Manuscripts in Progress
NO PLACE FOR US
Wolf entered his teen years alone and homeless, roaming the ravaged Polish countryside in a constant search for a warm bed, scraps of food, and his family. Two years earlier he had only a vague awareness of his Jewish ancestry. Now he had witnessed the death of his parents and separation from his older brothers. Wolf relied on luck, wits, and forged papers for survival, never slowing his search to find family survivors until reuniting with a brother who shared his determination to begin again. Seventy years later a survivor’s personal memoirs were given by his family to me, a journalist and historian, and I have retold his unique story as Wolf Freier in a young adult novel.
Wolf’s struggle for survival tells an untold Holocaust story. There are no camps or jack-booted thugs, and while Nazis lurk, the focus remains on this young boy whose life is yanked from comfortable middle class to living with a terror that he can’t see but still must flee, encountering along the way other Aryan-passing Jews, resistance fighters, and German soldiers. American teens are aware of iconic moments such as Ann Frank’s attic or the showers of Auschwitz, but a New York Times article reported 66 percent of them are unaware of even this much (NY Times, 4/12/2018). No Place For Us offers a deeper, more compassionate understanding of an atrocity that happened not so long ago.
Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.
Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, "They must die":
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.
`from Refugee Blues by W.H. Auden
KINDERSZENEN
Lila Powers lived by the wisdom and insight she gained from her first decade of life. Coming of age during the 50s as they morphed into the 60s, twelve short vignettes describe Lila’s camaraderie with her younger-but-wiser brother, her confusion and awe of her capable if sometimes bumbling parents, and her wonder at a troubled world of mystery and beauty.
The stories in Kinderszenen parallel Robert Schumann’s 1838 composition Kinderszenen, a look back at childhood. “I felt as if I were a youth again and wrote charming short pieces called Scenes from Childhood,” he wrote his fiancé. “They will delight you, but you will have to forget that you are a virtuoso.” Lila’s stories evoke the same sensation and mirror these music selections to tell of her own wonder years: At Home; Pleading Child; Frightening!; Of Foreign Lands and People and other events.
Mom was a contralto who devoted her life to her music and her children. Dad was a would-be history professor. Life revolved around parental foibles, the assassination of a president, horny toad fashion and the discovery that her tendencies toward embellishment of the truth defined her very being – she was a writer! The collected stories blend together to tell of a young girl facing choices, opportunities and roadblocks; the individual stories can also stand alone, as they each describe a growing moment in a life.
From Spotify: