Hannah’s War by Jan Eliasberg, Back Bay Books of Little, Brown and Company; (c) 2020; ISBN 9780316-537469; 312 pages including author’s note and acknowledgments, $16.99.
SAN DIEGO — I believe many of who have read about Jews who escaped Germany and Austria before or during the Holocaust suddenly found themselves regarded as enemy aliens by the Allied countries to which they fled. Yes, they may have been Jewish and clearly opposed to the Nazi enemy, but these refugees nevertheless were regarded with suspicion by their adopted countries. It was feared that the Nazis could coerce them into becoming spies, or saboteurs, by threatening to harm the immediate family members they left behind.
Hannah’s War is a fictional account of an Austrian Jewish refugee who was in an even more ticklish situation. A brilliant scientist, Hannah Weiss was accepted into the top ranks of the American program at Los Alamos, New Mexico, to build an atom bomb before the Nazi Germans could. Despite the fact that she had fled Germany, where she had worked as a top physicist, or perhaps because she had been able to do what other Jews in Germany could not, American counter-intelligence agents were suspicious of her.
Perhaps Hannah had made peace with the devil, and had agreed to work for the “Fatherland.” Perhaps, the Nazis were keeping her relatives hostage. Whatever it might be, and no matter how much the scientific head of the project, Robert Oppenheimer, insisted that her knowledge was necessary for the success of the project, it was clear to spy-chasers in the U.S. government that Weiss should be carefully watched.
Being under suspicion was not an unfamiliar situation for her. After the Nazis came to power, Weiss as a Mischling — that is a person of mixed ancestry with a Jewish father she adored, and an Aryan mother to whom she was indifferent — had also been under constant, close observation. How she escaped Germany, who helped her, and their reasons for doing so, are important elements of this fast-moving story.
Weiss’s antagonist in this novel is Major Jack Delaney, a U.S. Army attorney and investigator, who is suspicious of her from the get-go, but who also feels attracted to her, not only because of her capability, beauty, and femininity, but also because, despite his desire to lead a completely buttoned-up life with no sentimental ties, he feels for her an unwanted empathy.
Much of the novel deals with Jack’s and Hannah’s cat-and-mouse game during interrogations which took her away from her work as a physicist, but did not cause her, at least immediately, to be removed from the team.
As Delaney tries to learn about Hannah’s life and liaisons before fleeing Nazi Germany, Weiss seeks to uncover the secret that she can sense Delaney is hiding from her and from his American compatriots.
While the book is fiction, author Eliasberg said it was in part inspired by the true life story of Lise Meitner, Ph.D., a co-discoverer of nuclear fission, who like the novel’s protagonist, fled Nazi Germany and subsequently continued to make advances in nuclear physics, although not in the U.S. but instead in neutral Sweden.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com