Virginia’s diary survived the war and was published in 2006 as An American Heroine in the French Resistance (Fordham University Press), providing me with a wonderful jumping-off point for the story of the fictional Ruby Henderson Benoit, who, like Virginia, couldn’t sit idly by with the world at war. In a 1993 interview in the St. Petersburg Times, Thomas Yankus, a pilot shot down over France in 1944, said of Virginia, “There we were, walking into this apartment after some pretty hairy experiences and being greeted by this beautiful woman who said, ‘Hi, fellas, how’re you doing?’ She had no fear whatsoever.” I envisioned Ruby as that kind of woman too.
Creating Thomas, Charlotte, Lucien, and the other characters who populate The Room on Rue Amélie took a lot of research too, and I’m indebted to many authors who chronicled the war years in Paris so well. The heartrending Journal of Hélène Berr—often compared to Anne Frank’s diary—was very useful in helping me to understand the sentiments of Jews in Paris as the war dragged on, as was Jews in France During World War II by Renée Poznanski. Caroline Moorehead’s A Train in Winter, Ronald C. Rosbottom’s When Paris Went Dark, and Alan Riding’s And the Show Went On were great resources for understanding life in Paris in the 1940s. First Light by Geoffrey Wellum and Survival Against All Odds by John Misseldine were fascinating firsthand accounts of what the war was like for RAF pilots who flew missions over the Continent. And The Freedom Line by Peter Eisner, Little Cyclone by Airey Neave, and The Shelburne Escape Line by Réanne Hemingway-Douglass, and many newspaper features, helped me to understand the Allied escape lines through France and how they operated. It’s important to note, however, that while based heavily on the Comet, Shelburne, and Pat O’Leary escape lines, the escape routes in this book are fictionalized.
I’m also indebted to the kind folks at the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida and the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, as well as to Sarah Helm for her illuminative book about Ravensbrück.
Ultimately, Ruby’s story takes a much different course than Virginia’s real life did. But I’d like to think that there’s a little piece of the heroic Virginia in this book. In fact, I’d like to think there’s a little piece of Virginia in all of us—and that when we see injustice, we might just have the courage to stand up and fight against it.
Kristin Harmel