MARY LOUISE WELLS

Good Town

Good Town is a novel largely based on the memoir of my mother, Lieselotte Bischoff Wells. I also used other memoirs and oral histories from East Prussia, including some memoirs of the Jewish community of Guttstadt. While the book is historically rooted in the Holocaust and World War II, it is also very much fiction.

Guttstadt is now Dobre Miasto in Poland. Here are photos of the town from before the war.

The Jewish Synagogue in Guttstadt before it was destroyed on Kristallnacht.

The Catholic Basilica – The Church of Our Savior and All Saints

Photo by Bogitor, CC BY-SA 3.0

In real life, this was the extended Bischoff family around 1931. My mother is the little girl sitting on the ground in the middle of the photo.

The Catholic Basilica – The Church of Our Savior and All Saints

Photo by Bogitor, CC BY-SA 3.0

My grandfather, Johann Bischoff, before the war.

Alfred Bischoff, my mother’s brother who died at Stalingrad.

Hans Bischoff, my mother’s brother, who died in an American bombing.

Eva-Maria Bischoff – my mother’s sister who died of typhus during the flight.

My mother, Lieselotte, in the 1950s in Göttingen.

Base on a true story

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