As a non-fiction author, it’s particularly meaningful when you have a chance to connect live with readers who’ve had the experience to “meet” your real life characters. This opportunity recently happened for me when I got an email invitation to attend a long standing book club who’d read Adventurers Against Their Will.  I was in the midst of completing the manuscript for my second book, My Dear Boy, so we scheduled the meeting for two months hence.  That night arrived in March 2016. Here’s the email feedback I received following the evening.  It turns out it was as magical a night for me as it apparently was for them!

Dear Joanie,

…Words can’t even begin to express how special you made our book club gathering.  I know the rest of the ladies were as awed as I was that you brought your Dad’s pants that he was wearing when he escaped.  They bring such a reality to the discussion of your great book.  I get “chills” every time I think of all the “synchronicities” that happened and still happen as you bring “The Adventurers” stories to more and more people.

I have received so many emails from the Book Club ladies and believe me when I say they are still ecstatic about your presentation last evening.  Your genuineness in sharing and all the visuals you presented added an extra layer of understanding to the complexities and realities of “The Adventurers” lives.  The ladies will be talking about this for a long, long time.  As many of them have mentioned, this was the highlight of our 14 years together as a book club.  And, needless to say, we are all looking forward to the release of your next book.

And, I must tell you, I was flooded with many happy memories as I collected and made the recipes for the Czech dishes that I so enjoyed throughout my childhood.  Traditions are what connect us to our heritage.  How blessed we are that we can make this happen.

Thank you again for a very special evening for all of us.

Fondly, Fran

Inspiration for my fateful journey

When you’re an author of nonfiction, reader feedback inspires when you learn you’ve touched a personal chord within someone’s life.   Lately, a couple of heartwarming book reviews of Adventurers Against Their Will, remind me the day-in, day-out grueling research and study is well worth this fateful writing journey.

From Judith Lavitt in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada:

“I was born in Shanghai in 1941 to Jews that had managed to escape the horrors of Europe. My parents were one of the lucky ones in that they were able to leave when they did. They were on the last ship to get out by way of Genoa, Italy on the Conte Verde.  Pavel Kraus, a cousin of Joanie’s she includes in her book, was on this ship along with my parents (Abraham , Adi and Liselotte nee: Stein, Schaffer). Learning this fact alone made me want to continue learning more and more. This book gave me a better understanding of what my parents must have gone through in order to find a haven in Shanghai. As difficult as life was, they were much better off than the people who they left behind.   Shanghai was the only port in the entire word that would accept people without papers. These letters helped me to understand better what went on. After the war my parents as many others wanted the memories to fade so they never spoke about this time in their lives.

My grandparents along with aunts, uncle and cousins all felt that they would be safe staying in Germany. They had lived in Germany for a few hundred years and felt they were Jewish, but German first. They were a well-established family.  Could these horrors be true? Only my parents and one brother survived.

We left Shanghai and arrived in San Francisco on July 22. My brother Bert was born as an American on the 23. At that time no two people in our family had been born in the same country. We left by train for Winnipeg, when Bert was six weeks old.  Life has been good after such a bleak start.

I think this book should be a very important reading for the young. It could happen again.”

From Charles Ota Heller, Annapolis, Maryland, USA: 

“As a Holocaust Survivor–one of Czechoslovakia’s “hidden children” during World War II–I was intrigued when I found out about this book. What I discovered inside the covers of “Adventurers Against Their Will” was a series of remarkable stories. Author Joanie Holzer Schirm discovered an amazing gift left by her father: brightly-painted Chinese boxes which contained a treasure trove of letters. They are letters to and from her father’s friends and family–those who escaped Czechoslovakia from the Nazis and scattered around the world, as well as those who stayed behind and eventually perished at the hands of the Germans. It is one thing to be in possession of such correspondence and to have had the benefit of one’s father’s stories. It is another to write an interesting, coherent, dramatic, exciting story which keeps the reader turning pages.

Ms. Schirm does this beautifully. With so many individual tales, so many characters, and so many places, it would be easy for the reader to become confused. But, she uses skillfully a “Dramatis Personae” at the beginning of each chapter, along with a timeline at the end of the book, both of which allow the reader to remain engaged and informed. I know from personal experience how difficult it is, when writing such a book, to mix personal stories with historical events. The author does this masterfully, writing with emotion and feeling–informing, educating, and creating suspense. “Adventurers Against Their Will” is a must-read. It is for anyone who embraces inspirational stories of people who expect to lead ordinary, happy, lives, but end up having to overcome hardships and calamities thrust upon them by forces of evil.”

The photo is of my father’s 1939 ship ticket from Marseilles to Shanghai – his place of safe refuge until early 1941 when he made his way to America.   The high drama I write about in my books can’t be made up. These two book reviewers also lived early lives filled with life-threatening danger. Luckily, as with these two reviewers, the stories I write about end with rebuilt lives in a civilized society. May we remember civilized societies, as was Germany’s in the early 1930’s, are often fragile.  We must never forget the importance of honoring our differences and championing human rights.   

The idea of a break-up began about seven years ago when I first retired and became a struggling writer.  Until then, as a small business CEO, I was convinced the benefits greatly outweighed what was required to nurture the thirty-three year association. Recently, however, I took a look at the whole situation. As I skimmed over the fine print of life, I saw it was any longer worth it. Clearly, they were receiving more than I.

The worst part was there were others involved. For the least disruption and to keep life nearly as it was before the break-up, those connections had to be introduced to another acquaintance before I could make the separation final.   You may have already guessed this was not your usual friendship.  It always felt kind of plastic.

That’s because I’m talking about a credit card – and not just any credit card – American Express Platinum Credit Card. Like no other card relationship, this one has been with me longer than my husband.  But, unlike my husband, after recent careful analysis of what I used from all the offerings, I realized I just couldn’t take advantage of most of what the card made available.

The Platinum Card relationship folks probably feel the same about me. After all, I’m no Danielle Steel or J. K. Rowling. Maybe someday I will be that stature of author. Perhaps American Express will make that possible by sponsoring my books worldwide.  We’d then travel together again.  But for now, I took a close look at our annual Platinum bill for both wife and husband card holders and it finally made me cry out: Yowza.

Beyond the emotional decision of leaving behind this plastic friend who’d seen me through thick and thin, the most agony was caused by having to redo automatic direct pay accounts on numerous web sites.  Most forms crashed a few times before accepting the change. Two hours after I began visiting countless sites, a painful breakup was over. My replacement friend was in place.

To mourn the loss of my longtime friend and to celebrate my new pal, I went to the mall. Even poor authors need new shoes.

Remembrance + 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 31^st would have little to do with one another. And yet during my father’s life, and now in my own daily writing, they hold a key to a common cause for humanity.

Over the past six years as I’ve uncovered my father Oswald Holzer’s lost past within a treasure trove of his WWII letters, I’ve reconstructed aspects of the daily lives of Czech family and friends as they dealt with an unfolding Holocaust they did not foresee. These magnificent primary sources, written by seventy-eight people, tell of a storied Czech past suddenly engulfed with Nazi hate. They detail Nazi intolerance for those of different ethnic origins, religious or political beliefs, or physical and mental infirmities. The genocide that followed the hate included forty-four of my relatives. Among them were my paternal grandparents, Arnost and Olga Holzer, and great-grandmother Marie (nee Porges) Holzer.

So how does this story relate to Chinese New Year? What most people don’t know is that from 1938 to 1941, Shanghai, China became a haven for some 20,000 threatened European Jews who made their way to Shanghai’s free seaport to escape Nazi-persecution. In Shanghai in1939 when my dad arrived, there was no Chinese government. The Japanese had ousted the Nationalist government in 1937, so there was no authority at the seaport to exercise passport control or immigration. As a result, for a short period, anyone could land without having to show entry papers.

For my young Jewish father in this far away world, he emerged from the darkness of his Nazi-occupied Czech lands into this far east land of light, engaged in its own turmoil of Chinese versus Japanese soldiers fighting for control. When Dad arrived, he had no idea of the destruction that lay ahead back home for family and friends.

Trying to fit in, Dad embraced the Chinese culture, learned the language, and as a physician cared for their sick. In Peking (Beijing) in September 1940, he met and fell instantly in love with my American missionary mother, Ruth Alice Lequear. They quickly married and eventually found permanent refuge in Florida where they lived out their sixty year love affair. In recognition of the hope and inspiration it provides, my parents always celebrated Chinese New Year.

The UN resolution which established International Holocaust Remembrance Day urges every member nation to honor the memory of Holocaust victims. On January 27, I will read aloud the forty-four names of family members who perished. The personal register I will read from I call “Valdik’s List” as my dad typed it in 1993 when the movie Schindler’s List premiered. It was only then that my brother, sister, and I knew the extent of loss in our own family.

And soon after this important day of remembrance, I will turn my attention to how Chinese New Year, known as the spring festival, reminds us to cherish life through its colorful activities and hopes for the advent of spring.

Celebrating life should always be accompanied by remembrance of the people, places, and events that define our past. It is essential if we are to learn lessons from the past. Without this memory and continuity, we will have no sense of purpose to support our common cause for humanity to bring about a better, more peaceful, future for all.

Things 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 of how my parents lived their lives. I figured as a “good person,” happiness would just happen to me.  I didn’t realize that it was possible for happiness to be a choice.

In 1993, I drove from Orlando to visit my parents, Oswald and Ruth Alice Holzer, still residing in my childhood stomping grounds of Indialantic-By-The-Sea. By then I was forty-four and had grown curious about my heritage. The fan fair surrounding Steven Spielberg’s new film, Schindler’s List, made me think I could get my dad to speak more about his Czech parents. I knew his parents and grandmother perished in the Holocaust but had little information beyond that as my dad rarely spoke about them.

In the movie, the real life central character Oskar Schindler was an ethnic German born in what is now the Czech Republic. My father was also born in the Czech land just three years after Schindler. Schindler had worked as a German spy in Czechoslovakia and was arrested in 1938 for espionage. He was released under the terms of the Munich Agreement in 1939. My father served in the Czechoslovak Army at that same time. He was part of the soldier-team assigned to oversee the turnover of the Sudetenland to the Germans, also dictated by the Munich Agreement. The movie’s story followed that tumultuous period of Czech history.

I also knew from the previews that Schindler was a Nazi businessman during WWII who’d ended up saving 1200 of his Jewish workers during the Holocaust. I thought my father would find the movie interesting but realize now my idea to see the movie together was not a well thought-out idea. Had he gone with me, we would have watched onscreen gruesome scenes of concentration camps and vicious Nazis arbitrarily shooting people that looked just like my father’s close relatives.

Mercifully, my father gave me a resounding “no” to my movie invitation. But what happened next became a pivotal moment in my life.  In the quiet of their home overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, that night my father sat down with his old Voss typewriter. With me at his side, Dad typed out a list of the forty-four relatives he knew had perished in the Holocaust.  Never had my brother, sister, or I imagined the extent of our father’s loss.  As the names filled the page, suddenly these people existed for me – my flesh and blood relatives I’d never gotten to meet. When completed, I called his effort “Valdik’s List.”  This was the childhood Czech name that all these relatives had referred to him by.

It was one of the toughest moments of my life as I learned the truth from that period of his life. The memory is forever crystalized in my mind as my father, tears welling in his eyes, silently typed his list. It was also one of the most important moments in my life. I realized that my father made a choice. He chose not to burden his children with his pain until we were ready in life to accept it.  That night I was ready. The curtain rose on my desire to know what happened to all these people and put meaning to their lives.

Today would have been my dad’s 102^nd 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 offering their only son a birthday wish. It was their last. In the spring of 1942, the Nazis transported them to their death, likely at Sobibor.

This letter, originally written in Czech by Arnošt and Olga Holzer, is part of the collection of letters which are at the heart of my series of non-fiction books that not only detail my father’s epic journey seeking safe harbor after the Nazis occupied his homeland but also share stories of his friends and relatives thrust in to the world as refugees or trapped behind by the Nazis.  Forty-four of the 400 letters were written by my grandparents.  I treasure their loving messages, especially this one on a day honoring my father’s life.

Arnost Holzer Praha XII-Slezska 127

To Dr. Osvald Holzer-Long Beach USA

Prague June 20, 1941

2020-1+2A 912/3=483/3 {TN: possibly a number, evaluation, and signature of a censor}

Dear Children,

Wednesday has passed, and the day that brings us mail passed along with it joylessly. We have not received anything. Therefore, we have to look forward to the next Wednesday when we will surely get something from you.

We also wish that this birthday wish reaches you on time, so we want to dedicate this letter to this event only.

Valdi, the next month you will celebrate your thirtieth birthday. This is a milestone in everyone’s life. You will celebrate it away from us, so our thoughts will be with you. Were you with us, we would have tried our best to celebrate this day.  Of course, Ruth will certainly remember the day nicely and will, at least in part, make up to you for what we cannot do for you.

Unfortunately, a bad fate forces us to spend several years of your life without you. You know how we loved being with you and that we now must miss what was the most beautiful thing in our life and, in fact, for so long the purpose of our lives. Only the hope that the day will come when we can hug you again gives us the strength to bear all the hardship that we must. The wish that we always ask Providence for you, you know already.

We want you to be happy always in your family life with Ruth and satisfied in your profession, and we wish you that you reach the goal you set in your profession and that you succeed in every respect. We would certainly like to see you with a birthday present, but as you know, the circumstances are stronger than our best will and prevent us from doing so. However, we will keep all the gifts we bought for you here. We hope that the time comes when you are able to pick them up in person. God help that this is as soon as possible.

I know mom will want to start writing away, so this is it from me.

With warm greetings and a kiss for you and Ruth,

Your loving

Tata  {Dad}

My dear Valdi,

I read what dad wrote, and it was as if he wrote my thoughts from my soul exactly. You know best what you mean to us, and with such a festive day coming, I am always with you in my mind. I join the wish of your father and wish you lots and lots of good luck and all the success in life for your next thirty years.

We heard that about 14 days ago, Dr. Eisner’s parents and Dr. Wiener’s mom had left for the U.S.A.

With kisses for you and your Chic,

Your loving Mom

©2008 From the collection of Joanie Holzer Schirm.  Reproduction only with permission from Joanie Schirm:   jschirm@cfl.rr.com