No Enemies in Aliceville
By Alice Davidson

The Aliceville Museum purchased 50 copies of No Enemies in Aliceville to resell in the museum. The sixth grade social studies teachers at Bumpus Middle School are also using the book this year as part of their curriculum!

On June 2, 1943, the first of 6,000 German prisoners of war arrived by train in Aliceville, AL. They marched several miles to the prison camp that had been hurriedly built on the outskirts of town. The residents of Aliceville lined the streets to watch the procession of these strangers, these enemies, who had come from so far away to live as prisoners of war in this tiny Alabama town. Most of the German soldiers had been a part of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps and were captured in North Africa. Many of the Germans were highly educated professionals who had worked as architects, lawyers, teachers and doctors in Germany. The United States operated the camp according to the rules of the Geneva Convention of 1929, and the prisoners were treated well. Today, most people in Alabama know nothing about the camp. That is soon to change.

An ideal project. In the summer of 2004, I participated in The Novel Process workshop given by Roz Morris in Hoover, AL. I had been hoping to find an interesting, long-term project for my seventh grade advanced reading class at Robert F. Bumpus Middle School. The Novel Process is a year-long writing project that culminates in the publication of a novel that students have written as a class. The process was developed in the mid-nineties by Crista Walton who then taught in Hoover. The materials were free but could only be acquired by attending the workshop.

Writing a novel as a group seemed like an ideal project, and the process took students from research through publication and marketing. It allowed them to be creative, but also demanded focus and restraint, which are important qualities for all students to develop in their writing.

A novel idea. When school began, our first group task was to choose a topic for our novel. The Novel Process workshop suggested that a historical topic makes for a better project because a real event gives students a general time frame and a series of events to follow. Choosing an event was not easy, though. Several of my students suggested the Civil Rights Movement as our subject, but that topic had already been explored in another classroom novel. We brainstormed lots of other ideas, but nothing really sparked our interest. It looked like our project might be stuck at the starting line, when I remembered a story my mother had told me about a man who had worked as a guard at a German prison camp in Aliceville, AL. None of us had actually been to Aliceville, and we knew very little about the town or its history. But something about the idea of thousands of German soldiers living as prisoners in small-town Alabama piqued our collective imagination, so Aliceville's German soldiers became our novel idea.

A crucial element. As our research began, we discovered that a museum devoted to the German prisoners and the camp was located in Aliceville. Our class visited the museum in the early fall. Mary Bess Paluzzi, the museum's director, was a wonderful resource, answering our endless questions about the camp and the prisoners. I bought the video History Undercover: Nazi POWs in America (http://store.aetv.com), which the class watched countless times as they worked.

Most of the 6,000 prisoners in the Aliceville camp had been captured in North Africa. The prisoners were treated very well at the camp and many became friends with Aliceville residents.

In December, as we were nearing the end of our research, we realized that while we were turning into very competent writers and first-rate researchers, we were missing a crucial element to our book. We had the historical details right, but we needed to breathe life into our work. We needed to understand what it was actually like to live in small-town Alabama during WWII. I encouraged the students to interview their grandparents and great-grandparents for information about the time period. I invited my father to come and tell us about being 15 in 1943 and driving a school bus in Shelby County, AL. Papa was such a hit with my students that he became a main character in our book. An added benefit to our interviews was that my students learned more about their relatives than they might have otherwise.

Ready to write. In late January, we were ready to begin writing. We outlined the book on butcher paper lining the walls, and two students were assigned to each chapter. Some found the writing easy and enjoyable while others struggled, writing their chapters over and over. Since we did not have computers in our classroom, the students wrote in longhand. Two weeks before spring break, some chapters still needed much work, and our deadline of April 1 was quickly approaching. I started to worry that we might not finish, so I asked the students to come to school on a Saturday and work in the computer lab. It was then that the book really came together. I realized that writing on the computer was what most of the students had needed all along. That's where they are comfortable. I made sure we were in the lab during class for the next three weeks, and we missed our deadline by only a week. Seacoast Publishing, a small publishing company in Birmingham, published our book, as it had with other Hoover classroom novels. We received our first printing, 500 copies, in May. My students then became publicists and salespeople, working hard to sell books to pay the publication costs.

By the time school was out for the year, we were all exhausted, but my seventh graders had researched, written and marketed No Enemies in Aliceville, a book of which we are all proud. And not only are we proud of it, but the town of Aliceville is as well. Our novel tells their story, a story that is relevant today more than ever.

Alice's seventh grade class proudly shows off their finished product.

Alice Davidson teaches seventh grade Language Arts and reading at Robert F. Bumpus Middle School in Hoover, AL.