Five years ago, West Virginia native and resident Dwight Harshbarger was on vacation in Paris. At the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore near Notre Dame, he stumbled upon investigative journalist Edwin Black’s colossal work, IBM and the Holocaust. The book’s meticulous research struck Harshbarger, particularly regarding a little-known historical figure who undermined the census of Jews undertaken by Nazis throughout Europe. That man, French general René Carmille, would become the basis for Harshbarger’s latest historical novel, A Quiet Hero: A Novel of Resistance in WWII France.

“He was a forerunner, a pioneer in developing technology,” he says, explaining how Carmille came to control the Vichy government’s data on its Jewish citizens. Overwhelmed by the abundance of paper, everyone in the chain of command all the way up to Hitler was excited when Carmille volunteered to oversee the conversion of this data to keypunch cards for use with early IBM systems. However, as Harshbarger explores in his novel, Carmille always had other intentions. “Once he had the data, he would go in secretly at night and recode it. He wrecked the whole thing.”

While Carmille’s story was new to him, Harshbarger has had a longtime interest in people standing up to complex systems. His previous two novels, Valley at Risk: Shelter in Place (2015) and Witness at Hawks Nest (2010), respectively tell fictionalized accounts of the 2008 Bayer CropScience chemical explosion and the deaths of between 800 and 1,500 workers while digging the Hawks Nest Tunnel, begun in 1927, industrial disasters that both hit close to the author’s home, West Virginia. 

“[I’ve] always had a passion for safety, particularly industrial safety,” he says. “Each of us puts our lives and well-being at risk when we go to work in the morning.” That idea has driven Harshbarger’s 50-year career as a professor of psychology; he conducted behavioral research at West Virginia University in the 1970s, where he now teaches again as an adjunct professor of public health. He has also worked either as a consultant or directly for companies on their employee safety standards.

Over the years, Harshbarger has authored plenty of related academic and technical papers, but it is his love of history that led him back to fiction. “I felt very uneasy about not being a writer,” he says of having abandoned an early interest in writing. After graduating high school in rural West Virginia, he didn’t know whom to turn to for guidance. But in the 1990s, he joined a writers’ group and started collecting stories about West Virginia and his childhood that would become his first book, In the Heart of the Hills (2005). “History is kind of a hobby,” Harshbarger says. “But the human side of historical facts is fascinating to me.” 

This love for characters and storytelling had been ingrained in Harshbarger at an early age by his influential grandmother. While sitting on the porch, she would always have something to say about townspeople walking by. “Every person was a story, and that really shaped the way I feel about people and historical events,” he says. “Every person has a history. Every event has a story.”

For the industrial disasters, malfeasance, and, eventually, the efforts of Gen. Carmille that each grabbed Harshbarger’s attention, he created characters to flesh out the human and emotional tolls so often lost in historical accounts. In A Quiet Hero, those characters are the lovers Miriam Mijer and Charles Delmand. After the destruction of her home in the bombings of Rotterdam, Miriam is helped by Charles to assume a fake identity—she is Jewish—and to go to work with Carmille in Lyon, France, bringing new perspective and dramatic tension to the general’s subtle and highly technical assault on the Nazis.

As Kirkus Reviews describes, the fictional Miriam’s first-person narration renders the story of Gen. Carmille “vivid, dramatic, and believable.” The novel opens with Miriam’s commanding the gravitas of a resistance fighter as she announces: “I am twenty-seven years old. This morning, I killed a man.” But Harshbarger also uses his invented characters to focus on smaller moments depicting the anxiety and fear that seeped into everyday life during the war: 

That night, I lay awake. My imagination leaped out of control. Thoughts jumped from Simone’s questions to roundups of Lyon Jews to Luftwaffe bombs in Rotterdam to my family to buildings in flames. The once grand Boompjes Synagogue, had it become rubble strewn across its courtyard? Had Papa, Mama, and Margot become ashes?…Did my family know death was dropping on them?…My stomach tightened. Nausea welled up. I leaped from bed and ran for the toilet. 

“I wanted to have a woman, especially a Jewish woman, tell the story,” says Harshbarger of his decision to see Carmille’s actions through Miriam’s eyes while also capturing the heartbreak of families being uprooted. 

Though Harshbarger used Miriam to bring these elements into his story, he relied on extensive research to nail the technical aspects behind the plot. “I kept searching and searching for the name ‘Carmille,’ and eventually I found it,” he says. He managed to connect with the general’s four grandchildren, who visited with him and provided information that he could never have gotten elsewhere. “Carmille’s family shared what he was really like, what he was doing, and how he lived,” Harshbarger says. It was also through these visits and his multiple trips to France that he gained more insight into Carmille’s process for manipulating the IBM keypunch cards being handled by thousands of employees.

“I didn’t expect anything like what I found,” Harshbarger says of his research into the thing that perhaps most piqued his interest in Carmille while reading Black’s investigative work: IBM’s implicit involvement in the Third Reich’s operations. As someone with a passion for working on issues of corporate responsibility, Harshbarger hopes the way that IBM systems were used throughout Hitler’s government and World War II is one point his story will illuminate for readers.

Harshbarger notes that the world was, and still is, complex. He doesn’t want to be seen as preachy regarding what people should or should not buy. “But I think there are things we can do to investigate and to make things better,” he says. “I think [it’s] important…to always look below the surface. Think about what you’re purchasing. Think about the history.”

Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator based in Paris.