Cousin Abe and The Cold Blue

A Visit from James Benn

My fellow historical mystery writer James Benn has done it again.  The next in his acclaimed Billy Boyle series will launch in a couple of weeks.  Much as I would like to think that, this time, I will take my time and savor Jim's fluid, masterful writing style, I know I will be ripping through the story, unable to slow down until I see how it all will work out.  Here's Jim, to tell us about the inspiration for the new book.

There are many paths to creating a story. For my sixteenth novel in the Billy Boyle World War II Mystery Series, Road of Bones, that path took a detour through family history before intersecting with a treasure trove of recently discovered color footage shot in 1943 over the skies of occupied Europe.

My wife, Deborah Mandel, knew that her Jewish family in Torczyn (formerly in Poland, now part of Ukraine) had been wiped out by the Nazis in 1942. At least one Jewish villager did manage to escape, but hundreds were massacred after being forced to dig their own graves. The sad irony is that some could have been saved. Her grandfather, Israel Hyman Mandel, had journeyed from Poland to America in 1906 at the age of sixteen. He came here alone, and eventually became a successful tailor. In 1938, seeing that war was coming, Israel Mandel returned to Poland with enough money to bring his family to America.

 Israel Hyman Mandel, known as IH, standing with his wife Dora some time before his trip to Poland.

No one took him up on this amazing offer, unable to fathom the horrors that awaited them in a few years and unwilling to leave their community of sixteen hundred fellow Jews in Torczyn. IH’s own father, Benjamin Mandel, a rabbi in Torczyn, was among those who stayed.

Benjamin Mandel in Torczyn 1938. 

The Germans captured Torczyn in June 1941. In August of that year, there was the first mass murder of Jews from the village. On August 2, three hundred Jewish men and women accused of being Communists were murdered in the forest outside of town. A year later, on August 22, 1942, the remaining Jews were executed in the Jewish cemetery. It was there that Benjamin Mandel was shot. 

A small number of Jews did evade the roundup and went into hiding. Some fled into the forests and joined a partisan group operating in the area. 

One woman survived the actual shooting. She reported after the war that she fainted at the edge of the pit and fell in amongst the bodies. IH Mandel helped her to emigrate to Canada and heard her firsthand account of that terrible day. Benjamin Mandel led his family of more than thirty, and the other villagers, in prayer as they were led to their deaths.

This story was passed down from my wife’s grandfather. His children and grandchildren most likely thought they’d never meet any other family members. No Jews returned to live in Torczyn after the war. But about twenty-five years ago, two strands came together. Richard Moiel, a retired surgeon from Texas began to research his family’s genealogy. So did Abraham Seidman, who lived outside of Philadelphia. Both men were related to Benjamin Mandel and his wife Hene Moyel through relations who had left Poland in their younger years, but Richard and Abe had no knowledge of each other. 

As the two amateur genealogists became aware of each other’s efforts, my wife’s family suddenly became larger. Abe Seidman turned out to have lived a few streets from Debbie’s brother in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and attended the same synagogue. Dick Moiel lives in Houston, and I’ve been his guest when appearing at the excellent Murder By The Book bookstore. 

Cousin Abe is two generations older than Debbie. Abe’s mother, who had left Poland before the war, was the youngest sister of Debbie’s great-grandmother. Debbie calls him her adopted grandfather, and he is a charming fellow. Abe Seidman is also a veteran of WWII. He was a crewman on a B-24 Liberator and flew numerous missions over Europe. He lost a thumb to enemy fire and once had to walk out onto an exposed catwalk of a B-24 with no parachute to jump up and down on a bomb that was stuck in the bomb rack. You’ll read about Billy Boyle doing just that in Road of Bones, but remember, it’s really Cousin Abe.

I’ve thought about Abe flying over the German Reich and delivering bomb loads on the Nazi regime that had murdered so many members of his own family. I decided it was time to write about the experience of the young men like Cousin Abe who risked so much in that struggle.

A playful Abe Seidman circa 1930s.

Cousin Abe in 2019

            I had wanted to include the air war in one of the Billy Boyle novels but couldn’t come up with a good reason to put Billy inside a four-engine bomber flying over the Third Reich. When I decided to set this book in the Soviet Union, I found a way to solve that problem. What’s the most direct route from Great Britain to the USSR? Across Nazi-occupied Europe. The plot involves shuttle-bombing missions in which American aircraft land in the Soviet Union to rearm and refuel before returning to England or Italy. Perfect. Billy had his ride.

            But I had no idea what that experience was like other than the stories Cousin Abe told. No notion at all what it felt like to be thousands of feet in the air with fighters and antiaircraft gunners trying to kill you. 

            Then the documentary, The Cold Blue, came out. It was put together from ninety hours of lost footage filmed by renowned director William Wyler for his 1943 documentary The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress. The original unused color film had been sitting in the US National Archives since the war. It was an eye-opener. I’d read about the air war over Europe, but this film, and the accompanying interviews with surviving airmen, brought it home in a visceral sense.

Flying at 30,000 feet, these aircraft were not pressurized or heated. Twenty degrees below zero was considered a warm day. Often the temperature plummeted to sixty degrees below zero. Once, a man’s hands froze to a plexiglass window and his fingers had to be amputated. Frostbite could hit in ten minutes. Ice crystals could clog oxygen masks with debilitating effects.

One of Wyler’s cinematographers, Harold J. Tannenbaum, was killed when the bomber in which he was flying was shot down over France.

            One reviewer said that the film portrayed a "level of everyday heroism on offer [that] almost surpasses our capacity to absorb it."

            Which is the point of writing historical fiction. I believe we must try to absorb and understand the heroism of Benjamin Mandel leading his people in prayer as they were killed. Of Abe Seidman jumping up and down on a live five-hundred-pound bomb to dislodge it from the bomb rack six miles up in the cold blue sky. Of all who were forced to confront the terrors of a world gone mad, those who perished and those who lived through it. Of those whose stories we will never know and can only imagine.

Click here to view the trailer for HBO’s The Cold Blue