When writer Mimi Schwartz hears a story during a trip to Israel that corroborates the one her late father used to tell, she is compelled to conduct an ambitious research project about her father’s birthplace, a village where, he said, Christians and Jews lived cooperatively for hundred of years, a village where Christians remained supportive of their Jewish neighbors even in harrowing Nazi times. Good Neighbors Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village, (click here to download an excerpt) is the result of that project, which took 12 years to complete.

The story begins in Israel in Oleh Zion, a town founded by Jews from the German village of Benheim. The Torah Schwartz is looking at, she is told, was buried by Christians in Benheim to save it from the Nazis, and then after the war, a townsperson sent it to Oleh Zion and its residents who had fled Hitler. (All the town names Schwartz uses in her book are fictitious for the protection of residents.) Schwartz realizes that the stories her father recounted about his native village could have been true, that perhaps he was trying to instill in his children an important understanding about humanity (“In Benheim, people always brought food to those in need,” “In Benheim, neighbors helped each other,” “In Benheim, we never wasted a thing”). Once home, Schwartz searches for the truth about her father’s belief in an old-world caring that went beyond ethnic boundaries by contacting people in a social organization she remembered from her childhood.

By visiting the relatives she locates in Queens where she grew up and then by visiting other relatives and the friends of those relatives up and down the Eastern seaboard, Schwartz learns about the life and times of Benheim residents before, during and after WWII. She is struck with the way the New York Jews of Benheim have sustained an organization that offers support to one another and creates memorials in Benheim to honor those who didn’t make it out and were killed by the Nazis. She is struck with the way they remember so many stories of Christians helping Jews. Eventually, she visits Benheim and nearby Dorn (the third fictitious town name she uses), where many past Benheim villagers reside. She comes to know Benheim residents’ descendents and a younger generation of Germans committed to outing the denial of older Germans about the horrors of Hitler and the Nazis. She meets and relies on an older German man who has, from his own sense of duty, become an archivist of Jewish records in Benheim. She also meets ordinary citizens who keep what they call their “Jew File,” records of thevillage Jews they knew who had survived and what happened to them after they left for America, England, Israel, South America, wherever they started their lives again.

As the book jacket notes, Schwatz’s ultimate investigation is one about how people “negotiate evil and remain humane” even when “hate rules.” The beginning inspiration to find out about the truth of her father’s stories concerning cooperation between Christians and Jews despite Hitler’s rise to power is a far cry from her interests growing up. Then, she wished only to be typically American and refused to identify with her father’s background as a German Jew. When he admonished his children with sayings like, “In Benheim, everyone behaved,” and “In Benheim, we all got along,” Schwartz paid little attention.

But Schwartz’s father never forgot the kindness and delight the village residents took in one another and now that Schwartz has found people who knew her father and his village, she has gathered “small stories of decency” for a much larger audience, the kind of stories often “overlooked in the wake of a larger historic narrative.” She has validated her father’s history and even witnessed a new history in the making: She is invited to speak at a celebration of the renovation of what was the Jewish Synagogue in Benheim and is now a Protestant church working to honor the building’s history in a town that today has no Jews living in it. The text on the unveiled plaques contains words about not forgetting what happened, about preventing such horror and violence in the future. Hard as those in the ceremony and those in the audience are trying to use this occasion to heal from the damage of hate, it is the spontaneous and sustained wail of a woman who is the only concentration camp survivor from her family that offers the real opportunity.

All of the stories individuals tell are cast one against the another, Schwartz verifying facts from a variety of viewpoints and asking herself as she interviews people in Germany about the past, “Is this denial or truth?” Despite scholars warnings to trust only the research already done, the author is making her father’s cup whole from a multitude of shards. What are the old neighbors sorry for? What do they do today because of the bad times they lived through? How did they feel when their Jewish neighbors were taken away? When their Jewish neighbor’s homes were sold for a steal? When they were forbidden to help these neighbors? “Denial or truth?” Schwartz asks, looking for the right view, the right pieces, the right glue.

Toward the end of the book and the end of her 12 years of research, Schwartz’s son Alan asks, “So was Benheim special or not?” Schwartz makes a list of what she has found:

The policeman saved two Torahs.
The shoemaker kept fixing Jewish shoes and shared his ration cards.
The barber cut Jewish hair under the sign NO JEWS ALLOWED HERE.
The farmer’s daughter cleaned house, washed, and brought food to her old Jewish neighbor.
The barber’s daughter lent her good raincoat.
The shopkeeper gave food over the back fence at night.

The list continues with 12 more items; these three are from the ending:
Someone hid the plaque of Jewish war dead from WWI in the archives.
At least ten neighbors helped a half-Jewish family survive for five years. The rest let them be.
Carpenters who fixed the Jewish windows after Kristallnacht were sent to the Front and didn’t come back.

“Decency is such a solitary act,” Schwartz writes imagining what she would have done had she been a Christian in that town under threat of death for helping Jews. “…it’s evil that draws a noisy crowd.”

Reading Schwartz’s book informs us about how people cope with shattered lives, how they live with the deepest and most horrible losses on one side, guilt and regret on the other. The facts she is able to find preserved in the stories of so many build toward an answer not only about whether Benheim was special, but also about whether human goodness can survive, if only in pockets, when times turn ugly. Schwartz learns that goodwill and respect, angst and grief over their dissolution, connect people over decades. Her journey, the people she vividly portrays, and the stories she reveals never fail to evoke what is best and binding in our humanity. Her father would be smiling, I think, having read this book. He would cherish the fact that what he knew has been told.

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Many of us will be inspired to write our stories or the stories of our parents and grandparents after reading h Good Neighbors Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village, Here is a way to begin:

Perhaps you have taken a journey looking for truth about your family history. What question to do you have about that history? What are you trying to document?

Make a list as Schwartz does. The accumulation of specifics in the items you list and the order of the items should make the list build in intensity from beginning to end.

You may find that your list leads to chapters in a book you have wanted to write or to individual essays that might some day form a collection.

You can read a Trenton Times interview with Mimi Schwartz and learn more about her and her book at http://www.mimischwartz.net/.