Ellwangen is a picturesque German city of about 25,000 people known for its medieval abbey, built in 764. Situated midway between Frankfurt and Munich, Ellwangen is in many respects a typical German town. As such, it has its own brewery—and its own legacy of the Nazi era.

When one local high school teacher set out with her students to trace her city's past, she discovered a story that not only became the basis of a historical novel, Something Remains, which Hyperion is publishing this month, but also turned out to have an intimate real-life connection to a leading New York literary agent.

The teacher, Inge Barth-Grözinger, led an 18-month research project, tracing the history of Ellwangen's Jewish community, which had been eradicated before WWII. One story—the struggle of young Erich Levi, forced to leave high school, and eventually Germany, because he was Jewish—stood out from the rest, so they named the project "Who Was Erich Levi?"

What the class found was that Levi survived the Holocaust and went on to a successful life in America. In January 2002, school officials contacted the Levi family in New York, inviting Dr. Michael Levi, Erich's son, to the opening of the exhibition of their research project.

"It all seemed unreal," Levi noted. "My father died when I was young [in a car accident in Venezuela in 1966, when Michael was 14]. So the question 'who was Erich Levi?' was particularly poignant, because it was the same one I asked myself my whole life."

Levi and his teenage son Jacob attended the Ellwangen ceremonies, where they learned that his father, after emigrating to the U.S. in 1938, returned to Ellwangen in 1945 as a U.S. soldier and ordered the repair of the town's Jewish cemetery, which had been desecrated during the war.

With a bounty of historical material about Erich Levi and new information from his descendants, Barth-Grözinger crafted the research into a novel. By sheer coincidence, Michael Levi's wife, Gail Hochman, is a principal with Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents. Hochman volunteered to represent the book in the U.S. and sold it to Donna Bray, editorial director of Hyperion Books for Children.

"What's powerful about it," said Bray, "is that it is an accumulation of everyday details and small moments in a family's life, and a sense of encroaching danger. Though there are lots of books on the Holocaust, none really asks, how did it get to that point where neighbors and even friends turned on each other?"

Hochman said the project "helped further a very unexpected relationship—Erich's family in New York forged a real friendship with people in the tiny town that had forced his unhappy departure 65 years earlier. This to me is really the new face of the Holocaust theme—and the appeal to American readers: the theme of reconciliation and real friendship, and the desire to connect and repair old wounds."

Something Remainsis the third major YA book this year that grapples with the experiences of children in Germany during the '30s and '40s. Markus Zusak's The Book Thief(Knopf, Mar.) became a bestseller, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne (Random House/ Fickling, Sept.) has received much attention not only for its Holocaust theme but for a pre-pub marketing campaign that kept the book's plot a secret.

Regardless of media buzz or critical praise, a book about the Holocaust is not a sure thing. "It's a difficult handsell," said Beth Puffer, manager and buyer at Bank Street Bookstore in New York City. "You can't come in cold to books like this. But as each generation gets further away from it, they look at the Holocaust with a new perspective. It's now much less personal and much more in the realm of history."

For readers of any generation, Something Remains gives a dark episode of history a face in Erich Levi, something that is especially gratifying for his son. "My father was not an easy person because of what happened to him," Levi said. "He never talked about his youth, or the Army, and this book helped unravel that for me. When he went back to Germany and restored the cemetery, he was not hateful, and I will always be proud of that."