A student's interview with author Danny Cohen:

WHY DID YOU WRITE THE NOVEL?

 

We have a responsibility to ask: What is the future of Holocaust education? I think that parts of Holocaust education—curricula and museums, for example—will still look quite similar to what we have now. Soon, there will very few Holocaust survivors still alive and so I imagine that the children and grandchildren of survivors will be telling their relative’s stories. I wanted to find a way to bring the unknown and silenced stories of the Nazis’ many victims into the public sphere. I’ve always been drawn to telling stories, so writing historical fiction felt natural. I’d already been immersed in Holocaust literature and film for a few years before starting to write TRAIN, so I knew my way around the history.

 

HOW DID YOU RESEARCH THE NOVEL?

 

Once I figured out where to place the story—I searched for a moment in Holocaust history when the Jewish and Roma narratives connected—I read encyclopedia entries and textbooks, I read and watched survivor testimonies, and I studied photographs from the era. This took me the best part of five years, and I got some fantastic, essential advice from historians, other writers, educators, parents, and other scholars.

 

As I researched the history and wrote the story, I had many challenges. I needed to find a way to write a story that wasn’t sensationalistic or sentimentalized. To avoid sensationalism, I made sure to keep the story grounded in historical fact. I avoided sentimentality by making sure to show a range of responses from the central characters—for example, facing similar circumstances, Alex is generally more fearful, while Kizzy is more fearless and daring. Also, I conducted a test: When I gave drafts of the book to my different beta-readers, I asked them to tell me if the story made them cry or feel angry or feel shocked. It turned out that different readers were crying or feeling angry or surprised at different moments. If everyone had cried at the same scene, then this would have told me that I was being manipulative. That different readers cried at different points of the story -- and some did not cry at all -- told me that I’d created an open story where different people could connect in different ways.

 

 

HOW DO YOU CONNECT WITH THE CHARACTERS?

 

 

In order to make the characters “come alive on the page,” I needed to put myself in their shoes, which was certainly hard and, on one level, somewhat unethical since we cannot understand someone else’s suffering. The central characters of TRAIN are fictional and so, yes, to make them feel believable, I expect that parts of my personality rubbed off on some of them. I wrote a lot of TRAIN in front of others—in coffee shops, on the train heading to campus, at home in front of my family—and now and then people would interrupt me and ask me, sounding alarmed, “Are you okay?” I would reply, “Yes, why?” and they would say, “The expression on your face—you seem so sad” or “you seem angry” or “you look frightened.” I certainly had dreams about the characters and events of Holocaust history. I think that, the more we learn about atrocity, the more it affects us emotionally and psychologically. I’ve changed a lot while on my journey of Holocaust scholarship. I’ve become more cynical. But I’ve also become more passionate about human rights and other hidden stories of social injustice.

 

Originally, I found Viktor to be the most difficult to write. But once I turned him into a ghost who haunted his sister, Elise, who was a vehicle for Viktor’s story, then writing Viktor was much easier. As for my favorite character, it’s probably Marko. That he comes to regret so many of his decisions is something that developed naturally and so I found writing him to be entirely compelling.

 

I see parts of myself in Alex. He responds to particular events in the way I would probably respond. I also see myself in Ruth—she’s optimistic and determined to solve Alex’s treasure hunt. I also see myself in Tsura—she becomes engaged by injustice and she’s committed to telling the stories of her family. Some of my friends and family have read TRAIN and recognized certain elements of the book that are “very Danny.” Alex’s treasure hunt is something I would create in real life. The funny moments between Marko and Kizzy, early on, reflect my humor. I share Tsura’s cynicism and Ruth’s optimism. But these weren’t conscious choices. This “coming-of-age” feel of TRAIN wasn’t my intention either. But I knew that I had to place teenagers at the heart of the story (I wanted to write a story that teens would find compelling) and write a story in which characters changed and learned and grew, so I suppose it happened automatically.

 

DANNY'S MAIN MESSAGES:

 

The silencing and unsilencing of history and experience is my main reason for writing TRAIN, and so my main message is that silencing happens and unsilencing is possible. I also wanted to convey a strong sense of interconnectedness and complexity between historical narratives that are usually seen as separate. For example, the love story between Marko and Alex was a device I used to connect the Jewish and Roma victim narratives and weave into them the homosexual narrative of Nazi persecution. The themes and messages, along with characters’ personalities, developed slowly over many many drafts. Tsura’s courage probably came from my outrage that the Roma are so often excluded from Holocaust education and commemoration. Tsura is outraged, too. She fights and fights. She wants to free her family. She’s protective of Kizzy and Marko. She wants to preserve her family’s memory.

​

​