24 Nov Bonnie Suchman What Remains is Hope #HistoricalFiction #Holocaust #FamilyHistory #BlogTour #TheCoffeePotBookClub @BonnieSuchman @cathiedunn

FEATURED AUTHOR: BONNIE SUCHMAN

I’m delighted to host Bonnie Suchman as the featured author in The Coffee Pot Book Club Blog Tour being held between November 17th – 28th, 2025. Bonnie Suchman is the author of the Historical Fiction, What Remains is Hope (The Heppenheimer Family Holocaust Saga), published by Black Rose Writing on October 2, 2025 (360 pages). 

Below are highlights of What Remains is Hope, Bonnie Suchman’s author bio, and her guest post about the historical research for the book

Tour Schedule Page: https://thecoffeepotbookclub.blogspot.com/2025/10/blog-tour-what-remains-is-hope-by-bonnie-suchman.html

HIGHLIGHTS: WHAT REMAINS IS HOPE

What Remains is Hope
(The Heppenheimer Family Holocaust Saga)
By Bonnie Suchman

Blurb:

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:

Universal Buy Link: https://books2read.com/u/mvJNLV

This book is available to read on #KindleUnlimited.

AUTHOR BIO: 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:

Website     Twitter / X     Facebook    Instagram     Pinterest

Book Bub     TikTok     Amazon Author Page     Goodreads

HISTORICAL RESEARCH: WHAT REMAINS IS HOPE

My research into the lives of the four cousins in What Remains is Hope actually began as a genealogical exploration of my husband family, who lived in Germany before World War II. After three years of researching, I published a history that traced the family back to around 1700. But after the book was published, I decided I was not finished telling the family’s story. To provide a fuller and richer story, I chose to write their stories as novels. The first novel, Stumbling Stones, was published in May 2024.

In doing genealogical research, most people start with Ancestry.com, and that is where my search began. But that was only the beginning for me, and my search led to the archives of a number of German states, as well as the archives of relevant museums and organizations. Many of these documents contained important information about the family. For example, in order to receive permission to leave Germany, a German Jew was required to receive a tax clearance certificate from the Finance Office. Those files contained documents describing in excruciating detail the challenges faced by the family in trying to leave. At times, I could almost hear their voices in reading the various documents, pleading for a chance to escape.

But researching the cousins’ lives also presented an emotional challenge I wasn’t expecting. As would be expected, I needed to obtain records from the various concentration camps and ghettos, and reviewing those records was often heartbreaking. In addition, in researching the family, I discovered that many of the records I was reviewing were actually preserved by the Nazis to be used in order to prove who was a Jew, which was quite chilling. Some records were lost only because they had been in buildings bombed by the Allies during the war.

I wrote What Remains is Hope as a novel, but tried to make sure that everything in the book was factual. That involved reading the newspapers and journals of that period, including using Goethe University’s remarkable searchable tool. Frankfurt’s Institute for Urban History has created an extensive archives of the history of the Holocaust period, including a detailed description of life in Frankfurt during the 1930s. In addition, I read extensively of the period, so that I could understand the impact of the period on the cousins and why they made the decisions they did.

Finally, I was fortunate in that I was able to rely on first-hand knowledge from some family members. One cousin’s family member shared with me detailed remembrances about the family’s life in France during the war. And another cousin’s child provided me with touching accounts of his life in Munich during the war, which I included in the novel, including when he received the stuffed teddy bear mentioned in the novel from his Oma Henny (which he still has).

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