Genealogy
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How can we make peace in our world? One hopeful idea.
by Joanie Schirm on April 28, 2014 PermalinkHow can we make peace in our world? If we look to our past, there is one simple way for our shared humanity. As if foreordained, the Holocaust Remembrance Day of April 28, 2014 mirrors the time in which my paternal Czech grandparents, Arnost and Olga Holzer, began their journey to meet their fate
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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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“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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A Birthday Wish from the Past for Valdik Holzer
by Joanie Schirm on July 23, 2013 PermalinkJuly 23, 2013 A BIRTHDAY WISH FROM THE PAST FOR VALDIK HOLZER Today would have been my dad’s 102nd birthday had he lived beyond January 3, 2000. In honor of his birthday and the historic letter collection he hid away after WWII, I’ve cut and pasted below a translated version of his parents’ 1941 letter
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Honoring UN World Refugee Day – June 20th – 74 years hence, my dad’s journey as a refugee
by Joanie Schirm on June 19, 2013 PermalinkDocks in Hong Kong, June 24, 1939 – L to R: unidentified aide to Frantisek Urbana, Leo Lilling (Valdik’s “distant cousin), and Oswald “Valdik” Holzer, a stateless Czech citizen on his way to China after escaping his Nazi-occupied homeland (then the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia) According to the United Nations, every minute, 8 people
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Adventurers Against Their Will finds my dad’s birthplace for a photo op!
by Joanie Schirm on June 11, 2013 PermalinkThrough the goodness of reader Petr Šraier, my book Adventurers Against Their Will has made it to my dad’s birthplace, Benesov, for a photo op that warms my heart! As the star of the story is my father, Dr. Oswald “Valdik” Holzer, it seems fitting that the book should visit the place of his birth – see