We are joined again by LDS author Sandra Grey, author of “Traitor.” If you missed yesterday’s installment, click here.
Sandra, in your exciting new LDS historical novel, you go into quite a lot of detail about code encryption. Was it difficult to find and then relay this information?
Mr. Leo Marks, head of Communications at Special Operations Executive
(SOE) in Britain, wrote an incredible memoir of his experiences during the war entitled “Between Silk and Cyanide” (HarperCollins 1998) – over six hundred pages long and more exciting to me than “Harry Potter.” I read every word even the appendages. Marie’s coding skills, the silks she used in her secret transmissions, and everything else code-related, were based on the minute details, experiences, pictures, graphs and descriptions of procedures included by Marks in his book. In other words, after discovering this wonderful book, “finding” the information was easy. However, communicating the information when it came time to write about it (How Marie encoded her messages, Rolf’s deductions as to her reasons for being in France, etc)almost fried my brain cells!
Your main characters, Marie and Rolf, are on two opposite sides of the
war. Can you tell us a little about their internal struggles with love,
their political backgrounds, and their common beliefs?
Both Rolf Schulmann and Marie Jacobson feel things deeply, but the ways
they deal with those feelings differ: Marie finds herself torn between her memories of her French fiancé and her growing love for the German major. She fights against that love for quite some time – while at the same time Rolf Schulmann seems to acknowledge his growing feelings for Marie without struggling against them. He is able to reconcile the impossible differences between them while Marie cannot separate her feelings for him from the fact that he is a Nazi. He has the attitude that if they stay close to God, every difficulty will eventually work itself out. She has to sort everything out for herself first, before she can accept the love they have for each other as being achievable. But while Rolf accepts his feelings and Marie struggles against hers, they both try to pattern their lives after the Savior, which is the common thread that eventually brings them together.
It is a great romance, Sandra.
We’ll conclude our interview with Sandra Grey on Monday, and hope you’ll be able to join us.
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