Amazing people are often living in our midst.
I mentioned some time ago that a retired colleague of mine had written a book, soon to be released, about his life. I read it last night. It's not the best book ever written -- it's no Angela's Ashes -- but he sure did go through a lot and reading it was like listening to him tell the stories. The book is here. In brief, he was born in Poland in the 1930s, and was deported, along with his extended Jewish family, to a slave labor camp in Siberia in 1939 or 1940. He was a little boy then. They left Siberia after a year or so, and lived out the World War II years in Turkestan before returning to Poland at war's end, from there to a DP camp in Germany, and finally to the U.S. He was a teacher of U.S. history and Hebrew in my school for many years; he speaks several languages and has a doctorate in history as well. If this sort of story intrigues you, you might want to check it out.
Then I remembered another colleague, one who retired six or seven years ago, whose own childhood was quite a story as well, more horrific, in fact. He was a little boy of 8 or 9, born and raised in the Phillipines; his father was an American oil company executive. When the Phillipines were taken over by the Japanese army (he remembers watching their planes fly overhead on their way to Pearl Harbor), he and his family were taken captive, and spent the remainder of the war in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. This is where he grew up, until the war ended, and he came back to Ohio and went to high school, living a completely ordinary life. He too was a history teacher in my school. While in the camp, his mother kept a secret diary, which was an offense punishable by death, had it been discovered. That too was published several years ago; it's here, although it's now out of print. When the book came out, we had a book signing in my library, and raised money for a scholarship fund, so I met her then. She was a tiny little old lady, and to imagine what she and her family had gone through was next to impossible.
You look around at the ordinary people on either side of you everyday, and you never think -- how could you? -- that this might be someone who endured unspeakable horror, a survivor of history, a voice from the past. And there they are.
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