Five Minute History with author, Bonnie Suchman.
What Remains is Hope opens in 1930 in Frankfurt, Germany, and follows the story of four Jewish cousins to the end of World War II. By 1930, the Nazi Party was already proving to be a force in German politics, although it originated just after the First World War.
Following World War I, the German Kaiser was forced to abdicate and the Weimar Republic was established. The Republic struggled in the early years of the 1920s because of hyperinflation and in the later years of the decade because of political instability, but the Stock Market Crash in 1929 spelled the beginning of the end for the Republic. The Nazi Party, a fringe party through the 1920s, was able to secure nearly twenty percent of the Reichstag seats in the 1930 elections. In the 1932 elections, the Nazi party actually lost seats, but President von Hindenburg, worried about the growing strength of the Communist Party, made Adolf Hitler Chancellor in January 1933. Through ruthlessness, Hitler was about to consolidate power throughout 1933 and named himself Chancellor and Führer when Hindenburg died in 1934.
With the Nazis in charge, things changed dramatically for the German Jewish community. In April 1933, the Nazi Party organized a one-day boycott of Jewish businesses. Jewish civil servants and university professors were fired, and many Jewish lawyers and judges lost their positions. The Nuremberg Laws, enacted in 1935, took away German citizenship from the Jewish people and made it a crime for Jews and non-Jews to marry or engage in sexual relationships. German Jews continued to lose their rights and their ability to participate in society, but the actions known as Kristallnacht in November 1938 made it clear to German Jews that they needed to leave. The challenge was that Germany put up many roadblocks to leave and many countries, including America, made it difficult to immigrate.
In 1933, there were more than 500,000 Jews living in Germany, representing less than 1 percent of the population. When war was declared in Europe in September 1939, a little less than half of German Jews were still living in Germany. In October 1941, when the German government made it illegal for Jews to leave the country, approximately 170,000 Jews remained in Germany. Virtually all of them perished.
Some Jews from the Baden region were deported in 1940, but the deportations officially began in October 1941, with Jews from all over Germany sent to ghettos in Poland and to the occupied Soviet Union. Deportations to the death camps began in 1942. By the end of 1942, virtually every German Jew – other than the few receiving special status – had been removed from Germany. Germany was “Judenfrei” (Jew free).
The death and concentration camps began to be liberated in 1944 and all camps were liberated when Germany surrendered in May 1945. At the end of the war, only about 15,000 German Jews were still alive, most having been in hiding during the war.
What Remains is Hope
The Heppenheimer Family Holocaust Saga, Book #2
By Bonnie Suchman
Publication Date: October 2nd, 2025
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Pages: 360
Genre: Historical Fiction
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.
Praise for What Remains is Hope:
"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
Buy Link:
This title is available to read on #KindleUnlimited.
Bonnie Suchman
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:
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