Marilyn Sachs was a Jewish teen living in New York City during World War II.
“It was almost fun,” she said about the days when she dressed up and danced with soldiers. While her family couldn’t get the best cuts of meat, no one went hungry, either.
“All that time, Fanny, a year younger than I, was hiding from the Gestapo. She suffered hunger, cold and always the fear of being found out and taken away by the Nazis because she was Jewish,” Sachs wrote.
The “Fanny” Sachs writes about is Fanny Krieger, her close friend. Sachs, who has written close to 40 young adult novels, has just published her second book based on Krieger’s life story, “Lost in America.”
Both San Francisco women in their mid-70s, they befriended one another more than 30 years ago. They met because their children were in school together, and Sachs detected Krieger’s accent. As their friendship grew, Sachs asked Krieger if she would mind sharing her story.
“I invited her for lunch and brought a tape recorder,” Sachs recalled. “But I’m very unmechanical. She spoke for about three hours, and I had forgotten to turn the tape recorder on.”
Sachs went on to write “Pocket Full of Seeds,” that tells of Krieger’s story of survival in hiding, with Krieger becoming a young girl named Nicole Nieman. That book ends when the war does, though, and readers always wanted to know what happened to Nieman when the war ended. Some 30 years later, Sachs has picked up where she left off, to finish the story.
Krieger was from Aix-les-Baines, France. On a night in late 1943, she stayed at a friend’s house. It was to be a final farewell before the friend’s family fled the next day to Switzerland.
When Krieger returned home from school the next day, she found a ransacked apartment. Her mother, father and younger sister had been taken by the Gestapo. Her landlady warned her that they were no doubt looking for her as well.
Krieger spent the rest of the war in hiding. It was only after she met up with someone who knew her family’s fate that she understood they would not return.
So when she received an offer to come to America, she accepted, and that episode of her life is really what makes up most of the story of “Lost in America.” Krieger crosses the ocean to a strange country.
“People in America did not understand what had happened in Europe,” she said recently. “So much misery happened, that it seemed the whole world had to know about it.”
When Krieger arrived at age 17, her cousins — who were not at all nice to her — insisted that she contribute to the rent. She first worked at a chocolate shop, then at Air France. Her only close friends were other French Jewish immigrants. But over time, she began to adjust to her new life. As soon as she could afford to, however, she moved out of her cousin’s apartment. That’s where the book ends.
In real life, she then moved to Shreveport, La., and went on to Houston, where she met her future husband and got married. From there the couple relocated to San Francisco, where she became a successful businesswoman.
She also picked up fly-fishing, as her husband was a serious recreational fly-fisherman. Today she leads an international organization of women fly-fishers. She just led an expedition for a group of women to Argentina and soon she will go to the Bahamas.
“A lot of Jews do fly-fishing,” she said. “It’s a wonderful way to escape.”
Though she felt great guilt at first, for not being home that night her family was taken, Krieger admits that staying busy helps her not think too much about her past.
“I think it is a coping mechanism, but I wouldn’t want it any other way,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to spend my time feeling sorry for myself. I’m basically an optimist and I try not to dwell too long on the negative.”
“Lost in America” by Marilyn Sachs (150 pages, Roaring Book Press, $16.95).