The introduction to my new book that will be released this spring …
Why I Had to Write This Book
After Thanksgiving 2003, I sit at the coffee shop with my friend. While she sips a flavored brew, I nurse icy lemonade and stare at the piles of paper I had brought to share with her.
I called her because I’m frustrated, confused and tired. I can’t make sense out of hundreds of my handwritten and typed pages, and my mind swirls with enough words for a thousand sheets more.
However, more important, I can’t find my focus, voice, purpose in organizing and writing a book about the Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center of the American Red Cross. It’s too emotional, I explain. I cannot write objectively about the Holocaust and its shocking history, the Red Cross program and all the individuals I have encountered. I confess that I have been changed by this process, and I continue to evolve. I believe that I am a better person because of this, and that’s why I’m writing this book.
After she challenges me to look deeper within myself for the answers, I cannot fend off the tears, which had been building within me for months as I have agonized over this project.
She pats my hand.
“I can go out and buy any book I want or need about the Holocaust. There’s a ton of them out there. How is your book different?”
No one had asked me that. Even I had not stopped long enough to pose that question. Before I can scribble or type one more word, I have to know and be confident of the answer or give it all up now.
I explain that it’s more than the Tracing Center or the Holocaust. It’s about the journey of so many lives, including my own, and the wobbly fence between humanity and inhumanity in this world.
She smiles.
“Then you must write it in first person … your experience …”
And I have.
It’s not always easy to accept new challenges that will potentially enhance our lives and to ignore those that do not carry us further along on this journey …
But I had to, and, more important, I wanted to.
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