I can tell you from experience, as the child of a Holocaust survivor, that when I sat down to write a book about the experiences of my survivor mother it opened a Pandora’s box, releasing into my world demons and heroes whose voices claimed my waking and sleeping hours. How to tell a story that has been told a thousand times in endless variations. How to make it new, relevant, and even more daunting, how to get it published?
First, in order to live the experience from the inside, if that is at all possible, I had to become the heroine, my mother. The memoir became a novel, which allowed me to breathe the air of prewar Radom, Poland and recreate the life of an ordinary child whose childhood ends suddenly and utterly with the blitzkrieg that conquers Poland. After taping my mother day after day with a prepared timeline and a million questions I probed ever deeper into her wealth of memories. The story that I thought I knew so well reemerged transforming itself into a detailed account of the slow degradation of life under the Nazis and the human spirits resilience in the face of destruction. A life is so much more than a journey from ghetto to camps and eventual liberation. Protagonists and antagonists emerged interacting and affecting each other’s lives as the larger picture of war whirled around them.
First, in order to live the experience from the inside, if that is at all possible, I had to become the heroine, my mother. The memoir became a novel, which allowed me to breathe the air of prewar Radom, Poland and recreate the life of an ordinary child whose childhood ends suddenly and utterly with the blitzkrieg that conquers Poland. After taping my mother day after day with a prepared timeline and a million questions I probed ever deeper into her wealth of memories. The story that I thought I knew so well reemerged transforming itself into a detailed account of the slow degradation of life under the Nazis and the human spirits resilience in the face of destruction. A life is so much more than a journey from ghetto to camps and eventual liberation. Protagonists and antagonists emerged interacting and affecting each other’s lives as the larger picture of war whirled around them.
Every Jew during those years faced death a hundred times over. Each and every Jew should have been murdered as the Nazi plague wreaked havoc across Europe. Only a miracle and sometimes many miracles saved the few that survived. Even amid this bleak landscape of death love blossomed among the doomed, and sometimes even among the captors and their prey. Humanity persevered in the smallest of gestures in the most barren of landscapes the concentration camps. Amid the memories the story grew out of itself with all of the ingredients of an unforgettable tale.
Two years later the novel came full circle, a teenager’s miraculous survival of the worst evil to ever be perpetrated against mankind, a love story with a promise to survive. A year spent in submitting letters, summaries, partial manuscripts, teasers, one line hooks all culminating in rejection and frustration as agent upon agent refused to even read In the Face of Evil. It is no surprise that the publishing industry is in such disarray.
A survivor’s daughter is not one to be dissuaded by rejections, after all I wrote this novel for those that perished and for those that managed to survive. In the Face of Evil will see the light of day next month due to the magic of self-publishing and I hope it will reach a critical mass enough to enlighten those who believe that there have been too many books that shine the spotlight on mankind’s darkest hour. All too soon the physical living manifestations of that time, the survivors themselves will be gone. It is our duty as the inheritors of that history to preserve their tales. Although, there have been many books and films devoted to the Holocaust and World War II each one is different, it is these differences and details and the manner of exposition that makes these experiences worth the telling.
