Sharon Cameron is the author of the new young adult novel Up from the Ashes. Her other books include The Light in Hidden Places. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
Q: Your new novel Up from the Ashes is based on a true story--how did you learn about Holocaust survivors Chaim and Selma Engel?
A: My first inkling of Chaim and Selma came from my editor, after we had completed my first novel of the Holocaust, The Light in Hidden Places, when she asked if I had ever heard of the Sobibor death camp and its uprising. I hadn’t, but I was intrigued.
I sought out the filmed oral histories of the survivors, and found both Chaim and Selma, each of them describing the moment they first met, when they were forced to dance together for the amusement of their Nazi guards, while a fire made of thousands of bodies lit the sky.
They didn’t speak the same language. But as Selma said later, “love was their language.” Their story was devastating, and so beautiful. I thought about it a long time, but I knew I had to write it.
Q: What did you see as the right balance between fiction and history as you worked on the novel?
A: I think of Up from the Ashes as a work of “dramatized reality,” a novel where every name is real, and where each and every event comes from the eyewitness testimony of survivors. When dealing with subject matter like this, it would feel disrespectful to do otherwise.
However, I can’t know the exact words that were spoken in those situations, and sometimes, while we might know what happened—that two people were friends, for instance—we might not know exactly how that relationship developed.
By using the memoirs, interviews, court records, and oral histories of all the survivors—and in some cases, the perpetrators—I was able to find dialogue and scenarios that would fill those gaps, creating a novel of fiction that is as close to the truth as we can make it.
Though as Chaim said in one of his interviews, a person who wasn’t there just can’t really know. Because there aren’t words for a place like Sobibor. And I believe that’s true.
Q: The Kirkus Review of the book says, “The most compelling aspects of the story are the people at its heart: Selma, with her stubbornness and determination, and Chaim, with his kindness and sharp mind.” What do you think of that description?
A: It’s a very accurate description! I worked very closely with the Engel family when writing this book, and it was fascinating to see bits of Chaim’s strong, quiet nature and Selma’s exuberance coming out in their children and in their grandchildren.
Q: What did you learn that especially surprised you during the research for the book?
A: The biggest surprise of researching Chaim and Selma’s miraculous escape from the hell of Sobibor was exactly what drew me to their story in the first place: a deep, incredible sense of hope.
They chose love in a place where there was no love, and that love gave them hope—hope in a place where there was no hope— and that hope gave them strength, and determination, and resilience. I think it’s why they survived. What I didn’t realize is just how deeply their story would be able to plant hope in me.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Sharon Cameron.
