hiding their truths, whatever history they do reveal must largely consist of historical fiction.

Because literary historical fiction is storytelling that’s usually rooted in accepted facts relayed as imaginary events seen through artificial eyes, it can allow us to “experience” things of which we might never have conceived. Done well—I aspire to be able to make that claim!—it can illuminate while it provokes, and entertain while it answers questions readers may never have thought to ask. Done exceptionally well, it can elicit the kinds of visceral reactions I experienced while watching a 96 year-old man’s eyes well up as he spoke softly about his remembered reality as a 22 year-old fighter pilot.

Between the Clouds and the River is essentially historical fiction about historical fiction, a story in which the (un)known past of a man named Frank Gardner changes the future of a boy named Joseph Holliman.

Our own personal (un)knowns can change the lives of those who come after us.

We should craft them accordingly.

Dave Mason is the author of Between the Clouds and the River which is available now.