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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

What’s the best way to resist tyranny?

The two stories in this week’s episode suggest an answer: help the people around you, and hold on to your humanity. 

First, in Dreaming of the River, Pauline Steinhorn draws on family journals to tell how her mother and grandmother survived Nazi forced labor and Bergen-Belsen. Her grandmother smuggled medicine into the camp. Her teenage mother depended on girls in her barracks who shared food and covered for each other when they fell ill.

Helping other people gave [my grandmother] a purpose while she was there. So she didn’t obsess about what a terrible fate she had. She focused on how she could help others. — Pauline Steinhorn

Then, in The Barman of the Ritz, based on a true story, Philippe Collin turns to fiction to tell the story of Frank Meier, a celebrated Jewish bartender who served Nazi officers in occupied Paris. Collin uses the Ritz to examine what privilege lets people overlook and how a man trying to survive comes to take risks for others.

I decided to write a novel because I did not have enough information about him. But immediately I said to myself, “it’s a golden opportunity because … I was allowed to get inside his head and imagine all his thoughts, all his fears, all his desires, anxieties. — Philippe Collin

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You might also like: How to Be a Dissident, Lessons from Resistance Then and Now, Judy Batalion, THE LIGHT OF DAYS

Tags: Pauline Steinhorn, Dreaming of the River, Philippe Collin, The Barman of the Ritz, Writer’s Voice, Francesca Rheannon, Holocaust survival, Jewish resistance, Frank Meier, Nazi-occupied Paris, World War II historical fiction

Read Transcript: Pauline Steinhorn

Read Transcript: Philippe Collin

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