FOREWORD

When "Address Unknown" was first published in the United States, in Story magazine in September I938, it caused an immediate sensation. Written as a series of letters between a Jewish American living in San Francisco and his former business partner who had returned to Germany, the story, early on, exposed the poison of Nazism to the American public.

Within ten days of publication, the entire printing of that issue of Story was sold out, and enthusiastic readers were mimeographing copies of the story to send to friends. National radio commentator Walter Winchell heartily recommended the story as "the best piece of the month, something you shouldn't miss," and Readers Digest put aside its long-standing no-fiction rule to reprint the piece for its more than three million readers.

In 1939, Simon & Schuster published Address Unknown as a book and sold fifty thousand copies-a huge number in those years. Hamish Hamilton followed suit in England with a British edition, and foreign translations were begun. But 1939 was also the year of Blitzkrieg; within months most of Europe was under the domination of Adolf Hitler, the Dutch translation disappeared, and the only other European appearance of Address Unknown was on the Reichskommisar's list of banned books. So the story remained unknown on the Continent for the next sixty years, despite its great impact and success in the United States and England.

Author Kressmann Taylor, "the woman who jolted America," was born Kathrine Kressmann in Portland, Oregon, in 1903. After graduating from the University of Oregon in 1924, she moved to San Francisco and worked as an advertising copywriter, writing for some small literary journals in her spare time. In 1928 the editors of the San Francisco Review, a magazine she particularly liked, invited her to a party, where she met Elliott Taylor, the owner of his own advertising agency, and they were married within two weeks. When the Great Depression hit the advertisingindustry, the couple bought a small farm in southern Oregon. Taking their two small children and adding a third in 1935, they literally "lived off the land," growing their own food and panning for gold.

In 1938 they moved to New York, where Elliott worked as an editor and Kathrine finished writing" Address Unknown." Elliott showed it to Story magazine editor Whit Burnett, who immediately wished to publish it. He and Elliott decided that the story was "too strong to appear under the name of a woman," and assigned Kathrine the literary pseudonym Kressmann Taylor a professional name she accepted and kept for the rest of her life, largely because of the success of Address Unknown. This is how she describes the original motivation for the story：

A short time before the war, some cultivated,intellectual, warmhearted German friends of mine returned to Germany after living in the Uruted States. In a very short time they turned into sworn Nazis. They refused to listen to the slightest criticism about Hitler. During a return visit to California, they met an old, dear friend of theirs on the street who had been very close to them and who was a Jew. They did not speak to him. They turned their backs on him when he held his hands out to embrace them. How can such a thing happen? I wondered. What changed their hearts so?What steps brought them to such cruelty?

These questions haunted me very much and I could not forget them. It was hard to believe that these people whom I knew and respected had fallen victim to the Nazi poison. I began researching Hitler and reading his speeches and the writings of his advisors. What I discovered was terrifying, What worried me most was that no one in America was aware of what was happening in Germany and they also did not care. In 1938, the isolationist movement in America was strong; the politicians said that affairs in Europe were none of our business and that Germany was fine. Even Charles Lindbergh came back from Germany saying how wonderful the people were. But some students who had returned from studying in Germany told the truth about the Nazi atrocities.

When their fraternity brothers thought it would be fun to send them letters making fun of Hitler; they wrote back and said, "Stop it. We're in danger: These people don't fool around, You could murder one of these Nazis by writing letters to him."

When that incident occurred, it rated only a small article in the news, but it caught EUiott's eye; he brought it home to Kathrine, and it gave rise to their joint idea of using a letter as a weapon. She took that idea and went to work on the story she wanted to write.

I wanted to write about what the Nazis were doing and show the American public what happens to real, living peoples wept up in a warped ideology.

The result was "Address Unknown," a great success about which The New York Times Book Review stated in 1939, "This modern story is perfection itself. It is the most effective indictment of Nazism to appear in fiction." That indictment continued in Kathrine's next book,