Excerpt: What Remains is Hope (The Heppenheimer Family Holocaust Saga #2) by Bonnie Suchman
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Book details:
Book Title: What Remains is Hope
Series: The Heppenheimer Family Holocaust Saga
Author Name: Bonnie Suchman
Publication Date: October 2, 2025
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Pages:360
Genre: Historical Fiction
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Beginning in 1930s Germany and based on their real lives, four cousins as close as siblings—Bettina, Trudi, Gustav, and Gertrud—share the experiences of the young, including first loves, marriages, and children. Bettina, the oldest, struggles to help her parents with their failing business. Trudi dresses in the latest fashions and tries to make everything look beautiful. Gustav is an artist at heart and hopes to one day open a tailoring shop. Gertrud, the youngest, is forced by her parents to keep secrets, but that doesn’t stop her from chasing boys. However, over their seemingly ordinary lives hangs one critical truth—they’re Jewish—putting them increasingly at risk.
When World War II breaks out, the four are still in Germany or German-occupied lands, unable or unwilling to leave. How will these cousins avoid the horrors of the Nazi regime, a regime that wants them dead? Will they be able to avoid the deportations and concentration camps that have claimed their fellow Jews? Danger is their constant companion, and it will take hope and more to survive.
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Frankfurt
June 1996
A taxicab pulled up to the hotel’s front door, and the old woman walked outside. The driver got out of the car, presumably to help her. She waved him back into the car. “Thank you, but I can get into the taxi without any help. I just need you to take me to the Hauptwache.” It felt strange to speak with him in German, but she didn’t want the driver to think she was a tourist, to overcharge her. But the truth was her German felt rusty, and everything around her was unfamiliar.
As the taxi navigated the narrow streets, she tried to get her bearings. She had not been in Frankfurt since the end of the war. The buildings she now saw were mostly modern and functional. Nothing seemed to remain from the Frankfurt of her youth. The Allied bombings during the war had seen to that.
The taxi soon reached the Hauptwache. The driver stopped the car and got out to help her. This time, she let him. She paid the fare, including a generous tip, and walked into the plaza. Looking around, the only building she recognized was the small building in the center, where she would be having lunch with her cousins -CaféHauptwache. While planning her trip, she had read an article about how the government had preserved the café while they were digging for the subway, since it was one of the few buildings in the inner city not destroyed during the war. She remembered the café from her childhood and thought this would be a good place to meet her cousins for lunch. Standing in the plaza now, she realized she had made the right decision.
She had no memory of ever going to Café Hauptwache with her cousins. They frequented a different café sinceCaféHauptwache was too fancy for them. Instead, she went to CaféHauptwache with her mother after a morning of shopping on the Zeil, the main shopping street in Frankfurt. There had been plazas on either end, sandwiching the Zeil. She and her mother would start at the Konstablerwache Square on the east side of the Zeil and walk west until they reached the Hauptwache. If it was a warm day, they would eat outside. But on cooler days, they would go inside and enjoy the warmth and coziness of the café.
She looked at her watch. She still had an hour before lunch. She had intended to arrive early for lunch but had not expected to be this early. She decided to walk along the Zeil to pass the time. As she was leaving the plaza, she noticed a giant shopping mall, perhaps ten stories tall. Certainly not anything like the stores she remembered. In fact, she had the same feeling she had in the taxi – nothing was familiar.
Sitting down on a bench, she caught sight of the building to her right. It was a nondescript structure, with shops on the first level. But something was so familiar about the location. She stared at the building. And then she remembered. This was where Kaufhaus Wronkers had been. She could almost see it now. It had been the largest department store in Frankfurt and her favorite place to shop for clothes, with multiple floors of ready-to-wear clothing and a shop for tailor-made items. The Wronkers were well-regarded philanthropists in the Jewish community, and her mother always spoke with Frau Wronker when she was in the store. That special store was just one among many driven out of business by the Nazis. The building was destroyed during the war, and the Wronkers were murdered in Auschwitz.
She stood up from the bench and continued her walk, searching for something else that was recognizable, but even the names of the streets were unfamiliar. She remembered one street that was near the Zeil – Allerheiligenstrasse – but she couldn’t find it. That was the street where Café Goldschmidt had been. The café she and her cousins always frequented. The café was four stories and had multiple rooms, including a gaming hall and a ladies’ salon. The cousins preferred one of the smaller rooms on the first floor that served the café’s famous cheesecake. They would sit for hours, talking and drinking coffee, until one of the waiters would finally ask them to leave. The café was often referred to as “Café Jonteff,” which meant holiday in Yiddish, since Jews could come on the Sabbath and pay for their food later in the week. But Café Goldschmidt had closed during the 1930s and its owner perished in one of the camps. As she continued down the Zeil, she tried to remember the site of her favorite dressmaker and the local cinema. Newer buildings had replaced them. She felt like one of those old buildings, out of place in this new Frankfurt.
Glancing at her watch, she saw it was time to walk back to the café. She felt surprisingly good at the moment, notwithstanding a bit of jet lag. Friends often told her she acted like a much younger woman, and she did feel that now. She also kept her sense of humor, smiling as she recalled how she invited her cousins to lunch. She sent them letters in code – the cousins’ code. The code that allowed them to evade the censors. The code that helped them keep track of each other during the war. The code that sometimes kept them alive. She hadn’t used the code since the war ended, but it came right back to her as she was crafting the letters.
She retraced her steps back to the café. She was still a little early but walked in anyway. She was ready to sit down. A number of tables were empty, including a few near the windows.
A waiter came up and asked, “Meine Dame, how can I help you?”
She replied in German, “I would like a table for four for lunch by the window.” She was feeling a little more comfortable using her German. The waiter smiled at her and grabbed four menus.
As she sat down and looked at the menus, she realized her error, but said nothing to the waiter. I’m sure it’s just jet lag, she said to herself. Or she was feeling anxiety about the day’s upcoming event. She had a knot in the pit of her stomach. Or, perhaps, being back in Frankfurt has triggered old habits, when there were four of them. Because now there were just the three.
She felt the hole the few times the three had been together since the end of the war, without the fourth cousin. The cousin who had perished in the Holocaust.
The old woman had come to Frankfurt this time, as had her cousins, to attend the opening of the Holocaust Memorial, which would include blocks on a wall memorializing all the victims of the Holocaust from Frankfurt, including that lost cousin. That was one of the reasons they were meeting in Frankfurt. But the other, and more important, reason was that they had made a promise to their cousin that they needed to fulfill, together, and in Frankfurt.
"Readers will find this follow up to Suchman's prior novel, Stumbling Stones, both a heartbreaking reminder of the Holocaust's atrocities and a compelling tribute to a family's refusal to surrender to despair...Richly compelling Holocaust account, centered on the power of hope."
~ Booklife by Publishers Weekly
"Author Bonnie Suchman has a way of making every moment count with her characters in a narrative that feels powerfully real as she spins deeply personal stories against a sweeping and tragic backdrop of history. ..What Remains is Hope is historical fiction at its best, and I'd highly recommend it to fans of gripping fiction that's emotionally resonant and grounded in truth."
~ K.C. Finn for Readers’ Favorite
Bonnie Suchman has been a practicing attorney for forty years. Using her legal skills, she researched her husband's 250-year family history in Germany, publishing the award-winning, non-fiction book, Broken Promises: The Story of a Jewish Family in Germany, as a result.
Those compelling stories became Suchman's Heppenheimer Family Holocaust Saga. The first in the series, Stumbling Stones, was a Finalist for the 2024 Hawthorne Prize for Fiction, and recently, her family traveled to Frankfurt, Germany, to install stumbling stones for her husband's Great Aunt Alice and her husband Alfred, the real-life characters in the book.
What Remains is Hope is the second novel in the saga.In her free time, Bonnie is a runner and a golfer. She and her husband reside in Potomac, Maryland.
Author Links:
Website: www.bonniesuchman.com
Twitter / X: https://twitter.com/BonnieSuchman
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.fr/bonniesuchman/
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Bonnie-Suchman/author/B09L3BDVRQ
Tour hosted by: The Coffee Pot Book Club
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