Friday Feature Author Interview with Elise Cooper: The Midwife of Auschwitz, The Midwife of Berlin, and The Children on the Train by Anna Stuart

Ana Kaminski is pushed through the iron gates of Auschwitz beside her frightened young friend Ester Pasternak. As they reach the front of the line, Ana steps forward and quietly declares herself a midwife – and Ester her assistant. Their arms are tattooed and they’re ordered to the maternity hut. Holding an innocent new-born baby, Ana knows the fate of so many are in her hands, and vows to do everything she can to save them.

When two guards in their chilling SS uniforms march in and snatch a blond-haired baby from its mother it’s almost too much for Ana to bear. Consoling the distraught woman, Ana realises amidst the terrible heartache there is a glimmer of hope. The guards are taking the healthiest babies and placing them with German families, so they will survive. And there are whispers the war is nearly over… Ana and Ester begin to secretly tattoo little ones with their mother’s numbers, praying one day they might be reunited.

Then, early one morning, Ana notices the small bump under Ester’s thin striped clothing.

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Elise’s Thoughts

The Midwife of Auschwitz by Anna Stuart is a compelling read. Ana Kaminski and her frightened young friend Ester Pasternak were sent to Auschwitz. Ana quietly steps forward and states she’s a midwife–and Ester is her assistant. The story follows their time there but also how innocent babies born in that horrific place were snatched from their mothers if they had blonde hair. The guards are taking the healthiest babies and placing them with German families, so they will survive. But before they are taken, Ana and Ester begin to secretly tattoo little ones with their mother’s concentration camp identification numbers, praying one day they might be reunited.

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Book Description – The Midwife of Berlin

1945, Berlin: Ester Pasternak walked out of the gates of Auschwitz barely alive. She survived against devastating odds, but her heartbreaking journey is only just beginning. In the camp, Ester gave birth to a tiny fair-haired infant, only for her precious baby to be snatched from her and taken to a German family. Now the war is over, Ester is desperate to find her little girl.

But Europe is in chaos, Jewish families have been torn apart and everyone is urgently looking for their loved ones. In every orphanage and hospital she visits, Ester searches the faces of tear-stained toddlers; each mop of blonde hair and pair of blue eyes she sees sets her heart racing.

Will Ester ever be able to find the child whose tattoo matches her own? Or is she already too late.

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Elise’s Thoughts

The Midwife of Berlin, a continuation of Ester’s story is also riveting. Ester Pasternak walked out of the gates of Auschwitz barely alive. She survived against devastating odds, but her heartbreaking journey is only just beginning. In the camp, Ester gave birth to a tiny fair-haired infant, only for her precious baby to be snatched from her and taken to a German family. Now the war is over, Ester longs to find her little girl. But in doing so she is connected to a little girl, Olivia, an orphan, who Ester adopts.  This story takes readers on a journey reuniting the family. 

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Book Description – The Children on the Train

Grete always longed to be a mother, but it never happened for her so, as the clouds of war gather over Europe, she’s devoting her time to helping Jewish children escape the Nazis. She remembers the face of every single child she’s taken on trains to freedom in the Netherlands. The danger increases with each trip, but, today, she has to get her best friend’s children to safety, because they are closest thing she has to family.

But at the border, the train screeches to a halt and she hears the shout of a Nazi guard. Then the sound of boots coming towards their carriage. When the door bursts open, she draws herself up tall, and prepares to face the interrogation she knows will come. With shaking hands, she passes over Rosa and Adele’s tattered papers and hopes they aren’t scrutinized too closely.

Grete is ready to do whatever it takes to keep her small charges safe.

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Elise’s Thoughts

The Children on the Train is not connected to the Midwife novels, but it’s a story of courage. Grete always longed to be a mother, but it never happened for her so, as the clouds of war gather over Europe, she’s devoting her time to helping Jewish children escape the Nazis. She remembers the face of every single child she’s taken on trains to freedom in the Netherlands, and then to England. The danger of the Kindertransport increases with each trip.  

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The following is an interview with Anna Stuart about three of her books which can only be described as amazing.  

Questions for the Midwife of Auschwitz 

Elise Cooper:  Idea for the story? 

Anna Stuart: I must give the credit for the idea to my editor. She suggested that I might want to explore stories in Auschwitz. I wasn’t at all keen at the time, as it’s such a horrific subject, but I had a look on the internet to please her, and discovered the true story of Stanisława Leszczyńska, who was the original inspiration for Ana. I was hooked immediately and couldn’t believe no one had written about her already. Her life felt like something that just had to be shared with the world and I was honoured to be the writer that, via a fictional interpretation of her life and that of those around her, got to do that. 

EC: How would you describe Ana? 

AS: I think she was a genuinely good woman. She was a committed catholic who believed it was her God-sent duty to help others. She did that via her career as a midwife, but when things got tougher and the Jews in her hometown of Lodz were shut into a ghetto, in appalling conditions, she stepped up to help them, even when it put her in great danger.  

She stood up for what she thought was right, even in Auschwitz, confronting the cruelty of the kapos (block heads) and even evil men like Josef Mengele. Maybe something in her certainty and conviction got through, because she often won those battles, even if they were within a terrible framework. Somehow, despite being in her fifties in Auschwitz, she survived it for almost three years and got home after the war, where she continued to help others throughout her life. I admire her more than I can ever express and always love it when readers get in touch to tell me how much my version of her story moved them. 

EC: How would you describe Ester? 

AS: The inspiration for Ester was Stanislawa’s daughter, Sylwia. Ester is just a normal young woman, caught up in horribly abnormal affairs. Like Ana, she is inherently good, having been brought up to help others and stand up for what’s right. Ester’s ‘superpower’ in Auschwitz, alongside her friendship with Ana and Naomi, is her love for Filip, who she married at the start of the war. This gives her something to hold onto – something to believe it’s worth staying alive for, especially once she realizes that she’s pregnant with their child. The only thing I can think of that would be worse than being in a death camp, is giving birth in a death camp and Ester embodies that nightmare. 

EC: Is it true that babies and their mothers had the same tattoos? 

AS: In her brief testimony of her time in Auschwitz, given much later in life when urged to it by her son, Stanisława Leszczyńska stated that she tattooed the babies with their mother’s numbers in ‘a secret place’ in the hope of them being reunited after the war. Other witness testimonies suggested that this place was in the armpit, so that’s what I went with. 

EC: Please discuss the Lebensborn program and why would Germans accept Jewish babies? 

AS: Hitler – and many, many others – believed that the ‘Aryan’ race was superior to all others and that it was therefore their duty to suppress the supposedly inferior races around them and take over their land to allow the Aryans more room to breathe and grow the crops to sustain themselves. His plan was twofold: to get rid of those people he believed to be worthless, and to ensure that as many Aryans as possible were born.  

We know a lot about Hitler’s vicious policies to exterminate the Jews, the Romanies, disabled people, homosexuals, and perhaps, had he been given his way, eventually all ‘Slavs’. What we know less about is how he pushed the German people to produce more children. There was a relentless pressure in the media for women to stay at home and have children ‘for the Fuhrer’. Mothers who had more than four children were given medals and there was also a push to be sure that any Aryan women who got themselves pregnant out of wedlock were offered places in discreet ‘Lebensborn’ (‘found of life’) homes to have their babies. It was all about populating the world with their own kind.  

As the war went on and many German soldiers were killed fighting, especially in the bitter Russian campaign, this need for more babies became desperate and increasingly evil. Under the innocuous sounding ‘Lebensborn’ banner, German soldiers kidnapped thousands of blonde children from families in the occupied lands, especially Poland, Norway and, later, Hungary, to either put into homes in Germany or adopt out to German families. Many of these families did not know where their new babies had come from – often believing them to have been orphaned by warfare – but the truth was that they had been stolen from out of the arms of their mothers. Towards the end of the war, the same was done for any babies born in Auschwitz who looked even vaguely blonde. The irony of the Nazis taking in babies born to Jewish women is dark indeed, but it really did happen. 

EC: How cruel was Klara and what did you want her to represent? 

AS: Klara was the block ‘kapo’ – head – and, from all I read, is typical of the women who made it to the top of the prisoner tree in Auschwitz. Most of them were the original prisoners, sent there when it first opened in 1942 from prisons around Germany. They were often hardened criminals before they went in, even though some of them may not have done what we would see as terrible crimes. Klara for example (as she is inspired by a real woman) seems to have been imprisoned for offering abortions, which were illegal in Germany that was keen on bringing Aryan lives into the world. In Auschwitz, given a small amount of petty power, these women (and their male equivalents) became very cruel, ruling their block with an iron hand to curry favour with the Nazi authorities to get themselves privileges and safety. Not all kapos were so brutal – there are a few stories of some who did their best to keep their charges as safe as was ever possible in that terrible place – but many were, and Klara exemplifies them. 

Questions for The Midwife of Berlin 

EC: Idea for the story? 

AS: I never intended to write a sequel to The Midwife of Auschwitz but when readers kept writing to me asking what happened to Pippa, the idea for the story was seeded. When I realized that Pippa and Oliva would have turned 18 in 1961 – the year the Berlin wall went up – the two events came together in my mind and I was ready to get researching. I knew a bit about the wall coming down, having watched it on television as a child, but nothing about it going up and I found it utterly fascinating. It was a horrific time in history, especially for people who had just been through all the horrors of war, and I was very glad to follow my fictional characters’ stories into that year and intertwine them with the shocking events of history. 

EC: Do you think there was not much difference between the Stasi and Gestapo, Russians and Nazis? Please comment 

AS: This is a tricky area to get into and not really the place of a fiction writer. My job is to put my characters into a true world and follow their personal stories, but inevitably I came up against many stark historical truths in doing so. Certainly, the Stasi was born from the same place as the Gestapo, and, indeed, the KGB, and became, if possible, even worse. The culture of fear created by everyone informing on each other was one of the most terrible features of life behind the Iron Curtain and it seems to me a bitter truth that, in this period at least, the so-called left was just as bad as the so-called right. If you ask me, any regime that can only operate by controlling its citizens, depriving them of outside news, censoring all they say and do, and keeping them trapped within its borders with guns is inevitably doomed to failure. It’s truly terrible that they ruin so many lives in the process. 

EC: Describe Kristen and her predicament. 

AS: Kirsten and her brother Uli have been brought up by their mother Lotti, in a small flat in Berlin. Their father, Jan, disappeared after the war and their mother never wanted to speak about him, so the children assume he must have been a Nazi. They’ve got on fine without him. They don’t have much money but they do have each other and are happy. The novel opens, however, when Jan comes home and everything is blown apart.  

First, they find out that Uli is not Jan’s son, but the product of a Russian rape of their poor mother when they took Berlin. Then bitter, drunken Jan tells Kirsten that she is not his or Lotti’s daughter, but that he ‘found her’ and gave her to Lotti as a ‘present’. When her mother tearfully admits to this, she also tells Kirsten that she had a tattoo in her armpit – 41400. This most likely means she was born in Auschwitz to a mother who may, possibly, still be alive and out there looking for her. 

EC: Describe Olivia and her predicament? 

AS: Oliva knows that she was born in Auschwitz to a mother who died and that she was adopted by Ester and Filip. She has two brothers who are Ester and Filip’s full children and has always felt loved and part of the family. But the novel opens with her finding out that she also has an adoptive sister – another baby, born to Ester (and Filip) in Auschwitz and never found after the war. A baby who might be out there, still bearing the tattoo 41400, waiting to be found. 

EC: Similarities and differences between both sisters? 

AS: Kirsten prefers dancing and fashion, where Olivia is more into sport, but they are both hardworking, honest and loyal to those they love. They are also both curious – especially once they learn of the existence of a mystery sister. And they both have the drive to try and find each other. 

EC: Lotti versus Ester as mothers? 

AS: Ester is a kind, gentle, loving mother and an excellent midwife. But Lotti, despite taking in a child handed to her by the SS, is also a great mother. The Lebensborn programme was deeply flawed, and run by evil men, but not everyone caught up in it was equally evil. Lotti is a relatively simple woman, who took the child she was handed when she couldn’t conceive herself and worked hard to love and care for her. It was important to me to show Lotti as a good mother and explore the greys of the whole situation. She adopted Kirsten for genuine reasons but was, perhaps, wilfully blind to the wider world around her. In the novel she must face up to her own culpability in Kirsten’s story. This she does bravely. Motherhood has many facets I hope the novel explores that via Ester and Lotti.  

Questions for The Children on the Train 

EC: Idea for the story? 

AS: As with many of my novels, the inspiration for this story came from a real woman – Truus Wijsmuller, a key figure in the Kindertransport. She was an astonishing person, bold, organised and very brave, and she put herself in danger time and again to make the Kindertransport work. In Britain we know a lot about Nicholas Winton, who brought nearly 700 children to safety from Prague in the same period, also under the umbrella of the Kindertransport. His work was wonderful, but Truus did far more than him with no real acknowledgement. I have a personal suspicion that this is because Winton was a man, so history feels the need to commend him for rescuing children, compared to women who we simply expect to do so. The facts are, however, that Truus was out there, on the frontline, facing down Adolf Eichmann, and riding the trains between Germany and the Netherlands time and time again to get the terrified children over the border to safety. That, to me, is astonishing, and I hope this novel brings her story to more people as it really deserves to be known. 

EC: Are there any real characters or characters based on real characters? 

AS: As stated above, Grete is inspired by the amazing Truus Wijsmuller, and her husband Aart by the real life Joop Wijsmuller. Several of the key workers of the Kindertransport, such as Lola Hahn-Warburg and Norman Bentwich also feature in the book in a minor way, as does the horrific Nazi Adolf Eichmann in an interview that is inspired by Truus’ real-life testimony, plus several of the guards who she dealt with regularly in her work. 

The tale of Grete/Truus fighting her way back to the Netherlands from Paris as the German armies swept towards her is inspired by real testimony (and, incredibly, I had to dial back what actually happened as there wasn’t enough room for every crazy event), as is her getting eighty orphans out of the Netherlands on the very last boat before the country had to surrender. Various accounts of encounters with border guards are, sadly, based on real tales, as is the fact that Truus took her sightings of German tanks at the border just days before the invasion to the Dutch authorities and they would not believe her… 

EC: How would you describe Grete? 

AS: Astonishing! My Grete, inspired by Truus, is a sturdy, no-nonsense, middle-aged woman, who is prepared to cut through every scrap of red-tape to get to the heart of rescuing children from the Nazi’s clutches. She’s incredibly brave, hugely determined and one of those people who are prepared, when the rest of us are cowering, to stand up and be counted. She’s also, of course, a woman with her own fears and insecurities and I hope the novel explores what a toll public work can take on a private person. 

EC: How would you describe Helena? 

AS: Helena, a bit like Ester in The Midwife of Auschwitz, is a normal woman – a wife, a mother, and a daughter, trying to keep her family safe against terrible odds. I hope that readers can, perhaps, look at what happens to her and imagine themselves in her position, simply trying to live an honest, kind life, but thrown into terrible danger through no fault of her own. 

EC: What is the Kindertransport? 

AS: The Kindertransport wasn’t a set organisation, but rather a loose coming together of several different charitable groups who were keen to rescue children in danger in Hitler’s increasingly censorious regime. A variety of kind, brave people came together after Kristallnacht (The night of the broken glass when Nazi gangs rioted through the cities of Germany attacking Jewish people and their homes and businesses) to take a proposal to the Prime Minister to scrap visa requirements for unaccompanied minors. With tenacity and courage, and the backing of the Quaker Home Secretary, they succeeded in getting parliament to pass a law permitting this. They then all worked, in an ad hoc way, to organise transports to bring as many children as possible out of Europe under these new entry conditions. There was no limit on how many could come and they managed to free just under 10,000 before war broke out and made further operations impossible. 

EC: Why do you think the parents were willing to give up their children and send them to an unknown foreign country? 

AS: This is very hard for us to understand today, and even then, clearly, it was impossibly hard for people to put their beloved children on trains to a foreign country without them, but times were desperate. The Jewish people had seen their rights continually eroded each year. They had been declared ‘untermenschen’ – non-people – and had no protection from the law. As an example of the rampant prejudice and unfairness they were up against, after Kristallnacht, when their properties were trashed and many of them were beaten up and imprisoned in mass rioting, the Reich imposed a fine upon them to pay for the damages!  

Jews in Germany were living in constant fear of attack. Many of the men had been taken away to brutal labour camps (the precursors to the eventual concentration camps). They weren’t allowed to work as teachers, doctors or civil servants of any kind. Notices were going up everywhere banning them from cinemas, swimming pools and parks. Many of their businesses were being taken from them with no remuneration whatsoever. It was desperate. That had been going on ever since Hitler took power in 1933, getting worse with every year, and they were under no illusions that he intended their destruction. In those circumstances, getting their children away must have seemed like the one tiny shred of hope, and if it meant parting from them, that’s what they had to do. 

EC: Do you think that it was hard for the children to go to a foreign land and live with strangers? 

AS: I think it must have been incredibly hard and there are very varying stories about how it went for them. Many were lucky and got kind foster parents, who did their best to look after them – though even then, of course, they would desperately miss their own families. Others were treated roughly, even made into servants for the families, or passed around homes like unwanted baggage. After the war, there is no doubt that almost all of them were desperate to find their own families – and that very few of them ever did, as they’d been killed in the concentration camps. The Kindertransport was an operation borne from wonderful charity and kindness and it did save lives, but it was inherently sad, being only a last-ditch rescue possibility and never something that anyone would truly wish for a child. 

EC: Would you have given up your children? 

AS: I honestly don’t know. How can any of us say what we would have done without living in those times? My instinct is to say that I would rather they’d died with me than gone away to strangers but that, in truth, is a selfish stance. Most of the Kindertransportees, interviewed in later life, appreciated how much love it must have taken from their parents to send them away to survive. Would I have been brave enough? I have no idea. 

EC: What happened to the children after the war? 

AS: Many different things. Some were adopted by their foster families; some went on to homes or hostels. Many went to America, or stayed in Great Britain. In essence, they grew up. They got jobs, met people, and started families of their own. I read many testimonies from Kindertransport children and rebuilding was very important to them – finding love, having children, continuing the line that Hitler tried so hard to destroy. I think it’s wonderful that, in that way, they fought hatred with love, but it cannot have been easy for any of them. They were very brave young people. 

EC: Next book? 

AS: My next book will be The Berlin Bookshop, also a story about Nazi victims escaping Germany in the hideous build-up to the war in that country, though more adults than children. One strand of the story is inspired by the amazing real women, Ida and Louise Cook, who helped many families to escape. It will come out in Spring 2027. 

THANK YOU!! 

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