Andria Williams: Patrick, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. I’ve just finished reading “Into the Tunnel,” the first chapter of your new novel, Eclipse. I was struck as always by what an immersive, detailed world you create, the tension you achieve, and the beauty and specificity of your language.

As the novel opens, we’re accompanying Eli Hessel as he arrives from Auschwitz — where his whole family was lost — to a vast, mysterious Nazi project deep in a mountain. The change does not bring relief. As he’s led into the dark, underground tunnel, observing the familiar cruelty of SS officers and the smells and tastes of punishment and broken bodies and death, he tries to piece together exactly what this horrible and mysterious project is and what it will require him to do.

We are learning along with Eli just what the deal is with this place, and that approach creates not only tension in the story, but an empathetic dread as we cringe along with each new shade of understanding. Did you always know that you wanted to open the novel this way, with the reader learning Eli’s situation along with him, almost in real-time?

Patrick Hicks: The beginning came to me very quickly, thankfully. I could see it all in my head: the arrival at night, the huffing train in the background, the gaping mouth of the tunnel, the guard towers. I think there’s something deep inside us as a species that recoils at the thought of going underground, and I wanted to tap into that. Many of our legends and myths revolve around a fear of caves, and the underworld, and buried rivers. That natural dread of journeying beneath the soil must have been amplified a thousand fold for the prisoners of Dora-Mittelbau. Being underground? During the Holocaust? Can you imagine?

AW: No, I cannot imagine.

PH: It must have been a unique horror to be in that concentration camp. Imagine entering that warren of tunnels as slave labor and seeing the high technology of these new things called “rockets”, and now imagine knowing that you could shot or beaten or hanged at any moment. I wanted the reader to feel that sense of horrified amazement.

It also seemed like a good way to get at what I call “the moment of crisis”. That’s what drives all stories—a moment of crisis. It’s that moment in a character’s life when everything could change, the stakes are high, and the outcome is anything but certain. If a writer can find that moment, the tension will naturally follow. I wanted the opening chapter to unfold in real time, as you say, to make everything feel immediate and dangerous. It also makes the reader feel closer to Eli. He’s a likable man. We want him to live.

AW: Yes, from the very first line of Eclipse, the stakes feel incredibly high. My investment in Eli’s safety only grows as I read on.

Partway through the chapter, however–without at all diminishing the momentum–the reader’s granted a small measure of relief from in-the-moment dread when Eli’s narration is briefly replaced by a more authoritative narrator, who explains some of the history of the project inside Dora-Mittelbau. (That relief is short-lived as the nature of the project becomes known.)

“One thing was certain: the idea of a rocket was about to move from the realm of science fiction into the realm of science fact. What would soon rise up from blueprints would not only change the course of the twentieth-century, it would rumble down through the years to come. It influences us still. It threatens us still.”

Can you explain the project at Dora-Mittelbau, and the influence it still has? I’d be interested to hear more.

PH: We forget about it now, but the Third Reich had very sophisticated technology. The Allies had good reason to worry that they were quite literally being outgunned. The Nazis were developing an atomic bomb, they built the first jet plane, they had stockpiles of chemical weapons the likes of which the world had never seen before, and they also created the world’s first mass produced rocket—the V-2. Wernher von Braun, who would later move to America and build the Saturn V that got us to the moon, was the mastermind behind the V-2. He tested his prototypes at a military base called Peenemünde. The Allies bombed this site in 1943—we totally destroyed it—and this led von Braun and others to realize that a secret underground concentration camp was needed, it would be an underground factory that would churn out V-2s at a dependable rate. Hitler hoped it would change the course of the war.

And so, deep in the Harz Mountains, prisoners had to blast tunnels into the earth to create this factory. Thousands of lives were lost and, today, no one really knows about Dora-Mittelbau because what was built there—the rockets—were top secret when America discovered the camp. It was hidden from the press. We didn’t want the world to know much about the V-2s, so the horrors of this camp weren’t put in the public eye the way that Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen were. Even today, the name “Dora-Mittlebau” means very little to most people.

I wanted to change that. I wanted to show that this place created the blueprint of the latter half of the twentieth-century.

Those rockets became the ICBMs that exist today. They were built by German scientists who would go on to work for NASA—they’d get Apollo 11 to the moon—and in return we cast a blind eye on their crimes against humanity. That’s why the novel is called Eclipse. It’s about darkness and light. The horror of the Holocaust is directly tied to the wonderment of the Apollo program, and my main character, Eli Hessel, is involved in both events. While everyone is cheering for a successful moon landing in 1969, Eli Hessel is thinking about what happened in Dora. What would it be like to see your tormentors holding positions of high rank at NASA?

One reason some people think the Holocaust and the moon landings are hoaxes comes down to one irrefutable emotion: they both seem impossible. And yet, they both happened. We as a species did both of these things. There is ash at Auschwitz and there are bootprints on the moon. For me, they represent what we are capable of doing to each other, and they also represent what we are capable of doing with each other. Eli wrestles with all of this, and I’ve rooted everything in strong historical research.

AW: I’d love to hear about your approach to research. Both in this novel and The Commandant of Lubizec, I’ve been amazed by the absolute grounding in place and time you achieve, the attention to specific terms and images (carbide lamps, sodium lights, gypsum, kapo, Tranquility Base). What sort of reading and travel does your research involve?

PH: I really appreciate this question and I’m so pleased you felt that sense of grounding. As you know yourself with The Longest Night, all fiction is rooted in a particular time period, and it was important for me to make the reader feel they were in Nazi Germany. I wanted them to feel this in their bones, but I can only achieve this if I do a lot of research. So, in the case of Eclipse, I went to Dora-Mittelbau on two separate occasions and I spent many hours wandering around the camp, talking with curators, and getting into the ruined tunnels with a guide. I read eyewitness accounts of being at Dora, I did research on von Braun, the V-2s, and the Apollo program. This meant visiting the Kennedy Space Center, the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama where von Braun developed the Saturn V. Did you know they have a V-2 on display at Marshall but there isn’t a plaque or really anything that explains the crimes committed at Dora? Those who were murdered have essentially been erased from the story. Seeing that—or really not seeing that—made me want to write about this all the more.

I did the same type of thing for my first novel, The Commandant of Lubizec, which is about a fictitious Nazi death camp in Poland. I did three separate research trips to the real life camps of Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec. I spent over 30 hours in Auschwitz. I interviewed survivors. I have strong feelings that if I’m going to write about the Holocaust, I have to get the history correct. I mean, I just have to. It would be an insult to the survivors and the dead if I didn’t get it right.

AW: What, then, do you think is the relationship between politics and art?

PH: They’re braided together very tightly. Art isn’t created in a vacuum and artists have opinions which invariably come out. If you’re going to write or paint or make music, it’s because you have something to say, and that “something” will be a statement on the world around you. We may not see the politics embedded in Shakespeare today, but they’re there. He was a man of his era and he wrote about the world he saw.

One of my jobs as a literary artist is to shine light into the darkness. If I can illuminate new ideas and nudge readers to consider new things, then I’ve done something that goes beyond just entertainment. Good writing provokes us to think differently. It challenges us to care and it forces us to see the world through the eyeballs of another human being. The act of doing that is immediately political because you have to take in the world from someone else’s perspective, and biases, and joys, and fears. I love how literature forces me to consider the world anew.

AW: Alexander Chee has said that “writing fiction is an exercise in giving a shit—an exercise in finding out what you really care about.” With several books under your belt, have you figured out, or distilled, what you really care about?

PH: Oh, wow, what a great question. A complicated one, too. Writers tend to orbit around the same issues and approach them from different angles in different books. I’m deeply interested in how the forces of hatred and racism can turn into violence, and I feel a responsibility to help readers understand the Holocaust better. How we remember the past matters to me and I’m drawn to the idea that previous generations aren’t that much different from us. I care about cheating time and hauling the past into the present so that we might understand a particular era better, and maybe placing it into dialogue with our own concerns and values. That idea of “giving a shit”…if the writer cares, the reader will probably care too. We tell beginning writers to “find their voice” and while that’s important, it’s equally necessary to find out what you care about. Intellectual passion matters in writing. It’s the energy that propels narrative.

AW: One of the most moving passages in your previous novel, The Commandant of Lubizec, comes right before a group of prisoners decide to attempt escape.

“…As much as the guards wanted these prisoners to be faceless and anonymous, the very opposite was true. The prisoners were all individuals. Some had freckles. Others had crooked teeth…Many of the prisoners had ghostly pink indents on their fingers where a wedding ring once sat. Such a thing proved that they were beloved, once…At some point in time, the hot words of love had been whispered into their ears, and once, long ago, in what seemed like another life, they had all been the center of someone else’s universe. They were the sun. They were the stars and light. They were the molecules of God himself.”

In much of your work, fictional characters are given all the careful specificity and individuality of real people, until we feel that we know them. Why do you undertake this painstaking work, and why do you think it’s important?

PH: In order to write about a death camp, I knew that hundreds of minor characters would vanish into the gas chamber and never be seen again. But of course, they weren’t minor characters in their own lives. These were people just like you and me. During these scenes of mass murder, I wanted the reader to feel wounded that they were being taken from us. I wanted the reader to gasp at the monumental injustice of it all and see these people as fully realized lives. That’s the thing about genocide: it’s often viewed just as statistics, and I didn’t want that for The Commandant of Lubizec. I think that’s one reason why it’s made such a connection with readers. They see people dying in my novel—not numbers—people.

There’s a chapter called “Numbers” in The Commandant where all of these innocent souls are being forced to run towards the gas chamber and, in each case, I wrote pages of notes on who was in that crowd. My feeling was that if I didn’t care about these characters, than how would the reader care about them? In nearly every case, I had more information on these individuals than I put into the novel. I needed to see each of them, and I refused to make them faceless. That’s what the Nazis did. I wanted to see people—mothers, wives, fathers, uncles, piano players, poets, plumbers, book store owners, rabbis, children. They all had lives. And those lives were stolen from them.

AW: How do you maintain perspective, and avoid slipping into despair — if that is possible — when writing about and studying the Holocaust?

(I keep thinking of the way Eli tells himself, “All is well. Yes, all is well,” to cope with the constant threat and strain. Has such an intense working relationship with one of the darkest parts of human history ever felt like too much?)

PH: I’ve done research at ten camps now and…sometimes I feel too close to the Holocaust. When this happens, I back up and focus on the goodness around me. It’s always there though, hanging darkly in my imagination. For example, whenever I see the Yankees play baseball on television, their striped uniforms remind me of the prisoners at Auschwitz. Or whenever I see freight trains clattering across the prairie, I think of Poland. The same goes for smokestacks or crowds shuffling in the same direction. I teach at Augustana University, which is abbreviated on t-shirts as AU. That’s what Auschwitz was abbreviated to. AU. Konzentrationslager Auschwitz. KZ AU. If you go to Auschwitz today, you can see that stamped onto certain items. I don’t know…the Holocaust flits through my brain all the time. At least I’m removed from it by the safety of several decades. How on earth do survivors cope with what they saw? How?

AW: Oh, wow – I never thought that about the Yankees uniforms, and I don’t know enough about the Holocaust to have picked up on the AU reference — but if I had studied it as much as you have, I can see how it might permeate all my perceptions. Like you, I have no idea how survivors are or were able to cope with what they have seen.

Which leads me to my next question, in the hope that we have learned from history: A common refrain, under the current presidential administration, is that many of its messages smack of fascism, or sound eerily authoritarian, or seem to endorse white supremacy. As a scholar of one of the worst eras of white supremacy and genocide human history has known, do these claims ring true for you?

PH: The Trump Administration is one of the most corrupt and reprehensible in our nation’s history. He is certainly a damaged human being who is a racist, a misogynist, and his narcissism—not to mention his unmoored relationship to the truth—all make him an ideal candidate for dictatorial aspirations. This is a man who does not like criticism and demands absolute loyalty. I have no doubt he will go down in American history as a thug and villain to our democracy. After studying white supremacy and fascism for so long, Donald Trump’s language has disturbing echoes with what happened in the Third Reich for sure. These comparisons can only be taken so far, though. Trump’s political savvy and acumen is thankfully well below Hitler’s own rise to power, and I take comfort in the fact that, unlike Hitler, Trump does not have a private army like the SA or SS at his command.

While I’m concerned about the state of our republic, the majority of Americans reject Trump’s toxic viewpoints. We also don’t yet have widespread political violence in the streets with men chanting his name and beating up bystanders. If that happens—if something like Charlottesville happens regularly and routinely—that’s when the claims of Trump being like Hitler take on a more ominous and deadly tone. Nazism was forged in the furnace of post-Great War Europe. Germany wanted a strong leader in the 1930s. Americans? Our nation was founded on rebellion. Sooner or later Trump will be tossed aside. Until that happens, it’s good to study how one man came to power in Germany and what his dark charisma unleashed. One of my favorite quotes is from John Fowles’s novel, The Magus. In it, he says that the tragedy of the Third Reich is “not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.”

It’s necessary to keep such things in mind. Raise your voice. Get out there. Demonstrate. Vote. Our nation is greater than one man.

AW: Finally: I am a huge fan of your collection of poetry, Adoptable, about the building of your family: your wife and your sweet son Sean, adopted from South Korea. Each of these poems is so tender, so lovingly observant. You talk about your son’s arrival, as a toddler, and his initial terror; his mastery of the English language; and you imagine very movingly the birth mother who surrendered him mere hours into his life.

You write:

“what catches my eye is the gap

between when he burrowed into this world,
and when he was given to an orphanage.

In these missing hours, I imagine his birth mother
cupping the grapefruit softness of his head.

She breathes in his scent,
kisses his nose, memorizes

the topography of his face.
And then, reluctantly,

she lets him go.”

You’re able to turn your remarkable empathy and gift of language to almost anyone you choose. Can you talk a little about your journey to fatherhood and how it has influenced your writing and your art?

PH: I’m so happy we’re ending on this note, a note of love. I also want to thank you for these thoughtful questions, Andria. It’s been a fun conversation.

I wrote Adoptable at the same time that I wrote The Commandant of Lubizec, and although I didn’t realize it back then, I really needed to do this. I couldn’t write about the Holocaust without occasionally turning away to focus on the good things in my life. Adoption is complicated and beautiful and messy and confusing. My son will have plenty of questions about his birth country and his birth family—I won’t be able to answer these questions—but I’m looking forward to walking next to him as he searches. Aside from all the normal things a father worries about, I’m also thinking about racial issues, and belonging, and what it means to be an American. Since becoming a dad, I’ve realized all those clichés about being a parent are true. They exist for a reason. The toughest job you’ll ever love. Being a parent changes you forever. You don’t know love until you have a kid. They’re all true, at least for me.

I sometime wonder what my son will make of my writing when he’s older. One of the reasons I wrote Adoptable is because I wanted to capture the forgettable moments of his childhood—the day to day stuff. He already has huge missing pieces about background, so the least I could do was write about things he did as a toddler and try to explain how much we love him.

Being a parent has changed me as a writer for sure. I’m now totally aware that my need to write means that I’m not spending time with him. When you’re single it’s okay to be selfish and lock yourself in an office but, when you’ve got a child, that compulsion to get ideas onto the page takes on a new dimension. I’m a more focused writer now. I don’t flaff around like I used to. My writing time is more intense and disciplined. And when I do write about the Holocaust, I now see all of my characters as someone else’s child. I see the timeline of a single life more sharply. Maybe it helps me to remember how fleeting our time on this planet really is. And, when I think about how temporary our bodies really are, it makes the crime of genocide all the more monstrous, all the more important to write about.