Author’s Note
This is a book of the small stories, the ones that history has no time for as it paints the broad brushstrokes of the past. These stories, I found, often lead to the big stories about Good, Evil, Truth, Bravery, Loyalty, Decency and Denial—and, in my case, helped me to sort what I discovered to be true from the more official Truths of a world I inherited, but never knew firsthand.

That world is a little village of Christians and Jews in southwest Germany, sixty kilometers from Stuttgart. Some stories I heard as a child in Queens, New York—told by a father who remembered a pre-Hitler life “where everyone got along.” Other stories came later, and one in midlife—again about decent Christian neighbors, but during the Nazi years—set me on a twelve-year quest on three continents to find out more. By then my father and his family had died, so these stories come, mostly, from villagers I’d never met before: both the Jews who fled from the Nazis and their Christian neighbors, still in the village today—and who remembered those times.  All welcomed me into their kitchens and living rooms as “die Tochter von Artur Loewengart” (the daughter of Arthur Loewengart), a family they remembered well. And plying me with coffee and home-baked German goodies, the ones I loved as a child in Queens, they opened the albums of their lives with unexpected generosity.

"Don't be naive!" warned Holocaust scholars at my college where I’ve taught writing for twenty years. “Trust the records, not what people tell you! People are unreliable, contradictory!” But as storyteller, not historian, I liked how one person’s memory bumped another, muddying the moral waters of easy judgment. I liked how the same landscape of images—the white cross, the black swastika, the burning synagogue, the fresh-baked Berches and linzertorte—kept reappearing, no matter who was talking. And how the many angles of vision, taken collectively, made my father’s village real for me: a blend of fact, myth, and memory that I could reclaim, at least a little bit.

The people I met, the stories they told, the facts of village life and history, are true as I learned them. Nothing is made up—except for people’s names; the name of the village, which I call Benheim; two other place names; plus some identifying details that I changed to protect the privacy of the non-famous. They include farmers, tradesman, factory workers, and civil servants; many old-timers (Catholic and Jewish) and a few newcomers (Protestant and Muslim); some well off, some poor; some educated, many not going beyond the eight years of the local Volksschule. One survived a concentration camp; one had a Nazi father and grandfather; one was a Jewish daughter who escaped while her mother had to stay behind; one was a Catholic boy in Hitler’s army who now spends his retirement years doing research on local Jewish history. And many others, people neither heroic nor evil, whose lives and struggles let me reenter my father’s old world and walk around for a while with you, my reader—as if it were ours.

Mimi Schwartz
March, 2008

Critical praise for Good Neighbors, Bad Times