Overview of The Interpreters:

Two Journeys of Love & War

In 2015, when the locksmith cut the padlock on my father’s drab-green footlocker, my father had been dead for thirty years. My foray into his trunk began as a lark, a fun adventure. I didn’t know that the contents of the trunk—the letters, photos, and documents my Jewish-American father had kept while he was a POW of the Germans during WWII—and the eight years of travel, research, and excavation on which they would send me, would alter me.

The contents of the trunk led me to the details of my father’s capture and imprisonment; the harsh conditions he endured at his POW camp, Oflag 64; the risks he took to resist oppression and preserve human dignity; and the chaos and brutality of a world at war. The contours of his wartime experience brought into focus his other personal and professional choices—his family life, his patriotism, his passion for democracy, his long career with the CIA.

The search for my father and his past has carried me to new friendships across generations, to obscure American archives, Polish cemeteries, and German and Polish dinner tables; changed the shape and significance of my memories; and shifted my understanding of my father and his legacy. When I embarked, I did not realize how much the green footlocker had to teach us in a troubled world about the meanings of risk, resilience, integrity, and humor.

My research brought me closer to my father, but it also shoved me up against the frustrating limits of what can be known. Sometimes silence wins. Sometimes the trail runs dry. Sometimes there are no answers.

2015 Susanna First Visti to Oflag 64 Szubin.JPG

Excerpt from The Interpreters: Two Journeys of Love & War

Auschwitz survivor Estelle Laughlin peppers me with her energetic questions and as we finish our meal she declares, “You have a book to write.”

“No,” I insist, “my dad wouldn’t want a book written about him.”

“It is not about him,” she says.
“It is about humanity.”

NYU Men's Glee Club Banquet, my dad, a tenor, far right, 1941
Boletovsky's Appetizings, the little grocery that my Russian-Jewish immigrant grandparents owned in New York City. Circa 1940
My father, before he shipped out to Europe, 1942
The first journal my father kept while a POW. He chronicled his capture, "my history in a nutshell," on this page, February 1943
First postcard my father sent home as a POW. "I suppose you know by this time I have been captured...It surprised me just as much as it does you." March 1943
POW ID card. The number on the chalkboard is the POW ID number assigned by the Germans.
The Germans allowed the POWs various physical activities, but only if they signed a promise not to attempt escape, 1943-1944
Escape map. On the back my father listed the distances to major cities and rivers. I found it wrapped around a bundle of European currencies.
An issue of the POW daily newssheet, for which my dad was the Interpreting Editor. They published this issue on D-Day, June 6, 1944. U.S. Army Heritage & Education Center.
My first look into the last remaining barracks at the site of Oflag 64, Szubin, Poland, 2015