The Truth Behind the Fiction

I have circled the stories in Beneath the Edelweiss from the time I was a child. They have drifted in and out of my consciousness like spools of light that illuminate dreams. Holding my daughters— children that chronic illness could have easily denied me— made the distant past echo against my rib cage as if reaching through me toward them, and so without knowing what I would find, I decided to give myself to the landscape of my heritage and to the stories that needed to be told. 

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The novel’s setting, Carinthia, is Austria’s most southern province neighboring both Slovenia and Italy. Picture snow topped mountains, lakes that mirror the sky, and flowering alpine fields. Add to this, old wooden farmhouses with intricately carved balconies, Catholic wayside shrines bejeweled with offerings of fruit and bloom, and alpine villages nestled into the landscape like something placed carefully at the bottom of a glass bowl.

         This remarkable beauty is the backdrop for a sinister story; Carinthia was the cradle and the grave for Nazism in Austria, and it has one of the worst records for the euthanasia of the distraught, dying and disabled. These people became the testing ground for the wider holocaust.

Austria in the interwar period was a country suffering from chronic poverty. People could not sell a chicken without the tax man taking a cut, and his cut was firewood because there was no money. One of the few sectors of society that ate three meals a day were farmers. One of these farming families took in my grandmother, Elfriede, in 1936. My great-grandmother, Ana, was too poor and sick to look after her children, but she had full intentions of collecting them when her situation improved.

Elfriede would sit at the farm window waiting for Ana to collect her, and Mitzi, the farmer’s sister would encourage Elfriede outside to discover the alpine garden and life on the farm where herbal medicine was a normal practice passed along female lines.

Ana never came back to collect Elfriede because she died in Carinthia’s regional hospital where nurses killed patients as part of their daily duty under the Nazi regime’s T4 program.

It was imagining Ana in the hospital looking up at the mountain, Elfriede on the farm looking down at the valley, and Mitzi who comforted Elfriede that was the genesis for the novel. Beneath the Edelweiss does not chronicle Ana’s experience because I could not walk those ill lit hospital corridors with sticky floors even in my imagination, so I handed the story to Mizti and asked her to tell it to me through the metaphor of the alpine garden and the ancient herbal wisdom it offers.

The story of Ana, Mitzi, and Elfriede became layered with years of research where I discovered other communities living in this tiny border region caring for each other and fighting for survival; Jehovah’s Witnesses and their immediate faith-based resistance, Roma and Sinti who lived at the very edge of society, the ethnic Slovene-Austrians who united to form the only militant resistance within Hitler’s fatherland, and the many accounts of how varied the human response was to soldiers knocking on the door demanding to take their sick family members away.

Beneath the Edelweiss and the second novel in the series, Edelweiss Rising, forthcoming in 2027, are ultimately works of fiction, but I hope I have honored my elders, and the landscape they cherished. In writing these books, I seek to remember, witness, understand. Now I offer Beneath the Edelweiss into the world and hope it finds the people who can be uplifted by it..