Heather Clark's 'The Scrapbook'- a Different Kind of WWII Novel

In The Scrapbook, award-winning author, Heather Clark, writes her debut novel, a historical fiction set in 1996 that follows Anna, a Harvard graduand, who falls in love with a visiting German student named Christoph. As their relationship grows, Anna travels back and forth to Germany to visit Christoph and while it’s known that both their grandfathers were part of WWII, Christoph remains tight-lipped about his grandfather’s involvement in it. Inspired by Clark’s own grandfather’s WWII scrapbook, her story includes pieces of his biography as well as a few of his actual quotes about arriving at Dachau. Growing up, Clark had heard rumors of this scrapbook, but she never saw it until her grandmother brought it out on the day of her grandfather’s funeral. “…so it’d been kind of tucked away… for decades because my grandfather was part of an American army unit that helped liberate the Dachau Concentration Camp and when he was there, my grandfather took photos… and these photos ended up in his wartime scrapbook, so I saw the photos for the first time, horrific photos, of Dachau on Liberation Day, and obviously I was haunted by these and I wanted to come back to this story, but I didn’t feel like I had the right background to write a nonfiction book about it… so I went back to my roots in fiction and thought I could tell this story in a novel… there are obviously seeds here of real things that happened with my own grandfather… it’s been really exciting for me to spin fiction on top of those autobiographical foundations and to tell this story about the war, and memory, and inheritance…”

With regard to the past, Clark urges everyone to keep up with history, whether it’s world history or their own. “We need to keep reading our history and keep grappling with it, and listen to the stories of our grandparents because they have a lot to tell us, they have a lot of wisdom to pass down… look at your own family’s archive, don’t just throw it away or keep it in the attic… These are really important historical documents that can shed light on the past and I think we’re kind of living in this post-truth era where people think history doesn’t matter… so I just think we need to pay a lot of attention to our national histories, our collective histories, as much as we do our personal histories…”