The novelisation of a true story

by

Joanna Watts

This is a novel but one that is rooted firmly in fact. It is the story of my father and his parents. The facts in the tale have been handed down to me by my father. Although not a great talker about his early life, when he was 75 he decided to write his memoires. With painstaking care he researched and recorded as much information about his family as he could. I am extremely grateful for the work that he did as it captured forever an accurate record of people, places and events.

What it did not capture well enough for me was the emotion and the drama of my father's story – particularly the first 25 years of his life. From what I gleaned from the little my father shared and then from reading his memoires, I had the sense that he and his parents were amazing people. They were not grand or important. They were just everyday people but they did extraordinary things. And they displayed anything but everyday courage and fortitude during some of the most challenging periods of modern European history.

Theirs was a story that I felt needed to be told and that is what I have tried to capture: a sense of the emotional stress they must have endured, the fear, the frustration and the hardship. The three main protagonists in my story – my father and my grandparents – displayed a strength of human spirit and determination that is truly inspiring.

But they were not the only ones - many of the smaller players in their story were heroes too. I have tried to capture a little about them too: people like Uncle Max Bruckner, Aunt Fritzi and Uncle Robert Schreier, the family in Wetzikon, the German doctor who funded my father's schooling in Switzerland and of course the Chief of Police in St Gallen, Paul Gruninger, whose story is now famous in its own right. For me, it is a great sign of hope that in dark times there are those who refuse to lose their humanity and consciously or unconsciously try to do what is right.

Not everyone I have portrayed in the book is real. My father's memoires captured the major events but not always the intervening steps to get to them. As he is not here anymore to verify facts with, I have filled in the gaps by using educated guesses as to how some of the situations might have played out to reach the outcomes my father has documented. I have tried to create characters only where absolutely necessary from a story-telling perspective.

My main objective has been to capture the story of my father's childhood and youth for posterity. My grandparents both passed away long before I was born and I never knew them. My father passed away in 2012 and the living proof of these heroes passed away with him. I hope in some small way that by telling this story, one which they would probably rather have forgotten, I have provided a testimony to these everyday heroes. The world is full of them and we don't hear their stories enough!

Joanna Watts, April 2013

Vienna, 1938