Clara Stauffer’s travel album

Clara Stauffer’s travel album is a lost private artifact whose photographs helped reveal the reach of her postwar escape network. Although the novelist never held the album, images reproduced online—read together with a newspaper account of a collaborator’s family—turned it into a key connecting evidence: Stauffer’s South American journey was not merely travel, but part of the novel’s reconstruction of a network helping Nazi fugitives find refuge in Argentina.

Discovery and Loss

On 22 July 2013, while beginning work on the novel, the author searched online for Clara Stauffer. Among the results was a newly encountered reference to an album of photographs taken by Stauffer during a long journey through Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile between December 1948 and 1949. A Madrid secondhand bookshop had offered it for sale, but its description stated that it had been sold on 19 March 2013—before the author knew it was available.

The author tried to trace the buyer through the bookseller, offering to repurchase the album at any price or to pay simply for the chance to see, touch, and photograph it. The attempt failed. The bookshop knew neither the buyer’s name nor how to contact him; he had paid in cash, collected the album, and never returned. The object’s disappearance thus became part of its evidentiary story: the author could not inspect the original or establish its custody, and had to work from the images already available online.

Reading the Photographs

The reproduced pages showed Stauffer’s neat notes in white pencil on black card. Unable to obtain the album, the author enlarged the images as much as possible and transcribed the names and dates that could be deciphered into a light-green notebook. The photographs were not self-explanatory; their significance depended on patient reading of captions and on connecting the recorded names to other sources.

Among the journey’s mementos were photographs of two weddings. The bride and groom in the two sets of images were a brother and sister who shared the same surnames. The woman’s name could not be identified from the images, while the man’s was clearly legible as Hannibal D’Angelo Rodríguez. An internet search for that spelling produced no result. Remembering that Stauffer had studied in Germany, the author tried a Spanish spelling of the name and found a connection that redirected the investigation.

Corroboration and Historical Context

A 3 August 2003 article in the Argentine newspaper Página/12 had reproduced a letter to its director, Sergio Kiernan, from Aníbal D’Angelo Rodríguez—the name without the initial h and with one n. He identified himself as the son of Magda Ivanissevich de D’Angelo Rodríguez, an Argentine teacher of Croatian origin. Her brother, Oscar Ivanissevich, had twice served as education minister under Perón. The family details supplied a way to connect the wedding photographs to people and political networks beyond the album itself.

The letter followed a Página/12 report about newly declassified migration files containing information on Nazis who fled to Argentina from 1945 onward. That report had mentioned Magda Ivanissevich in connection with Jean-Jules Lecomte, a Belgian war criminal. Aníbal’s letter proudly acknowledged that he and his mother had helped save Lecomte from those he called the liberators, and claimed involvement in other cases as well. The novel’s account identifies Lecomte as the earliest Nazi fugitive whom the Stauffer network helped bring to safety in Argentina. The letter therefore did more than confirm a name: it supplied a concrete historical context for the wedding images and for the people who appeared in them.

Significance in the Novel

The combined evidence led the author to understand Stauffer’s South American journey as an operational visit during one of the most active periods of her work: she had traveled to supervise her organization’s activities and attend the weddings of two children of one of its closest overseas collaborators. The album consequently became a principal axis of the novel, linking personal photographs and family celebrations to the practical work of aiding fugitives.

That role also reflects the novel’s method. It is fiction built around real events, with short nonfiction passages interwoven among fictional chapters; those passages recount documented history, while historical figures—including Stauffer—interact with invented characters. The album does not simply decorate that historical framework. Because its contents were available only through reproductions, its names had to be deciphered, and its clues required corroboration from a newspaper article and migration-file reporting, it embodies the work of assembling a clandestine history from incomplete, dispersed traces.