Natalie's Projects

“The place we come from no longer exists.”

I’m not sure if I was told this about my family‘s homeland in Slovenia or if it was simply something I came to understand at a young age. It feels like something I’ve always known and I think it gave me a keen awareness not only of loss, but of imagination and possibility. Imagining my family’s lost homeland of Gottschee became my way of connecting with it – and them. I knew one day I’d write about it. 

It wasn’t until I was a teenager, though, and learned more about World War II that I started to wonder what it would have been like for me to have lived through the war in Gottschee. When I later learned  that there had been many young people involved in fighting for Gottschee, my seventeen-year-old protagonist, Stefanie (named after my grandmother) was born. She’d be a spy, of course! The setting would be the stunning, fairytale-like landscape of Slovenia, and she and her friends would be launched on an epic tale of survival against the Nazis, Partisans, and Communists. Could Gottschee be saved? Could Stefanie find her purpose and her true love?

And so I came to write How High the Heaven – How Dark the Night, a never-before-told World War II story based on my own family’s  experiences and dozens of interviews I conducted with other Gottscheers. Though it was very painful to learn about all my family went through during the war, I’m grateful for the opportunity to have so deeply imagined their lives. It was truly a labor of love. And though this is a story that happened  nearly 100 years ago, I can’t help but feel that its themes of love, power, evil, good, and family will resonate just as powerfully today.

My Grandmother at a summer picnic in Gottschee (3rd on right)

My dad in Austria after the war

You can read a sample here.