I remember the moment I understood I would have to write this story.

I was in Berlin with my girlfriend, wandering the city hand in hand, stopping for coffee near the Tiergarten with no real plan. We decided to visit the Jewish Hospital, the Jüdisches Krankenhaus. I had heard the name so many times in my family, and now I was just a few metro stops away.

We entered beneath the old stone sign I recognized from my grandmother’s black-and-white photographs. We walked through the main hall, pausing by the large central staircase, then stepped back outside into the park. Tall trees held the summer air still. We sat on an old wooden bench, its paint cracked and faded, perhaps unchanged for decades.

I leaned back and closed my eyes. The weight of the August sun did the rest. When I opened them, a frail silhouette in white passed by.

“Grandma,” I thought, half asleep.

The impression vanished, but the feeling remained. The place was still alive. The ground, the buildings, the silence seemed to carry the presence of the doctors, nurses, and patients who had once moved through these grounds under impossible conditions.

Until that moment, this had been a story I had heard. Now it was something I could feel.

I came to the story as a physician trained in facts and clarity, but the hospital’s truths demanded something messier: fiction.

My grandmother had been a nurse there during the war, in one of the only Jewish institutions allowed to function under Nazi rule. I listened to her tell these stories in her home in Minnesota, and later returned to them in recordings, digitized VHS interviews, her voice steady as she described a world that seemed impossible to reconcile with the one I knew.

As a doctor, my first instinct was to document: gather the facts, reconstruct events, present them with clinical structure. But the more I tried to assemble the story as a linear sequence, the more it lost its essential truth. The decisions these young nurses and doctors faced were not clean or binary. They were made in uncertainty and fear, where no option was clearly right or wrong.

What did it mean to care for a patient you knew might soon be deported? To preserve life, knowing it could lead only to greater harm? These were lived dilemmas, shaped by silence, by what could and could not be said, by days heavy with dread.

A conversation with a writing mentor became the turning point. “We need to be in their bodies,” she told me. “We need to feel the weight of the day in their legs, through those scratchy stockings.”

That simple remark changed everything.

The truth lay not only in what happened, but in how it was experienced. In the exhaustion of the corridors. In the sudden ring of a telephone that might announce deportation. In the quiet knowledge, shared but rarely spoken, that hope was often an illusion.

Fiction, it turned out, was not a departure from truth. It was the way to get closer to it.

My experience as a physician deepened this realization. In medicine, we prize clarity and measurable facts, yet so much of care unfolds in uncertainty, sitting with patients when curing is no longer an option, deciding when presence and silence matter more than words.

Writing fiction allowed me to slow down, to inhabit those moments fully: the slight flutter of the heart before a decision, the doubt that follows, the weight it leaves behind. The doctors and nurses in Berlin faced the same structure of dilemmas, only in extremis. Fiction gave me the unencumbered honesty to explore them, not to invent, but to place the reader inside the experience. To let them feel, even briefly, what it might have been like to stand there, to face those choices, and to ask the only question that matters: What would I have done?

Medicine taught me to observe, to listen, to attend to what is visible and measurable. Writing this novel taught me that some truths, especially those forged in fear, moral ambiguity, and the quiet acts of care, are not fully accessible through observation alone. They must be approached through narrative and imagination, through the attempt to inhabit another life.

Sometimes, that is the only way to come close to understanding them.

Jonathan Hammel is a cardiologist in France.