Once again, I’ve learned something I feel like I should have known about the experience of trans people — only this time, it wasn’t simple ignorance; it was at least partially the result of silence.

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Milo Todd’s The Lilac People is a historical novel that tells the story of a trans man, Bertie, and his partner, Sofie, weaving together narratives from two different time periods: the time leading up to, and including, the Nazi takeover of Germany; and the months after the Allies’ victory and the liberation of prisoners from the concentration camps.

Before the Nazis, Germany had been relatively tolerant of LGBT people, especially thanks to the work and advocacy of Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. Though there were laws on the books against homosexuality and what they called transvestism, the Institute helped trans people get “transvestite passes,” which protected them from legal issues related to being publicly trans. The Institute also provided what we now call gender-affirming care, including surgery.

This is not to say that these were idyllic times for LGBT folk; the novel describes the mix of optimism and insecurity that Bertie and his friends experienced in those pre-WWII days.

Of course, this all changed when the Nazis took power. It’s hard to know how many trans people were imprisoned and killed — for one thing, the Nazis defined trans men as simply homosexual — but, as the Museum of Jewish Heritage writes, we know that the Nazis “brutally targeted the trans community, deporting many trans people to concentration camps and wiping out vibrant community structures.”

The other thread of the narrative involves Bertie and Sofie just after the Allies had rolled into Germany and started liberating the prisoners in the concentration camps. That’s a good thing — though it turns out that it wasn’t quite as good for LGBT folk.

This is not a spoiler, as it’s the first paragraph of the book:

We’ve received word that the liberation of the camps is not the celebration we’d hoped. The Allied forces are sending all pink triangles and any qualifying black triangles to jail to start the sentence for their crimes. All other categories of identity, crime, or marker have been liberated, for the Allies feel they have suffered enough.

I’d heard of the pink triangles, which marked homosexual prisoners, and I’d vaguely heard of black triangles, which, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum,

marked “asocial” prisoners (Asoziale – Aso), imprisoned in theory for vagrancy or prostitution, but in fact for a wide range of other deeds or behaviors, loosely and arbitrarily interpreted by the police. The Roma in the Birkenau “Gypsy camp” were classified as asocial.

So were “transvestites.”

What I didn’t know is that the Allies turned these people over to the German government to be punished according to German — that is to say, Nazi — law.

The Lilac People is Todd’s first novel, and there are a couple places where it reads like that to me — a bit more exposition than I’d like; some “preachy” passages that don’t quite seem like a conversation the characters would actually have. Nonetheless, it’s a good first novel, and worth the read.

And I do recommend that you read it. It’s possible to get the facts of the matter from, say, Wikipedia’s article, “Transgender people in Nazi Germany,” especially if you follow the internal links and footnotes.

But the beauty of historical fiction is the way it puts events on its feet, the way it encourages empathy. The history is interesting — not to mention disturbing, especially in the way it resonates today — but Todd’s work lets us feel Bertie’s experience in all its complexity and, even, contradiction.

As I said in another post, I was late to even see trans issues, let alone understand them. The Lilac People gave me the opportunity to listen to trans people’s experiences — fictional experiences, to be sure, but well-researched and evocative.