In The Presence of Mine Enemies - Viewpoint Characters

Viewpoint Characters

• Heinrich Gimpel, a hidden Jew serving as an officer at the Wehrmacht HQ in Berlin. Heinrich is careful and meticulous about keeping up his masquerade: originally even from the reader, who goes through nearly a whole chapter before finding that Gimpel is a hidden Jew and a leader of a secret Jewish community. Heinrich's specific job is to monitor the American payment of tribute to Germany and detect the frequent attempts to avoid payment. Gimpel is later arrested because a friend's wife denouncing him as a Jew, without knowing he really was one, simply because he resisted her sexual advances. Gimpel is eventually released from custody; an SS major who escorts Heinrich out the door, casually remarking to him: "You find us in the oddest places."

• Lise Gimpel, Heinrich's wife and, like her husband, is also a Jew.

• Alicia Gimpel, Heinrich and Lise's ten-year-old daughter and oldest of three sisters. At the beginning of the book, she is initiated into the secret that she, and other family and friends, are Jewish. She is stunned but gradually comes to accept it.

• Susanna Weiss, a Medieval English scholar at the Friedrich Wilhelm University. She is also one of the few surviving Jews left in the Reich.

• Esther Stutzman, a receptionist at a Berlin area pediatrician's office. She and her husband, Walther, are also hidden Jews. She is a tuckerization of the well-known science-fiction/fantasy author Esther Friesner.

• Walther Stutzman, a computer programmer at Zeiss. He has unauthorized access into many of the Reich's databases due to codes that his father created, his father being involved with transferral of paper records to computer records. He has been able to assign false Aryan pedigrees to Jewish individuals to enable them to avoid detection by the Reich.