Inspired by my namesake who died in the Holocaust

According to the saying — frequently attributed to Albert Einstein — coincidences are God’s way of staying anonymous. If this is true, there may have been divine intervention in the creation of Melanie Levensohn’s debut novel, as an extraordinary coincidence kick-started the whole project.
When Melanie Zipperer married, she took her husband Pascal’s surname, Levensohn. She then found out that she was the second Melanie Levensohn. The first was the half-sister of Pascal’s cousin, Jacobina Löwensohn, who was only been told of her half-sister’s existence by her father on his death bed.
“He had lost all contact with Melanie during the war and then he left for Canada and never knew what happened to his eldest daughter,” says Levensohn. “He made her promise to search for Melanie and Jacobina spent ten years trying to find the half-sister she never knew.”
Despite years of intensive research, contacting various Holocaust organisations, the International Tracing Service, the Red Cross and other experts, all leads ended with the first Melanie’s transport to Auschwitz.
“Jacobina kept the letters and historical documents she compiled during those years in a binder, entitled ‘Melanie Levensohn’. She gave it to Pascal who kept it in his office. I opened it and it was extremely moving to see. It is my name, on a fax in German written by an SS Obersturmbannführer in 1943 telling his headquarters that a certain Melanie Levensohn is on a train from Drancy [the French transition camp for Jews] to Auschwitz, and that there are 843 other women on that train. The other moving moment was when I saw a copy of Melanie’s registration entry card to Drancy. It had her parents’ address, her age and her profession, which was a student back then.

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The student Melanie Levensohn, who is believed to have died at Auschwitz

“The fact that I, Melanie Levensohn, came into this family exactly 70 years after the first Melanie Levensohn disappeared; me coming from Germany of all countries, and having studied in Paris just like her, that was just too much.
“In addition to strengthening my understanding and appreciation for the Jewish people it also gave me a belief that there is something bigger that I cannot understand.” The fact that her own daughter was due to be born on the same day as the original Melanie’s birthday “sent shivers through my body”, says Levensohn.
For Levensohn, the mystery of the fate of her namesake spurred her to write her first novel. A Jewish Girl in Paris is her fictionalised account of young Melanie’s life under Nazi rule, interwoven with a modern-day search for the truth by an enterprising French woman.
“I always wanted to write, but I never dared to,” says Levensohn. “I wrote my first book when I was eight or nine, I had an old typewriter! I studied literature but I never became a writer. When I read this folder and learned about Melanie Levensohn, the inner urge to do something became very intense and I had to write something. I didn’t want to write a documentary, that was not me. Then I started thinking about how to weave these real facts into a fictitious story using the world I know and working it into a plot that would be an interesting read.
“I didn’t know what to do, exactly. I was also very worried about writing the historical part because I had no idea about anything of the daily life, what was going on in Paris in those days. I was worried that I would write something wrong so I had to do huge research and dive deep into that time period. I had to read books — not just the historic facts but also the little daily life facts: what did they have to eat, what was the price of a baguette, how was the life of the Jewish population step by step restrained and what exactly happened to them.
“My mother tongue is German, I always think in German. I tried to write in English but the German was just pouring out of me. So I thought I would never be a good fiction writer if I don’t write in my mother tongue. I started the book in 2015 and it took me about two years to write it. It was published in 2018 and subsequently it was published in Italian and then in French. My big dream was to get it out in English, so my husband, who is American, can finally read the book, and his remaining family too. So it is a very big moment for me that the book is coming out in English.

A Jewish Girl in Paris (002)