Category Archives: Biography

Welcome Ronny Herman de Jong

Join me in welcoming Ronny Herman de Jong to Highlighted Author.

 

Ronny Herman de Jong Ronny Herman de Jong, author of two books and featured in a 2013 Anthology, currently lives in Prescott, AZ, is a survivor of the World War Two Japanese concentration camps on the island of Java. The very first books she owned, she received after the war for her ninth birthday from her grandmother and her third-grade teacher. She still has them. Writing became the joy of her life in fifth grade. When she lived in Hawai’i, she loved to swim, snorkel and dance hula. Now, living in Arizona, she likes to hike with her Rottweiler, Isabelle, read, write, and practice yoga and Pilates. Her motto is Reach for the Stars!

A member of the Professional Writers of Prescott and the Society of Southwestern Authors, Ronny holds a BA in English Literature from Leiden University in the Netherlands.

She’s with us this week sharing her book, Rising from the Shadow of the Sun: A Story of Love, Survival and Joy.

 

Interview with Morning Scramble

 

 

What they are saying:

“Aided by her mother’s secret diary (published here in its entirety) that she kept during this awful time, written in Dutch of course that Ms. de Jong later translated into English, the author tells this harrowing little-known story, another from World War Two, that is a horrific picture of life in a concentration camp but, much more importantly, a testament to the endurance of the human spirit.”—H. F. Corbin “Foster Corbin”

“Ronny Herman de Jong’s book, “Rising from the Shadow of the Sun,” is many things: a journal of a mother, Netty (Jeannette Herman-Louwerse) who survived a Japanese extermination camp, her husband’s military story, and their daughter, Ronny’s reflections on her own life in context of her parents’. These three major “characters” bring unique points of view about the experiences of a family during the Japanese invasion of the island of Java, in the Dutch East Indies. However, the combination of the three in one book is like looking into a prism with many faces. In the final analysis, the stories blend into one another and the reader gains a much fuller, richer view than she would with only one perspective. “Rising from the Shadow of the Sun” is an important account of courage and hope.”—Nancy Owen Nelson, PhD, Memoirist, poet, college professor

“Rising from the Shadow of the Sun: what an incredibly beautifully detailed account it is. Many books have been written in the Dutch language (about the Japanese concentration camps in the Dutch East Indies), but what is so special about this book is that it gives such a complete overview. It covers almost a whole life span. The reader is pulled into the story (from the very beginning).

De Jong provides an important service to all English-language readers. I know for certain that there is a need among readers of the second and third generation in English-language countries to read this book.

I think it has the potential for a movie. Sadly, I only produce documentaries.”—Hetty Naaijkens-Retel Helmrich, Producer http://www.scarabeefilms.com  

 

 

Rising from the Shadow of the Sun

blurb

The story of a mother’s love and courage during World War Two in the Pacific and the journey of her little girl from the horrors of life in Japanese concentration camps on Java in the 1940s to peace and prosperity in the United States in the 21st century.   

 

Book Trailer

 

 

Excerpt

Part One

In the Shadow of the Sun

 

Eluding Death

Rising from the Shadow of the Sun Front Cover (2)Sticking his bayonet through the gedèk (bamboo fence), the Japanese soldier aimed to kill me. He missed. A little girl with blond braids, I was only five years old in March of 1944. The bayonet sliced through the air over my head. “Mamma!” I cried.

“Ronny, come here!” cried Mamma. Dropping my flowers I scrambled across the slokan (ditch) and into Mamma’s arms. “Oh Ron!” said Mamma. “I am so glad you could run so fast through the slokan! You’re such a big girl!”

“What was that, Mamma?”

“You probably came too close to the gedèk. On the other side is a soldier. He thought you were running away and put a stick through the gedèk to scare you.”

“Can you get my flowers, Mam? They are for you.”

Mamma took my hand. “We will get them later, when the soldier is gone. All right?”

That morning, Mamma and I were walking along the edge of the camp. I was picking wildflowers for Mamma across the slokan. On the other side of the gedèk, a Japanese guard heard voices and intended to kill me. It is one of the bad memories I have of those three and a half years in Japanese concentration camps. At that time, Mamma, my little sister Paula and I were incarcerated in Halmahera, a Japanese concentration camp outside of Semarang, on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies. The war had gone on for two years.

The Japanese Army had conquered our island in March of 1942. Civilians—men, women and children—were put into concentration camps. Our captors withheld food and medication and treated the prisoners in the most inhumane way. Many were tortured and raped and beheaded. The Imperial Japanese Army’s instructions were to exterminate the Western Race in the islands at all costs so Japan could achieve a monopoly in Southeast Asia.

It was a near miss. I did not die at the hands of that Japanese soldier in 1944 because I was too small. I could have died a year later from hunger edema. In August of 1945, I was six. My legs were like sticks, my tummy was bloated and my cheeks were puffy. I was in the last stages of beri-beri, hunger edema. Paula, then four years old, had dry edema and was a mere skeleton. She could not walk or sit anymore. I imagined how it would happen. Paula would die first. Mamma had “wet” edema, like me, and she would die soon after Paula. I would have a month, perhaps two, before it was my turn. The Japanese would throw me into a mass grave outside the camp; a large hole in the ground dug especially for this purpose. When the war was over, allied rescue troops would unearth my body with all the others and bury it properly in the cemetery outside of town. They would top my grave with a nameless white cross. They put white crosses on thousands of graves in memory of the women and children who perished under the cruel treatment of the Japanese.

Forty-nine years later, I stood at that cemetery and wept. I wept tears of sorrow for all those mothers and children who had perished, and I wept tears of joy because I was alive.

I did not die in 1945 from hunger edema, because on August 15, 1945, the Japanese Empire abruptly surrendered and the war was over.

The world knows a lot about the war in Europe, the German occupation and the Holocaust. This book captures an aspect of  WWII that is unknown to many: the torture and deaths that took place in civilian concentration camps all over Asia under Japanese occupation: the Asian Holocaust.

 

March 8, 1942

Misery

They are here. The Japs came marching in today. I heard the sound of many motorcars, a heavy droning sound, along a wide avenue near our street. I ventured to look around the corner and saw the Japanese army, marching and driving. On both sides of the street many of the natives were waving small Japanese flags. I felt they were betraying us and hurried back home.

Yesterday, our next door neighbor, who lives in the large home on the corner, didn’t come home from the office. He works in City Hall. He left in the morning, as usual, but didn’t return in the afternoon. A telephone call notified his wife to take a small suitcase with some clothing and toiletries to the prison. The prison! She came to talk to me today, totally upset. Her husband, a high government official, had been imprisoned. She didn’t know why.

Fokko has gone. I don’t know anything about him. I don’t even know where he is, whether he is still alive or whether we’ll ever see each other again. You can understand how I feel. This is the worst thing that could happen to me, because as long as you have each other you can endure anything. I’ll try to tell you everything that happened since March 1st, now exactly a week ago, also a Sunday.

Fokko had to work that day and wouldn’t be back until Monday night. When Ronny and I said goodbye that morning at the gate I said, “See you tomorrow night.” The funny thing was that we said goodbye twice, which had never happened before, and I thought, How strange. I hope nothing happens to him. I’d always have to think about this. We had our daily bombardments and around 11 our neighbor came over with a telephone message from Fokko. He’d called to ask if everything was all right. An hour later I was called to the phone (we didn’t have one of our own) and Fokko asked me the address of Jos’ wife’s parents in Malang, where I was to go if we had to be evacuated. He said, “Just in case we don’t see each other before you have to be evacuated, I need to know where I can find you.”

That telephone call frightened me. I went home, only to be called over again an hour later, and there it was: he had been assigned to a group of men who had to evacuate to Tjilatjap, a harbor town on the south coast. That’s all he knew. He asked me to pack a suitcase and didn’t even know whether he would have time to pick it up himself.

“And what about me?” I asked.

“You are staying here,” he said and he gave me an address where I would get money every month, part of his salary.

I went home to pack Fokko’s suitcase. All kinds of horrifying thoughts went through my mind. In the afternoon I went to a phone booth to call him. He said he didn’t know anything yet, but he was almost sure he’d have time to come by before he had to leave. “Say goodbye to Ron and little Paula.” I got home just in time for the next alarm. That night Fokko called me again at the neighbor’s and we had a good, long talk. He cheered me up again, but I didn’t sleep much that night. Early the next morning, while I was sorting out some pictures for Fokko to take, I heard from one of the neighbors that the base would be destroyed around 9 a.m. When we heard the terrible explosions, tears started running down my face. You should have heard Ronny trying to cheer me up. Stroking my arm she said, “Please don’t cry, Mam. Maybe Pappa will come home to pick up his suitcase.”

When that didn’t have any results, she said, “Maybe Pappa will stay with us for a little while longer.”

“No, Pappa really has to leave.”

“Do you love Pappa so much? Maybe then we’ll get another Pappa,” she finally said.

At noon the radio broadcast the news that the Japanese had invaded Java’s north coast. A little later Fokko drove into the driveway for the last time. Of course he was depressed too. They had each received some money and a lifebelt (did that mean he would go overseas?), and the train would be leaving at 7 p.m. that night. We spent some time talking, while Fokko looked through the papers he wanted to take with him. Kokki  kept the girls occupied, but we didn’t feel like dinner that afternoon. At five Fokko and I left for the tram, which would take him to the train. It cut me through my soul when I heard him say, “Pappa has to leave now. Be good, girls.”

He took them in his arms, hugged them and kissed them goodbye. They couldn’t understand that it possibly meant goodbye for a long time. He had to leave them just like that. How terrible.

 

Get your copy of Rising from the Shadow of the Sun here:

Amazon.com | BarnesandNoble.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk

 

Want more Ronny? Here’s where you can find her:

Website:  http://www.ronnyhermandejong.com
Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/ronnyhermandejong/
Twitter:   https://www.twitter.com/ronnyhermandejo/
Google+:  https://plus.google.com/106034067626195740064/posts
Goodreads:  https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/17044346-ronny-herman-de-jong
Pinterest:  http://www.pinterest.com/hermandejong/ 

Welcome Pamela Bitterman

Join me in welcoming Pamela Sisman Bitterman to Highlighted Author.

 

Pamela caught my attention when I was introduced to her novel, Muzungu, then my heart with, When This Is Over, I Will Go To School and I Will Learn To Read, and my breath with, Sailing to the Far Horizon. All true stories, they prove to me that his woman is amazing. 

She has been a guest speaker at Sierra Club, Palomar College, Southern California’s Writers conference, American Association of University Women, was guest of honor at Asteres Annual Event, Aboard The Star Of India Tall Ship, Arts That Splash, 39th Annual Local Authors Exhibit, and held Book Tour events and signings nationwide and abroad.

But it doesn’t stop there.  The list continues with her radio interviews and television appearances on The Michael Dresser Show, Radio New Zealand National Radio, Nine to Noon Program, KPBS Public Radio, These Days Program, Discovery Channel, Investigation Discovery Program, series Escaped, Share the Candy Radio Webcast, Cruise With Bruce Radio, Travel Wise, Let’s Talk About Books with The1essence, and January Jones BTR. 

I’ll let her tell you more in her own words.  She’s much more exciting to read. *wink* Pamela, it’s all yours…

 

Today I am a mom, a wife, a writer, and an explorer who has tried to travel her world with her eyes, arms, heart and mind wide open. I am a youthful 6o years old; strong, wise, weathered and seasoned. I hope to be able to proudly proclaim myself to still be all the aforementioned and more, in the years ahead. I have worn many hats along the road thus far; teacher, student, counselor, naturalist, sailor, mediator and more. I have been on quite a journey, with tremendous love and laughter, sadness and loss, beauty and wonder, struggle and survival. Great joy, and great heartache. Life. I would want very few do-overs. I am grateful for everything. I have been fortunate!  My life continues to be an ever evolving work in progress, as do I.  My first book, Sailing To the Far Horizon,  is graphically biographical. It encapsulates me as product of the first thirty years of my rather unconventional life.

Muzungu, the story of my unlikely escapade throughout Kenya, picks up on that journey a couple decades later. I also wrote a children’s book about this experience titled “When This Is Over, I Will Go To School, And I Will Learn To Read; A Story of Hope and Friendship For One Young Kenyan Orphan“. It was illustrated by the orphans I worked with in Africa. Both are the personal accounts of my work and travel through Kenya as the epitome of Muzungu, the Swahili word for white man.  Literally translated, Muzungu means “confused person wandering about.” Fit me to a tee! In between the adventures that were the subjects of my first and my later books were my marriage and children, my persona as wife and mother – the heart of me; me as my best self. As I explain in Muzungu, during those intervening years, the “yee-hah!” exhilaration of climbing out onto life’s edge had never entirely died out in me. It had merely been lying dormant beneath a meticulously constructed, implied housewife persona, a twenty-five year stint of nurturing-mother prioritizing for which I had absolutely no regrets. Everything had turned with the seasons, as they should. And a bygone time had finally come back around, although to what purpose under heaven remained to be seen.  My future also remains to be seen, and to be told.  Can’t hardly wait!

 

Sailing to the Far Horizon

Blurb

One woman’s true story of life, loss, and survival at sea.

“I keep reminding myself that I have seen the pictures, heard the stories, read countless books. There is an exotic world out there comprised of brilliant wonders and fascinating cultures, promising endless horizons and illuminating adventures, inducing me with wholly unique challenges, and daring me to accomplish awesome leaps of faith. The Sofia is my ticket.”

 

Book trailer

 

Excerpt 

Sinking; The Life Rafts

The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one, that never otherwise would have occurred. — GOETHE

Click Image To Purchase . . .

On this fifth day [hopelessly adrift in life rafts following the sudden and violent sinking of our tall ship, the Schooner Sofia] we realize that we are no longer seeing distant ships off on the horizon or the occasional plane soaring overhead. And we hear far fewer heralding cries or have welcome visits from curious shorebirds venturing out to examine our unnatural presence. Already well outside the shipping lanes, we have been carried steadily out to sea, on our way to nowhere. When incurably wide-eyed and ever-hopeful Chris asks Evan [our skipper] if we still have a good chance of being saved, Evan fixes on his imploring stare and answers with accuracy and uncharacteristic gentleness. “No Chris, not much,” he replies. Evan then lays his head on my shoulder and sleeps. In nearly four years of countless highs and lows across half the planet, this simple gesture is the most sincere and spontaneous intimacy that my captain and I have ever exchanged.

We need to patch the raft yet again, a prospect now both futile and horrific. We are being barraged by a family of sharks. They rub their sandpapery bodies along the thin, grainy raft floor, bumping us about like we are on a carnival ride. By the second day in the rafts, I was forced to announce to my captive audience that, whether we liked it or not, I was menstruating. Amid a chorus of alarmed male sighs, the other women raise their hands in a reluctant but resigned “me too” acknowledgement of undeniable feminine unity. As is so often the case when women live together, our cycles had synchronized. Nature delivered us yet one more cruel jab: There would be blood in the water. The sharks are now our nearly constant companions, a patient and persistent entourage. Patching the leaks is no longer an option. Besides, our raft is almost beyond repair. Our having to go into the ocean for good is imminent, and we all know it.

 

Get your copy of Sailing To the Far Horizon here: http://www.amazon.com/Sailing-Far-Horizon-Restless-Journey/dp/0299201902

 

 

Muzungu

About the book:

Muzungu, the Swahili word for white folk, translated literally means “confused person wandering about.” During the author’s months working and traveling through Kenya, this description fits her to a tee. Her audacious Kenyan adventure makes for a bucket load of anecdotes and impressions born of heart and hands-on experience–enough to knock your socks off.

 

Book trailer

 

Excerpt

COMING HOME:

Click Image To Purchase . . .

“Order this phone today” some sweet confection-nicknamed, neon-colored, ultra sleek mobile “and help wipe out AIDS in Africa!” the television commanded me within minutes of my collapsing for the first time in my Southern California living room after spending nearly two months in Africa. Now, what does that mean? I pondered. The next morning, a headline in the fat newspaper on my doorstep informed me that a tiny band of rebel fighters trapped somewhere in the African jungle were caught killing mountain gorillas. They were eating them to survive. Some American animal activist group was positively outraged. “Yes, outrageous,” I sighed.

Since returning home, reflecting on the time I spent in Kenya has proved to be a frustrating exercise. Throughout my journey I toted my copy of National Geographic, the issue on which the title page flashed, Africa: Whatever you thought, think again. I was hoping that somewhere in this illustrious expose I would find validation for the conflicting messages I was receiving. To make matters more confounding, from the moment my plane touched down back on U.S. soil I was buried in an avalanche of material insidiously designed to debunk my own eyewitness accounts. As a result I began to question my perceptions, which in turn caused my intention to commit the experience to print to stutter and then stall out completely. I feared that if I wrote an honest appraisal of my adventure I would be vilified. Even worse, I was afraid that what I wrote would have a deleterious effect on the people of Kenya, the people I went there to help. Then later on, while leafing through the stack of magazines that had piled up in my absence, I stumbled upon an article that casually discarded the term hunger, substituting in its place the new PC term, low food security, when describing the unpardonable state of the starving multitudes on the planet. It was at that moment that I pledged to tell my story.

Curious as to how the media’s tone when dealing with current issues jived with my personal impressions, I collected every Dark Continent news tidbit that cycled down the pike. Culling information from a variety of sources and comparing it with anecdotes from my own journey, I ferreted out what I hoped amounted to the litmus test for a Kenyan reality check. Materials from newspapers to newsmagazines, adventure journals to journals on health, and nonprofit charitable organizations to profiteering political organizations, were referenced and offset against my own experiences. As a result I began to suspect that the media’s Africa had taken on a life of its own and that tragically that life had precious little to do with improving the lives of Africans. It became increasingly apparent that although my story was certain to be a great many things, one thing it would never be was representative of the norm. I am changed as a result of my trip to Kenya though not in any way formerly anticipated. In addition to acknowledging the existence of the established abominations at work in Kenya, I expose some lesser-known evils. In the end I wrestle a few slippery demons of my own.

David arrived home to San Diego six months after I did. I called him immediately and we got together to catch up. He seemed like the same old David, ”happy, kind, helpful, manic, and refreshingly clear-eyed and unsentimental about the situation in Maseno. I was thrilled to have him back, had dozens of ideas to run past him, and felt such a profound sense of comradeship that I became cautiously optimistic about completing the book. My Kenyan cohort confirmed everything I remembered, sensed, questioned, and concluded about our shared experience at St. Philip’s. I am not crazy . . . I consoled myself. Then David stepped off the front porch of his and Michael’s sweet little cottage, strolled down his lovely tree-lined street, settled beneath a blossoming willow on a soft green lawn, and calmly sent a bullet through his brain.

Get your copy of Muzungu here: https://www.ebookit.com/books/0000000120/Muzungu.html

 

 

When This Is Over, I Will Go To School, And I Will Learn To Read 

Proceeds go directly to the Kenya orphans.

 

From the author:

No one knows the story of Kenya better than the children who live it.

I had the opportunity to travel to this country and become immersed with the families there. The result is a 1500-word nonfiction children’s picture book containing over 70 unique and original color images, titled, “When This Is Over, I Will Go To School, And I Will Learn To Read: A Story of Hope and Friendship for One Young Kenyan Orphan.”

This true story of one little boy is told in his own words.

While there are many books about Africa on the market, none are told from a child’s point of view like this one.

The children from the village created the book’s illustrations. I asked these students to draw what represented family, love, happiness, sadness, fear and hope for them. I have also included powerful photographs of the children, the school, the village and the countryside, the hospital, the mobile clinic and orphan program.

It is this truth that is certain to nudge the hearts and minds of parents, teachers and children everywhere.

I have promised all proceeds from the sale of this book to the children of the tiny village school where the illustrations were created. They trust me. And they wait.


Book trailer

 

Excerpt

 

Click Image To Purchase . . .

My name is Julius. I am six years old and I have never been to school. I live in Kenya, Africa, with my bibi(grandmother), my dada (sister) Sarah and my kaka (brother) Hezron. Hezron is only three years old, but he is much bigger than I am.

We live in a mud hut on our little shamba (farm) in the forest.

Baba (father) and mama (mother) are gone. They were very sick and they could not get better. Our bibi cares for us but she is old and she cannot see. Sarah protects us. Sarah is eleven years old.

Professor Nancy is a kind bibi with skin and hair the color of cornflowers who comes to our village. She sees the hands and feet of my jamii (family) and says, “You have jiggers. Jiggers are bugs that crawl under the skin and lay eggs. You must come to my mobile clinic and orphan feeding program this weekend.”

I tell her, “When this is over, I will go to school, and I will learn to read.”

 

 


Get your copy of When This Is Over, I Will Go To School, And I Will Learn To Read here: https://www.createspace.com/4054600 

 

Want more Pamela? Here’s where you can find her:

Website:  www.pamelasismanbitterman.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome Tema Merback

Join me in welcoming Tema Merback to Highlighted Author.

Tema was born to a Holocaust survivor, Dina Frydman from Radom, Poland and Leo Balbien who was rescued by the Kindertransport from Vienna, Austria.  She was raised in a loving home by two people whose lives had been shattered by the Holocaust, though in entirely different ways.  She attended Granada Hills High School, worked countless jobs, and became a Kathryn McBride Scholar at Bryn Mawr College, following her passion for literature and art history.  As she married and had children, her desire to write was deferred by the demands of a family.          

Through the years, several writers have approached her mother with hopes of telling her miraculous tale of survival.  Unbeknownst to Tema, her mother had long ago determined that only she could bring this book to fruition, that only she would write it with an intimacy and compassion that no one else could.  In the Face of Evil is the result of a collaboration of two forever bound souls, a mother and a daughter. 

Ranking #12 on Book Movement, In the Face of Evil has received outstanding recognition, including Silver Finalist in the category of Young Adult Literature for the National Jewish Book Awards for 2011 and being an eBook of note on the prestigious International Raoul Wallenberg Website whose members include Nobel Laureates and International world leaders.

You can find more at The Jewish Journal, April 26, 2011, by Ryan Torok:  A daughter tells her mother’s story of the Holocaust, The Jewish Journal, May3, 2011, by Ryan Toro:  Holocaust Book Reading Brings on Reunion and More, and MalibuPatch, April 29, 2011, by Jonathan Friedman:  A Novel Idea to Tell a Survivor’s Story.  

 

Welcome, Tema.  Please tell us about yourself and how you came to write In the Face of Evil.

When I was a child I knew my mother was different.  I didn’t really hear her accent but all of my friends did and would ask, “Where is your mother from?  Is she from Hungary?  She looks like Zsa Zsa Gabor.”

“Poland, she’s from Poland,” I would answer.   To my friends my mother’s foreignness was other worldly.  She might as well have been an alien from another planet.   She was an enigma even to me as I tried to fathom the differences between her and my friend’s parents.  It wasn’t such a stretch of the imagination for me to conclude that I didn’t really know my mother.   From time to time I wondered why my mother had no father, mother or siblings.  What had happened to my grandparents?  I wondered why she had a tattoo on her forearm and why during the summer she wore a Band-aid to cover it up.  Later when I asked her why she wore the Band-aid?   She would shrug and say she didn’t want to be stared at or endure the inevitable questions that the indelibly blue A-14569 would elicit from strangers.

In the 50’s and 60’s no one spoke of the Holocaust or World War II for that matter.  I don’t remember ever learning about it in school, at least in terms of the Holocaust.  I was about nine when I finally began to persistently question her as to the mysteries that surrounded her.  You see, I didn’t just love my mother I was in love with my mother.  She was so startlingly beautiful that all of my friends would constantly comment on her beauty.  It was like an aura that shone so brightly that even children were taken with her.  Forget about the countless men that were drawn to her.  Even with four children in tow between the ages of three and nine they would come up to her and hit on her, using any excuse just to bask in her glow.  She enjoyed being beautiful but was never comfortable or secure with it.  In other words, she never really owned it.  It was just some fluke of nature, something she hadn’t earned.  I, however, only wanted to look like her and be like her.

She was hesitant to share her past but I must have been relentless because little-by-little she began to share her stories.  At first, she spoke mostly about her family, reminiscences of incidents and events, family history and the city she came from.  Her eyes would light up in reverence as she spoke of her father, mother, sister and brother, her grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.  Then as suddenly, her eyes would cloud up and fill with tears as I continued to badger her for an answer as to what had happened to them.  Eventually, she shared it all with me and I became part daughter, part psychologist, and part family historian.   It became a routine that on Sunday morning I would climb into bed with her and having saved up a hundred questions during the week I would interrogate her.  I was insatiable for answers and this hour usually ended with the two of us sobbing.  I would wrap my arms around her feeling guilt that I had provoked such sorrow, wanting to comfort the pain that could not be comforted.  I felt like the parent, the protector of this soul that had known such horror and lost so much.  It seemed inconceivable to me that anyone could survive what she had.  In my efforts to reassure her I would promise to never leave her and profess my love of her for all of time.  “Mommy, when you die I don’t want to live another day.”  She would laugh and say, “Of course you want to live.  Life is the most precious thing we possess.  Believe me, even with all of the evil in the world there is nothing sweeter than life.”  So would another session end with her hugging me, “Besides, I am not leaving so fast I will be with you a long time.”

My mother has kept that promise to her child of being with her for a long time.  The days and years have flown by as they tend to do and I feel that the circle that is life gets ever smaller.  She is older now and not a day goes by that I don’t worry about her fragility.  Yes, she is still beautiful but not in that effervescent lusciousness of youth.  Her beauty is more haunting and like a mirror her face reflects the years of deprivation and loss that were her teens.  Yet, her spirit is as pure and incandescent as it ever was.  It is a mystery to me how anyone who has witnessed what she has could hold such an enduring belief in the goodness of mankind.  Today, she often reminds me of an ancient philosopher of Greece.  Ever the pragmatic idealist, she has long resigned herself to the inexplicability of life.

It is important to remember during these rapturous days that are summer that even with all of the imperfections and disappointments that come with the daily task of living, there are miracles to be sure.  My mother lives by example and she is an example to us all.  Be sure to appreciate all that you have been given and all those that you love.

I always knew that one day I would write and publish a novel, the question was never if, but rather what and when.  Subject matter presented itself wherever I looked, however, for some reason I was not prepared to tackle the one story that was personal, the one that threatened perilously near my heart.  Creating the story of my mother’s survival of the Holocaust seemed a journey through Hell and one that might prove to be too painful to revisit.  Then it struck me, what if the memoir became a novel written in the present, in the voice of my mother as it occurred.  The journey would become one of hope, a passage from ashes to redemption.  A novel of an adolescent transformed into womanhood set against the background of world conflagration. “In the Face of Evil” was born.

I am currently writing my second novel.

 

About Dina Frydman Balbien

Dina Frydman was born in 1929 in Radom, Poland.  Radom is situated about forty-five minutes by car from the capital city of Warsaw.  Her parents Joel and Temcia Frydman were hard working people that owned and worked at their Kosher and non-Kosher butcher shop.  Dina had an older sister Nadja who was six years her senior and a younger brother Abek that was three years her junior.  They were an educated middle-class family, religious yet modern.  They saw the future as a bright beacon of possibility, a place where Jews would find through education and hard work equality and success.

In September of 1939 when Dina was 10 years old all of the Frydman family’s dreams and aspirations were ended when the Nazis conquered Poland.  From that moment forward until sixteen year old Dina’s liberation at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp life become a deadly game of survival.  From work camps to death camps Dina did, through countless miracles, survive.  Sadly, none of her family would share that fate.  Her mother, father, sister and brother were murdered at Treblinka and Auschwitz.  Only two of her cousins from her extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents survived.

After Dina’s liberation she spent time at DP facilities in Germany and a school for orphans at Aglasterhausen, Germany before immigrating to the United States in May 1946.  She lived in foster care with a family in Philadelphia and attended Overbrook High School for two years.  In 1949 she moved to Los Angeles, CA to live with a cousin that offered her a permanent home.  She graduated from Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights and through necessity went to work.  OnApril 5, 1952 she married Leo Balbien, a Kinder Transport immigrant from Vienna Austria who served in the US Army.

Dina was a full-time mother to her four children:  Tema Nadine (named for her mother and sister), Joel Abraham (named for her father and brother), Joshua Nathan (named for both of her grandfathers), and Sarah Gail (named for both of her grandmothers).

In the last twenty-five years Dina has spoken to schools and synagogues in California about the Holocaust.  In 2008 her daughter Tema Merback began a novel based on her amazing story that was published in January 2011.  In the Face of Evil:  Based on the Life of Dina Frydman Balbien has received critical acclaim from readers throughout the world and now has been honored by the National Jewish Book Council as a Finalist – National Jewish Book Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature.  The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation has also recognized In the Face of Evil as an e-book of note by recommending it on their prestigious website www.raoulwallenberg.net .

The novel, like The Diary of Anne Frank, spellbinds the reader with its ability to recreate the world in which Dina lived prior, during and after the war.  Written in Dina’s voice we experience her transformation from child to teenager to woman while surviving occupation, destruction and imprisonment.  Through it all Dina’s strength, perseverance and positivity all factored into her survival.   She retained and exemplified the only possession left her by her loving family:  Morality, ethics, love and forgiveness.

Her life is an inspiration to friends, family and all who read her story.   Dina lives in Thousand Oaks, CA with her husband Leo.  They have seven grandchildren.

 

 

What they’re are saying: 

 

“This book is the outcome of three miracles.  First, the mother Dina Frydman, lived through the Holocaust, surviving an unbelievable, all too true set of tragic experiences that wiped out her entire family:  occupation, ghetto, work camp, slave labor, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen (in its final stage of total collapse and chaos).  Miraculously, she came through with her goodness, honor and affirmation of life intact.  This book reflects those qualities.

Second miracle:  for decades, in an incredible feat of memory, Dina relived and told her stories, recounting them with pitch perfect recollection, including a vivid gallery of portraits of friends, family, victims, persecutors, and with vital scenes of the kindness and cruelty of strangers, the love and incapacity of family, the support and saving help of friends.

Third miracles:  Dina’s daughter, Tema Merback, absorbed these stories and reproduced them in this authentic, gripping, moving account.  What the mother could not do – put her testimony in a book – the daughter has done and without losing any of the fire, or the suffering, or the heartbreak or the moments of relief and of despair.  In the end this book communicates an irrepressible, overflowing life force and decency and hope in the face of the most inhuman crimes ever.

As authentic, as compelling, as devastating as a survivor’s account written at first hand, this book snatches memory and life from the jaws of oblivion and gives them as a gift to its readers.

This book was a mitzvah to write and a mitzvah to read.”—Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, Founding President, Jewish Life Network; Founding President, CLAL:  The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership; Chairman, United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 2000-2002.

 

Tema Merback, October 16th guest speaker at Santa Monica College for their Literary Lecture Series.    

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In the Face of Evil

Excerpt

Prologue

Seventy years have elapsed since the end of my childhood and the beginning of World War II. The destruction of community and family that followed the German invasion and conquering of Poland precipitated and forced me into an unnatural adulthood. The odd windfall of this calamitous event is a searing imprint of memory. Faces and voices have followed me my entire life offering up their advice and counsel, whether desired or not, shadowing each step as I steered my course through the seas of life. At times they have proven to be more real to me than yesterday’s events. Often, these friendly ghosts have capriciously danced through the corridors of my dreams as real and alive as the last day that I saw them. Like the story of “Brigadoon,” the mythical community of book and song that reappeared every hundred years and for one shiny bright inexplicable moment sparkled through the mists of Scotland, so has the vanished world of Radom, Poland returned to me in dreams and at times in waking just as it was long ago. The joyous community with its various degrees of religiosity, the marketplaces and shops, the places of learning, the observance of holidays, the intellectual liveliness, and of course the devotion and celebration of the Sabbath are all safely locked inside the reels of memory that play like a film in my mind, alive again.

Although I have tried at times to put the war behind me for both mine and my children’s sanity, like the tattoo that I bear, it is burned into me and has colored every moment of my life. With the passage of time there have been endless books with their endless revelations as to why or how such a nightmare could have occurred, but in the end the only lesson learned is that it happened. The Holocaust happened and millions perished through systematic slaughter. A world of people with their joys and sorrows disappeared and with them went a way of life. The apocalypse has long passed and the years have flown by like the clouds in a windblown sky. Soon there will be no survivors left and the keepers of the memory will be just that, a memory. So it has come to me, the bearer of the torch, the last to remember their sweet sojourn among friends and enemies before I, too, leave this world of bitter sweetness. The tale has now been written of those who lived, that they may endure and that you might know them.

Dina Frydman Balbien

Part 1

Radom, Poland Summer of 1939

 

Chapter 1

An Ordinary Family

Click Image to Purchase. . . .

From the window of our apartment, I look down on the bustling streets. The morning sun shines on my street, Koszarowa Ulica, a busy thoroughfare in Radom’s Jewish quarter. Placing my hand on the window, I feel the warmth radiate through the glass. The bright August morning pours into my bedroom, casting away the shadows of a doubt-filled night. The ordinary ebb and flow of life seems to continue in a reassuring cycle of sunrises and sunsets.

Across the street, the shopkeepers are opening their stores. Michal the baker comes out and looks at the sky. A smile spreads across his plump face as he brushes some flour from his prominent nose. Mrs. Rabinowicz greets him, and with a last wistful glance at the sky, he follows her into his bakery. The birds’ songs crescendo in the tall chestnut trees lining the street, adding to the symphony of daily life. People hurry through the busy streets in pursuit of their daily callings. Bicyclists weave among the horse-drawn carriages, or dorozkas1, the principle form of transportation throughout Poland’s cities. Life seemed normal enough on this warm summer day in 1939. I rub my eyes in an effort to dispel the dream that still plagues me, trying to make sense of the visions of the night. It has been two years since my beloved zaida2 passed away. Last night in my sleep, he came to me. Reaching across the barriers that separate the living from the dead, he touched me in an urgent gesture to communicate. Standing at the foot of my bed, silently beckoning me to acknowledge his presence, he hovered; his large immaterial body shimmered before me. His eyes, the color of blue ice, bore into me through the veil of death. He conveyed a warning I could not fathom. The ghostly apparition had disturbed my peaceful slumber and I had brusquely shooed my grandfather away, reminding him that he belonged in the afterworld of the dead.

I awoke with a horrible feeling of guilt and remorse. Why had I not reached out to him full of the love we once felt for one another? I had not asked him why he was there. Instead, in the imaginary landscape of my dream, I had told him to leave and not to return. How could I have sent my beloved grandfather away? I tried to brush the vision from my mind and replace it with the happy memory of my grandfather as he was in life, Jekiel starke, meaning Jekiel the strong in Yiddish. Rhythmically swaying in his rocking chair, he impatiently waited for our cherished daily routine—when I climbed on his lap and kissed him. Together we would rock as he told me stories of his youth, the security of his arms enfolding me, his white beard tickling until I was reduced to giggles. The fond memories of a favorite grandchild encircled me in a blissful cloak of warmth and safety, shielding me from the terrors of the dream.

 

Get your copy at Amazon.com:  http://www.amazon.com/Face-Evil-Based-Frydman-Balbien/dp/1770670815/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1352070206&sr=1-1&keywords=In+the+Face+of+Evil

 

 

Find more about Tema here:

Website:  http://www.inthefaceofevil.net

Blog:  http://www.inthefaceofevil.net/blog

MalibuPatch:  http://malibu.patch.com/search?keywords=tema+merback

Facebook :  http://www.facebook.com/pages/In-the-Face-of-Evil-by-Tema-Merback/194512790585067

Twitter:  @tema1953

Goodreads:  http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4655919.Tema_N_Merback