- Kristin Harmel is a former sports journalist, former reporter and a New York Times best selling author.

Her book, The Forest of Vanishing Stars is a World War II coming of age story about a young woman who uses her knowledge to help Jews escape the Nazis and explores her complicated past.

I'm Holly Jackson.

Join us as we bring you powerful stories from both new and established Southern authors as we sit by the river.

(light dramatic music) ♪ - [Presenter] By The River is brought to you in part by The ETV Endowment of South Carolina, Community Foundation of the Lowcountry, Strengthening Community, OSHER Lifelong Learning Institute at USCB, the Pat Conroy Literary Center.

Well, it is another beautiful day here at our waterfront studio in Beaufort.

Thanks so much for joining us for our show By The River .

I'm your host, Holly Jackson.

You know, By The River is our love letter to Southern writing and here we invite authors from South Carolina and all across the southeast.

They are new and established authors.

And today we are pleased to have the author of The Forest of Vanishing Stars .

And it's Kristin Harmel.

Very beautiful book.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Came in from Orlando.

- [Kristin] I did.

- And enjoying a little time in Bluffton with a friend.

We're gonna get to that in a little bit.

But first, let's get right to the book.

Tell us what this book is about.

- [Kristin] Sure.

So The Forest of Vanishing Stars is the story of a woman who is kidnapped from her German parents on her second birthday by this woman named Jerusza, who feels like she's been called by the forest itself to take this girl to give her a different life.

So she raises her deep in the heart of the woods with all the survival skills she'll need, but almost no ability for human interaction because she has virtually no human contact.

So in 1942, when the old woman dies, and the young woman at the heart of the novel, Yona, her life crosses with a family of fleeing Jewish refugees.

She finds out for the first time what's happening outside the safety of the woods.

And now the old woman who kidnapped her and raised her has always told her, "Don't interact with other people.

"Stay in the woods.

"It's the only way to stay safe."

But suddenly she has a choice.

She realizes she can do as she's been told or she can use what she knows to help these people survive as the woods are filling with people running from the Nazis.

And of course she chooses the latter, or else it would be a very short book and we probably would not be here talking about it today.

But it becomes a story of identity.

It's a coming of age story as she understands for the first time what it's like to deal with other people, to interact with other humans.

You know, with all the ups and downs of that.

But it's also a story based very deeply on the real life stories of Jewish refugees who fled into the forests of eastern Europe during World War II and actually survived the war that way.

There were thousands of them.

And the real life stories are so inspiring, so incredible, almost unbelievable.

It was a real honor to write about those real stories in this novel.

- Historical fiction has kind of become your thing.

- Yes.

- What made you take that route?

- You know, I started off writing romantic comedy a long time ago.

Books that at the time would be called chiclets.

It was during the time of Bridget Jones's Diary and The Nanny Diaries .

And The Devil Wears Prada and all of that.

That's where I started because I wrote my first book when I was 24.

And I was a pretty flaky 24 year old.

Pretty much all there was to me was what I was doing for work and worrying about boys and all of that.

- [Holly] Right.

- [Kristin] I'm 42 now.

I've grown up a little bit as a person.

But I think I've also grown more into the person I was sort of always meant to be and the writer I was always meant to be.

I think I had to gain the confidence that I could do this sort of thing.

And this is what I've been doing for about a decade now.

And I'm fascinated to tell these historical stories that still have, to me, a great deal of relevance today.

Because yes, they are stories of the past.

But the past teaches us how to move forward.

And particularly the recent past.

So most of my historical fiction is about World War II.

And I think that that resonates because it's not that long ago.

Most of us have parents or grandparents or even great-grandparents who were involved in some way or had their lives changed in some way by that war.

And I think that makes it feel like a very accessible period of the past.

And one that still has a lot of lessons to teach us.

- How do you balance the historical and the fiction?

How do you choose what makes it and what doesn't?

- So for every novel I begin with just months' worth of research.

And that's always kind of the question.

How do you decide what to leave in and what to leave out.

'Cause I could've written you a thousand pages about what the refugees went through in the forest and to ice fish in the winter and how to tell, you know, the good herbs from the bad herbs and things like that.

So I think the balancing act comes from knowing how much to take in but then how much to actually put on the page.

And I like putting as much as I can on the page.

As long as what I'm putting on the page is something that drives the narrative forward and drives the action forward.

And I've always found it fascinating to use as much real life as I can.

As much real historical context as I can.

But to create a fictional protagonist who engages in these stories that are very much based in reality and has her own journey and arc through that real world.

- There has to be an incredible amount of research that goes into these books.

This one in particular.

Tell us about that.

- So this book in particular was very difficult to research.

Not least of all because I wrote the entire book during the COVID pandemic.

Typically for my novels I would travel extensively.

I would do a lot of on-site research and traveling to the Eastern Poland in Belarus in 2020 was just not a possibility.

So for this book I began with a ton of reading.

Just truly everything I could get my hands on.

And I was very fortunate that there has been a lot written about the refugees who survived in the forest.

The stories are so fascinating that I think within the last 10 years or the last 20 years maybe, people have kind of been telling those stories more and more frequently.

There are a lot of memoirs written by survivors.

There are a lot of recorded videos of survivors talking about it.

There was a lot like that I could sink my teeth into.

There was less immediately available about the forest itself.

But I did find a book that was about the flora, fauna and human history of the forest at the heart of this novel.

I read through that.

It's filled with post it notes and underlines and highlights.

And at the end of that I thought, okay, I have about 80% of this.

But there are still things I don't know that are very specific to what would've happened in World War II.

There were two people who completely brought all of the research alive for me.

One was a man named Vadim Sidorovich.

He's the one who actually wrote that book about the flora and fauna in human history.

And he became basically my research right arm in Belarus.

Which is where the forest, which was in Eastern Poland is located now.

I would email him things like, it's April, it's raining, they haven't build their shelter for the night.

Where would they go?

And he would send me a picture of himself in that specific area of the forest, hiding in an old hollowed out oak tree and he'd say, "They'd go into an oak tree like this."

And as you can see, there could fit three men inside.

So, you know, I would send him 20 questions like that a day and he would send back these wonderful answers accompanied by photographs.

- Wow, what a help.

- Which brought the forest alive.

After all of the reading I did about the human history of what happened there, the person who brought the human history alive for me was a man named Aron Bielski.

He was the youngest and only surviving of the Bielski brothers, who were four Polish Jewish brothers who fled into the forest in 1941 and early 1942.

And wound up building a society there.

People they saved numbered 1200 by the end of the war.

1200 people survived for years in that forest, primarily because of the work of these four brothers.

And the youngest, Aron, was 14 when he fled into the woods.

He's 94 now.

So it was 80 years ago.

And he lives just a few hours away from me in Florida.

I live in Orlando, he lives in Palm Beach.

So it was like a gift from above that this man was still here, was just a couple of hours away from me.

Despite that fact that I was writing about Eastern Europe.

And that he was willing to not just tell me what it was like in the forest, but to talk about some of the lessons he walked out of that period of his life with.

And I like to say that kind of put a beating heart on the collection of details I had accumulated.

- [Holly] Oh, I like that, that choice of words there.

When you're describing the storyline of the book in the beginning, you used the phrase, virtually no human contact.

Which basically reminded me of the pandemic.

Where we basically had no human contact for a while.

And you wrote it during that time.

So did your experience of quarantining impact the storyline at all?

- You know, that's a really good question.

The book was already plotted.

I am a very detailed outliner.

So there was already a very detailed outline in place before the pandemic began.

But I would imagine that probably some of that did find its way into the writing.

You know, I had a conversation yesterday with two other authors, who I'm sure your viewers love, Patti Callahan Henry and Mary Kay Andrews.

And we all wrote our books together, along with two other authors, Mary Alice Monroe and Kristy Woodson Harvey.

We all texted each other in the mornings and we all wrote our 2021 novels together during 2020.

And the three of us, Patti, Mary Kay and I were talking yesterday about how an underlying theme of all of our 2021 novels, even though they're completely different was this idea of how do you survive the surviving.

And that might not have been a question that I started with in the outline, and at the beginning of this novel.

But I think it became something that spoke to all of us.

Because it was something we were going through at the time.

You know, you can make your way through but how do you survive the surviving?

And I loved that thought and I loved that it was a thread that ran through all of our books in very different ways.

- [Holly] And you dedicated this book to that group, "Friends and Fiction."

Tell us a little bit about what that group is and why in a sense they helped you survive during that tough year for all of us.

- That group, and thank you for asking.

That group was essentially everything to me in 2020.

And you're right, I do dedicate this novel to them.

So it was a group that I co-founded along with Mary Kay Andrews, Kristy Woodson Harvey, Patti Callahan Henry and Mary Alice Monroe.

So the five of us.

I always have to count on my fingers to make sure I get all five of us and don't leave somebody out.

The five of us co-founded it in March of 2020.

It's a Facebook group for readers.

We have-- I think we're about 44,000 strong now.

And constantly growing.

We have a live show every Wednesday night.

So we're live on Facebook at 7:00 PM Eastern on Wednesdays.

We're also live on YouTube at the same time.

And we interview other authors.

We started on, I think, April 15th of 2020 and we said, we'll do it through the end of May.

Because obviously by the end of May things are gonna be back to normal.

- Right, right.

- Spoiler alert, things were not back to normal.

But in the meantime we really found a community.

We found that it was a way to reach readers who we couldn't be meeting on the road.

We found that it was a way to support independent booksellers whose bookstores we couldn't be going into and doing events at, during this time period.

And you know, it was just a place where we found each other.

We kinda found who we were supposed to be.

We found how to connect as readers and writers.

And I think all of us, the five of us and our community of 40,000 plus found ways to support each other and be with each other and help each other move forward through this difficult time.

And now that that difficult time is almost past.

Now that we're beginning to emerge from it, I don't see us stopping.

It's been this beautiful addition to all of our lives.

And I think we'll just find new and different ways to move forward.

- Did you ever imagine it become what it is?

- Not in a million years.

We thought maybe a few 100 people will join us.

Maybe it will be the equivalent of having done a few book signings.

- Maybe someone will ask a question.

- Right, exactly.

But where you meet a few 100 people and you feel like you've kind of made that personal connection.

The fact that we're past 40,000 now-- - [Holly] That's incredible.

- Oh my gosh, and we still see those numbers ticking up.

But it's not just that, it's not just the number.

It's the real sense of connection, I think we all feel with each other.

And I've been out on the road now for almost two weeks promoting The Forest of Vanishing Stars, and I have been blown away, and honestly brought to the point of tears at almost every event by the number of people who show up who are "Friends of Fiction" members.

But more than that, the number of people who show up and tell us that it meant something to them.

And that it helped them through a difficult time.

For something we just started thinking, maybe we'll do a little bit of good with this and maybe it'll be something we could have some fun with.

I feel so grateful and so honored that it has even without us intending it to, at the beginning, it has meant something to people.

That means a lot to us.

- [Holly] Definitely - [Kristin] Yeah.

- [Holly] Let's shift gears just a little bit 'cause I wanna make sure that I ask about this.

In several interviews that I've watched where you were speaking, you've talked about someone you interviewed while at People Magazine who was extremely influential to you.

Tell me about who that person was, what kind of influence they had.

Whether they're still with us and if they know what kind of impact they've made on your writing career.

- That is a wonderful question.

So I've worked for People Magazine for about 12 years.

I was a reporter for People .

And, you know, I did so many interesting stories.

You know, you come from a very similar background to me.

You get to go out and do these amazing things and go to cool events and meet really interesting people.

I've been to Superbowls, I've been to the MTV movie awards, I've interviewed Ben Affleck and Matthew McConaughey.

And Patrick Dempsey, he stole my heart, he's so nice.

My favorite story of People was always the story of this man named Henry Landworth.

He'd founded an organization called "Gift Kids the World."

Which you may have heard of.

It is in Kissimmee, Florida.

Right near Orlando.

They work with organizations like "Make a Wish" to give critically ill children and their families a dream vacation.

So whether it's to Disney World or Universal.

I mean, it's just an incredible organization.

The man who founded it was a man named Henry Landworth who was extraordinary.

His two best friends in life were Walter Cronkite and John Glenn.

And I get to interview both of them for the story.

Both of them said he was the most extraordinary man they've ever met.

And when you think about the people who John Glenn and Walter Cronkite must've met.

Doesn't that just blow you away?

He was incredible.

He was a Holocaust survivor.

He had been in concentration camps from the age of 13 to the age of 18.

And we talked a lot about that experience and how it impacted his life and shaped his life.

Both of his parents were killed.

He and his sister survived.

He came to the US with 20 dollars in his pocket and became a self-made millionaire.

His story is incredible.

But the thing he said that really stayed with me was that in order to survive in the concentration camps, he had to learn how to turn his emotions off and when the war was over, he never knew how to turn them back on again.

For the rest of his life he never knew how to experience emotions that you and I and probably everybody watching just take for granted.

I'd always been interested in that time period.

My very first short story that I ever submitted to a contest was when I was 13 and it was about a girl in a concentration camp.

This was something that has interested me and touched my heart for a very long time.

But I had never really thought of it that way before.

And having him say that to me in such a plain stark way I think shifted my perspective ever so slightly.

It stuck in my heart, it stuck in my head.

And that psychological reaction to what he had been through became the basis for one of my characters in The Sweetness of Forgetting which was my first World War II story.

Which came out in 2012.

I did have a chance to tell him.

But like the character who has that psychological reaction in "The Sweetness of Forgetting" he was slipping away with dementia.

His sister knew.

It was his sister who I talked to.

She said she had passed it along to him.

And you know what, I actually did get to speak to him one more time on the phone before he passed away.

So I did get to tell him how much he had influenced me.

And that did mean something.

But I will never forget that.

And I will never forget the way that that encounter, that interview that I thought was just gonna be about, you know, this wonderful organization, suddenly shifted my track.

And in doing so kind of changed the course of my life.

- [Holly] That's incredible.

- [Kristin] Yeah.

- [Holly] You never know who you're gonna run into.

- [Kristin] You never know.

- [Holly] And how they will shape your life.

- [Kristin] You never know.

- [Holly] You also were influenced by the book that so many of us read as a child and were impacted by.

The Diary of Anne Frank .

- Yes, absolutely.

And I think that's probably one of the things that set me on this path to begin with.

It was just that I had to find my way back to who I was.

You know, I mentioned that I started off writing chiclet.

And I think that was just because I really wanted to write books.

And that felt like what I should be writing.

I think all along my heart has been in that time period.

And yeah, The Diary of Anne Frank influenced me in many ways.

But one of them was that it was the first time I understood.

I mean, in one of those light bulb moments that we have a few of in life, right.

It was a light bulb moment where I understood, you can write books and make a difference in the world.

Because prior to that I though that to make a difference in the world, to do good in the world, you had to do something different.

You had to become a social worker or a teacher or an attorney or a politician, or somebody who could really enact some sort of change, right.

And then I read The Diary of Anne Frank and I thought, oh my gosh, you can change the world in a positive way by making people see things from another perspective or by letting somebody's heart connect to a story that teaches them something.

Prior to that I really thought books were just for entertainment.

And so that solidified my goal of wanting to be a writer.

And it meant so much to me that every single one of my novels, even beginning with my chiclet novels, that had nothing to do with World War II, every single one has had a character named some version of the name Anne in honor of her.

- [Holly] Oh wow!

- [Kristin] Because she...I don't know if I'd be doing this if I hadn't been influenced by her.

And that's my little nod to her every time.

My nod of gratitude.

- [Holly] Love that.

You mentioned at the beginning starting with chiclet but truly the beginning started with sports.

- It did.

It's so true, yes.

- [Holly] Tell us about that.

Was that just like, I gotta get my foot in the door, I'll write about whatever, or are you actually a sports fan?

- I am a sports fan.

And you're completely right.

I started off as a sports writer.

And I thought-- Well, I always knew I wanted to write novels.

But I felt I probably needed to go into journalism first.

Because it felt unrealistic to begin writing novels at, you know, 16, 17, 18.

So I thought I need that career in the meantime.

And as you know, 'cause you've made a very similar career choice, journalism's wonderful, because you get to ask people questions.

You get to meet people.

You get to truly understand what makes people tick.

So you can't in normal life go to a cocktail party and walk up to somebody and say, "Tell me about all your psychological trauma."

But you can do that as a journalist.

Perhaps in a slightly more finessed way.

But it allows you to get to know people on the inside.

And then use your skills as a storyteller.

Whether on television or in print to tell that story and maybe move people in some way.

So journalism felt like a very logical kind of first career to have, for me.

I was very interested in sports at the time.

My first non-journalism job, so my first job overall was working at a baseball stadium in St. Pete, where I grew up.

St. Pete, Florida.

And so when I was 16, I said, I've always wanted to be a journalist, I might as well start now.

And so I started pitching a local sports magazine in Tampa Bay, called Tampa Bay All Sports .

Pitching stories about the NHL and the NFL and cleverly omitting my age.

Never lying but just failing to mention that I was 16.

- [Holly] Right.

- So I had these assignments at the age of 16 to go in and interview NHL and NFL players in their locker rooms.

- Wow, what an experience.

- Until the editor met me one day and said, "How old are you?"

- Are you an intern or-- - Because when I was 16 I looked about 12.

So I'm sure he was just like, "What is happening?"

But he stared at me for what felt like forever and then he said, "Well, I guess you can write."

And thus begin my career.

- [Holly] Love it, what a great story!

Tell us a little bit about your reading.

Do you read historical fiction or is it one of those where you don't want it to influence you so you get outside that genre?

- Well, you know, I love reading historical fiction.

One of the things about being one of the hosts of "Friends and Fiction" is that we try to have different authors from different genres who write about different things.

And we try to read as many of their books as we can.

And since we have a different guest every week, that is basically a towering reading list.

Historical fiction tends to be my preference.

And as an author, who has established herself over the last decade or so in this genre, I often get blurb requests from other authors.

Which means that authors send me their book that is yet to be published, that is a few months out from publication.

And I get the opportunity to read it and offer some words of endorsement.

So that takes up a big part of my reading too.

But, you know, sometimes I like to read other things.

I'm on a book tour right now and I've been listening to a lot of audiobooks and I don't think any of the ones I'm listening to are historical fiction.

They're just books that have interested me over the last few months that I'm finally having an opportunity to read.

- [Holly] Now what's next?

Do you expect to stick with historical fiction or take a different route?

- [Kristin] Yeah.

Historical feels right to me.

I think-- I know for sure, because I'm in the middle of writing it, so it would be strange if I shifted that one away from historical.

My next one is a World War II novel.

Set in World War II France which is-- Primarily the World War II stories I've written in the past have been set in France, which I used to live in Paris.

I just feel very connected to that culture and that place.

But beyond that I do think I will probably stay historical but I think what my novels tend to have in common probably goes back even to Henry Landworth who we were talking about, who I spoke with for People so long ago.

I think my novels tend to link together with the idea of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

And finding the light within themselves in dark moments in history.

And so I don't know that I'll always write about World War II.

I don't know that I'll always write about the past.

But I think that that is something that will probably be at the core of all of my books because it's who I've discovered I am as a writer.

- And there'll always be an Anne somewhere in there.

- [Kristin] There will always be an Anne or some version of the name Anne.

You are absolutely right, yes.

-[Holly] Very good.

Well, thank you so much for joining us.

Kristin Harmel, and we appreciate you being with us.

And everybody, thank you for tagging along.

You're watching By The River.

We're gonna leave you now with a look at our Lowcountry Poet's Corner.

We'll see you next time "By The River."

(light upbeat music) Oyster boats in summer were never meant to be.

Upside down in knee-high grass, waiting for the gray season of salt, grit, and croaker sacks.

For strong black men in hip boots, dipping oars through the crack of dawn fog.

Soft in the sweet Gullah rhythms of their morning.

No color but flannel shirts.

Clusters chinked across the deck.

Solid but not in August when caked mud sifts away fine powder for dirt daubers nesting in the hull shade.

Wooden tombstones waiting to be turned.

Dragged back down the bank and launched and lapped at.

♪ (upbeat theme music) ♪ ♪ - [Presenter] By The River is brought to you in part by The ETV Endowment of South Carolina, Community Foundation of the Lowcountry, Strengthening Community, OSHER Lifelong Learning Institute at USCB, the Pat Conroy Literary Center.