In Terese Svoboda’s latest book, Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, the novelist and poet takes on the little-known life of her husband’s mother, Patricia Lochridge, a Zelig-like figure who was the only female American journalist to cover both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters of World War II. The title of the book refers to a lost 1945 photo of Lochridge at the age of 29, standing beside a pile of what the U.S. military claimed were Hitler’s ashes. Lochridge often told the story of how the military used her to verify Hitler’s death. Svoboda and her husband, Steve, remember seeing the photo in Lochridge’s home in Hawaii in 1980. After Lochridge died, they searched her archives and their own, but as hard as they tried, they could not find it again.
Lochridge was a polio survivor who walked with a slight limp. Svoboda theorizes that her experience with the debilitating illness might be the key to understanding her powerful personality. Sometimes having had a brush with a serious disability or with death causes fearlessness. But just as Svoboda finds it hard to pin down so many of the details of Lochridge’s stories, some family members—including her brother—claim she may never have had polio at all. Why would she lie about having polio? For the same reason F.D.R. pretended not to be paralyzed—to not show weakness.
