You're listening to Kind World, I'm Erica Lance. In September of 2016, Rachel

Serati, a writer, and Sergio Scheller, an aspiring organic farmer, were newlyweds

in Boston. Their apartment was full of wedding

gifts, some still unopened. Sergio had a map of main on the wall, with pins and

all the places they might own their own farm someday.

Their plan was to move to Maine once Rachel finished writing a book she'd been working on for years.

You may remember from our last kind world that Rachel was retracing the steps of her

grandmother, the sole survivor of her Jewish-Chuck family after the Holocaust.

One day, Sergio heard an interview that he thought might help Rachel with her work.

It was with a woman named Julie Lindahl.

She was talking about this research and she'd spent many years retracing her family history,

but she had come from this perspective as the

granddaughter of an SS officer. Julie had uncovered the family secret that her

grandfather had been a brutal Nazi officer during World War II.

And as Sergio listened, he was stunned by how much of her work paralleled Rachel's project.

Yes, Rachel was descended from a Holocaust survivor and Julie from Nazis, but they

had both spent years immersed in the same history.

Sergio called me from the car and was like, oh my God Rachel, he was like, you're not alone, you're not alone, because it's a very lonely project to work on.

And Sergio and I just sat there and were like, wow you, like I need to contact her.

Like I don't know what this could be and like we had a whole swarm of brainstorm thoughts of

like we could collaborate this way and this way or maybe it was just great to have a conversation.

So the next day, Rachel and Sergio huddled around her computer

...