I declared a moratorium on discussing breast cancer over the weekend. I’ve spoken nonstop on the subject since my diagnosis ten days ago. I’ve talked with survivors and researched it on the internet. I’ve met with my surgeon and my husband’s physician, a man who generously gave of his time to answer lingering questions. Sometimes we can know too much.

I have to think of the German people during World War II, the era in which my novel, The Still Voice, is set. As the war progressed they were told less and less. In fact, while German soldiers were dying in Russia by the thousands, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels gave speeches proclaiming how well the war was going. Of course, the truth filtered out in letters the soldiers mailed home. No wonder Goebbels’ radio broadcasts became known as “Clubfoot’s Fairytale Hour.”

In the spring of 2007 I stayed a week in Wiesbaden, Germany with a childhood friend of my mother’s. On a walk through their old neighborhood, the woman pointed out a jail near the street where my mother had lived as a young girl. “We thought the Jews were being held in that jail,” she said. “Can you imagine? It has seven cells.”

Wiesbaden’s Jewish population stood at its highest in the 1920s, at a little over three thousand. By the start of the war, their number had dwindled to twelve hundred. In 1942, the city’s remaining Jews were deported to death camps. The citizens of Wiesbaden were told the Jews were being resettled in Theresienstadt--a spa city to which they could retire in safety.

Sometimes one can know too much. I wonder what course World War II would have taken had the German people known more.