Holocaust
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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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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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International Day of Tolerance – Be Remembered for What YOU do Next
by Joanie Schirm on November 16, 2013 PermalinkToday is the International Day of Tolerance. Seventy four years ago at this very moment, my young Czech father was on the wrong side of desperate as he encountered the greatest intolerance the world has ever seen. Hitler and his henchmen were making their hate known toward a wide array of people they deemed “undesirables”:
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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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From the Floor of British Parliament, Echoes from the Past
by Joanie Schirm on August 31, 2013 PermalinkAs the crisis in Syria boils and the clear path is made to the Bashar al-Assad regime being responsible for chemical weapons dispensed on innocent citizens (including some 400 children) I think of days past and wonder what the lessons are we should have learned. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=217296289 How bad does something have to unfold for humanity
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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