Czech/Prague
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My “homage” to Adventurers Against Their Will soon to be expressed as “pocta”
by Joanie Schirm on March 25, 2014 PermalinkAs I held my pen to sign this Triton publishing agreement, words from my 1992 Walt Disney World Dreamers and Doers Award came to mind: Somehow I can’t believe there are any heights that can’t be scaled by someone who knows the secret of making dreams come true. This special criteria, it seems to me,
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Remembrance + Hope – A Common Cause for Humanity
by Joanie Schirm on January 25, 2014 PermalinkRemembrance + Hope – A Common Cause for Humanity It would seem to most that the United Nations-sanctioned International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 and Chinese New Year this January 31st would have little to do with one another. And yet during my father’s life, and now in my own daily writing,
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Reminder of Threads of Life
by Joanie Schirm on January 16, 2014 PermalinkSo the world continues to show how small it is…and the never ending threads of life from the story of my father’s life continue… Today I got a sweet email from Czech cousin Ondrej “Ondra” Matejka. To those of you who have read Adventurers Against Their Will, Ondra is a great-grandson of my father’s Aunt
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Things that are tough are what you remember.
by Joanie Schirm on January 8, 2014 PermalinkThings that are tough are what you remember. I was brought up on the view that if you wait patiently until the end of the story, the good people will live happily ever after. As a 1960’s child, “Treat others with respect and make the world better wherever you go” paraphrases the example
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A Piece of Great Advice To Start the New Year
by Joanie Schirm on January 2, 2014 PermalinkA Piece of Great Advice to Start the New Year Six years ago when I sold my engineering firm to begin my life as a full-time writer, I got some great advice from my friend Dr. Sandy Shugart. Known in Central Florida for his leadership of extraordinary accomplishments among the nation’s 1200 colleges, as President
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Honoring the Continuing March Toward World Peace
by Joanie Schirm on November 11, 2013 PermalinkNovember 11 – yesterday marked the 95th anniversary of the signing of the armistice ending World War I. You remember the much repeated phrase “The war to end all wars”? It originated from British author and social commentator H.G. Wells’ book titled “The War That Will End War.” Later, the words were used by U.S.
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“The life, my dear friend, is the art of meeting people.”
by Joanie Schirm on October 22, 2013 Permalink“The life, my dear friend, is the art of meeting people.” A wonderful event just occurred. Czech words from seventy years ago were read aloud in my writing room. It happened because I read a fortuitous article in the Orlando Sentinel newspaper reporting that the Rotary Club in our College Park neighborhood was
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Approaching this day in history: August 15, 1944: Allied armies invade Southern France
by Joanie Schirm on August 10, 2013 PermalinkFrom the historic Holzer World War II Letter Collection of 400 letters written to and from my dad by 78 Czech writers from 1939 – 1946: a letter from someone who found refuge in Southern France before war broke out. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005470 Letter from cousin Rudolf “Rudla” Fischer in 1939 after he, his wife Erna, and son