Tag Archive for: World War II

Susan’s Story –by T.K. Thorne

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Writer, humanist,
          dog-mom, horse servant and cat-slave,
       Lover of solitude
          and the company of good friends,
        New places, new ideas
           and old wisdom.

 

 

 

Susan had never told her family about her experiences. In fact, before Louisa Weinrib called her in 1990 for an interview, she she had never talked about what happened to
anyone other than those who had gone through it with her. Hers is a true story of
amazing strength, resourcefulness, and friendship.

 

Susan Eisenberg’s childhood was full of promise. An only
child, she was born in 1924 into a family that proudly traced their Hungarian
lineage back a hundred years. She grew up in the small town of Miskolc, where
her father had a successful business buying and exporting livestock and grains
for a farming cooperative. 

 

Susan was aware of anti-Semitic sentiment, but it didn’t
touch her early life. The Jewish community was well integrated into Hungarian
society, and she had many Christian friends. She spoke Hungarian and German, loved to ice-skate and ski,
and wanted to go to college, but by the time she was of college age, Jews could
not attend.

 

Her loving and close-knit family gathered after synagogue at
her home, where they also celebrated the Seder. On weekends, they offered a
tradition of high tea for family and neighbors. 

 

Trouble began in 1938 with a small Hungarian Nazi party that
grew in strength, paralleling the party’s growth in Germany. After Germany’s
invasion of Poland in 1939, Polish refugees fled into Hungary, bringing what
seemed unbelievable stories of what was happening in Poland. Without a birth
certificate validating birth in Hungary, officials shipped the fleeing
civilians back to Poland. An army friend confided to Susan that, in reality, the
Poles were taken across the border and shot. Even when people began wearing
brown shirts with swastika armbands and spouting slogans, Susan recalled, the
Jewish community just ignored it. 

 

In 1940 Hungary became an Axis power. Hitler, who invaded
the Soviet Union in 1941, demanded that Hungary join that war. Susan’s uncle
died when he was forced to walk with others into a field between the German and
Russian armies to test for the presence of land mines. Her father was taken to
a work camp. Released the following year, he was ill and depressed and died soon
after at 44. After his death, Susan and her mother moved to the city of Budapest
to live with relatives.

 

Although the Jews in Hungary suffered under tightening
restrictions, Hungary’s regent protected them for a time from Hitler’s “final
solution”—extermination—until Hitler discovered the regent was secretly
negotiating an armistice with the US and the UK. On Easter Sunday in March
1944, Susan was having coffee with a friend on a cafe terrace and saw German
panzer tanks rolling over the bridges into Budapest. The Germans occupied and
quickly seized control of the country.

 

The Nazis rounded up her family members who were still
living in the countryside. The relatives sent postcards—which Susan and her
mother later learned the Nazis forced them to write—advising they were well and
going to Thersienstadt (a concentration camp/ghetto in Terezin). All of them
perished in that camp.

 

In Budapest, Allied forces regularly bombed the city.
Everyone carried bags of food at all times, never knowing when they might have
to run into the air-raid shelters. Jews were required to wear a yellow star patch
on their clothing and live in designated housing. Restrictions dictated when
they could leave the house and forbid them to go to public parks or even walk
on the sidewalks. They could work only in manual labor positions. Jewish professionals,
doctors and dentists, could only practice on Jewish patients.

 

Susan was 19, with light blonde hair and blue eyes. She pulled
off the yellow star from her clothes and snuck out into the country to get
food. Once, on her return, Germans soldiers in a vehicle, not realizing she was
a Jew, picked her up. They asked for a date. Heart pounding, she agreed, lying
about where she lived, and promised to meet them later. Safely home, she looked
down at her clothes and realized that a closer inspection would have revealed
the stitch holes from the star she’d removed. 

 

When the Russian army was approaching Budapest, the
Hungarian Nazis ordered Susan to report for labor with her age group and sent them
to dig foxholes. Their Hungarian Nazi guards were 14 or 15-year-olds. When a
young girl working at Susan’s side sat down and cried for her mother, those
guards immediately shot her.

For two days and nights in the cold and rain, with no food, the guards ran them
back to Budapest to work in a brick factory where she met two girls her age,
Ferry (Ferike Csato) and Katherine (Katherine Goldstein Prevost). Susan pretended to be crippled and part of a group of sick and injured destined for
Budapest and death. She escaped and made it to her aunt and uncle’s house, but
the following day Hungarian gendarmes (police) rounded her up with others. The
gendarmes forced even mothers from their babies to join with those in the
streets.

 

Their Hungarian guards told them they were taking them to
Germany to die. “The one who dies on the road is lucky,” they said. Over a
ten-day period in October, they walked in rain, ice, and cold from Budapest to
the German border (125 miles) to Hegyeshalomover. Thousands were shot for
lagging behind or collapsing. A few country people along the way gave them a
piece of bread. Others stripped them of their clothes. Guards kicked them. They
slept in flea-invested hay. 

 

Anyone who had anything of value traded it to the peasants
for food. They fought for a share of rare carrot or bean soup.

 

One night, the guards packed them onto a barge on the Danube
River. Overwhelmed by the press of dying people, Susan escaped by swimming to
the bank in the freezing river. She begged a man she encountered to help her or
just get her something dry to wear. He agreed but instead returned with police
who escorted her back to the prisoners.

 

At the German border, they marched another ten miles to
trains. Jammed into cattle cars, they traveled for days but couldn’t see out
because black slats covered the cars. She was only aware of repetitive stopping
and starting. 

 

Finally, in October 1944, the trains arrived at Dachau
concentration camp in Germany, their destination. The smell of the crematorium
camp would stay in her nostrils for the rest of her life, as would the shock of
her first sight of the skeletal prisoners who mobbed them, begging for bread.
Guards beat the prisoners back.

 

The newly arrived assembled in a large open field, waiting
to go in. But even with bodies being constantly cremated, there was no room for
them in Dachau. Susan and her two friends, Ferry and Katherine, went with other
girls to Camp Two and then Camp Eleven (nearby work camps). They slept in
bunkers below ground on a wooden floor and a pallet of straw. Camp Two, they
quickly learned, was the “sick camp.” The next stop for Camp Two occupants
would be the crematorium in Dachau.

 

At the satellite camps, they were given striped uniforms.
About 500 people lived in each barrack with a block leader in charge. Food came
once a day in a big wooden barrel with hot water and big hunks of sugar beets.
At night they received a piece of bread that “oozed sawdust and a piece of
artificial marmalade.” At first, she couldn’t swallow it. The older inmates
encouraged her to “eat it, no matter what.” 

 

Each day, the prisoners were called out to stand, sometimes
for hours, in the cold for a count and work assignments (Appell). “If you fell
out, you were beaten or shot. If a friend was dying, you made sure that she
stood up, no matter what, and wasn’t left in the barracks.” 

 

In the first Appell, Susan was picked to work in a kitchen where
she peeled beets. Germans brought in prisoners for punishment, hanging them
from rafters and beating them. She and the kitchen workers constantly cleaned
the blood from the floors. She hid beets inside her baggy shirt and shared it
with her camp mates and the Muselmann—the starving, skin-and-bones
prisoners resigned to their impending death.

 

Susan was transferred to different camps for work
assignment. At one, German engineers of the Wehrmacht (Armed Forces), instead
of SS troops, ran the camp. More humane, their military task masters distributed
pieces of food to the workers, food that kept Susan alive. Barehanded and
dressed only in the thin striped uniforms and sockless wooden clogs, Susan and
her fellow prisoners pulled wagons of wood in the Bavarian winter mountains.
Sometimes she was taken from the camp to wash clothes for German housewives.
She also worked in the Sonderkommando (work groups at crematoriums) to
remove teeth from the corpses of the murdered for the gold fillings.

 

Her health was deteriorating. She had lost weight and
suffered from reoccurring high fevers. Typhoid broke out in the camp. There was
no medication. To isolate the prisoners, the guards stopped letting them leave,
throwing beets and bread over the fence. 

 

In early March 1945, after the epidemics, a female guard
beat her for speaking defiantly to a camp commander. People all around her were
giving in to despair, but she refused to do so, vowing she would survive. 

 

At another work camp, Susan joined women prisoners building
an underground airplane hangar. They were forced to carry 100-pound bags of
cement across a catwalk several stories high. The Muselmann went down
instantly under the burden, falling to their deaths. “There was,” Susan said,
“as much blood and flesh in that hanger as cement.”

 

An inmate orchestra played as she and other workers left the
camp and on their return. Guards made the orchestra watch and play during
beatings and hangings and while starved prisoners–who had tried to grab
potatoes from a wagon—were strung up between the electrical barbed wire, potatoes
stuck in their mouths.

 

Once, the Germans spruced up a barracks, putting in
furniture and stocking it with people they found “not in terrible shape” for
the Swiss Red Cross, who had come to inspect the treatment of prisoners. As
soon as they were gone, the Germans took the untouched piles of canned foods,
condensed milk, and chocolate the Red Cross had left for the prisoners.

 

One barrack’s occupants were expectant mothers. They were
allowed to give birth to their babies and tend them. Then one day, without
warning, all the infants were taken away and the women sent to the work
groups. 

 

To use the open trenches to relieve themselves, Susan had to
walk through knee-deep mud at night, sometimes stepping on top of the bodies of
those who had fallen there and died in the mud. Survival, she knew, depended on
not allowing yourself to feel and thinking only of the moment.

 

Her last assignment was in a dynamite factory. By this time,
the air raids were almost continuous. Landsberg, a nearby town, was under siege
by the Americans. In April 1945, guards took her and her friends to the main
camp in Dachau. They spent a night in the showers at Dachau, believing they
would next be taken to the crematoriums, which were still “going strong.” But
the next day, with thousands of young people, they were marched out of the
camp. As they left, they could see the trains that continued to bring prisoners
from other camps [to keep the Allies from discovering them], many already sick
and emaciated. When the doors opened, dead bodies fell out. Inmates stacked
them like mountains in front of the crematoriums to be burned. But the Germans
had run out of time. The American guns were days away. 

 

They marched from Dachau, walking at night and hiding in the
woods during the day. Allowed to dig in the fields they passed for roots and
potatoes, they ate them raw. All understood the guards’ orders were to march
them into the mountains and kill them in the forests where the Allies would not
discover their bodies. Guards shot in the head anyone who lagged or fell. Susan
was sick and feverish. She could not walk on her own, but three friends,
Katherine, Ferry, and another supported her, keeping her from collapsing.

 

As they struggled through the mountains and meadows of
Bavaria, guards began deserting in the cover of night. American planes flew low
enough Susan could read the insignia on the wings. The pilots, who surely saw
the striped uniforms, refrained from dropping bombs.

 

Five days later, what remained of their group arrived at a
work camp for Russian prisoners in the small German town of Wolfratshausen. The
first task of their remaining Nazi guards was to take the Russian prisoners of
war and shoot them. Knowing they were next, Susan lay on the roadside, too sick
and exhausted to react. Then she heard a roar—the first American jeep of the
Third Army coming down the road—liberators.

 

The German guards fled, but the liberators were combat
troops, unable to care medically for the freed prisoners. The Americans moved
on, and the liberated were left to fend for themselves.

 

Typhoid once again thinned their ranks. Her friends held out
tin cans for food the passing American soldiers threw to them. Survivors that
were able, brought supplies from the town and cooked soups. Reports that
Americans fed and clothed German prisoners, playing baseball and basketball
with them in the prison camps, ignited bitterness and anger. Many Jews took
abandoned weapons and hunted the German SS who had tortured them and killed
their friends and families.The sound of gunfire in the surrounding forests
peppered the nights.

 

They spent the summer in the woods, slowly regaining their
strength, then Susan, Katherine and Ferry trekked to a displaced persons camp.
Although her friends wished to immigrate to Israel, Susan wanted to go home to
Hungary. And they chose to go with her. 

 

They walked to Prague, a journey of 145 miles, where a
Russian troop train allowed them to ride. Arriving finally at their destination
of Budapest, they found it devastated. Susan couldn’t find her house in the
rubble . . . or her mother. They tried to find work. Inflation made money
worthless. A friend of her uncle finally gave her a job in the ministry [government]
which paid the workers in potatoes and bread. They lived in a room open to the
elements; bombs had destroyed the windows and doors.

 

Ferry convinced Susan to go with her, Katherine, and two
Sabra (Israeli) agents who were attempting to get fifty Polish Jewish children
to Israel. The children had survived by hiding in Christian homes. Susan and
her friends rode with them by train to the Hungarian border where they had to
walk about 200 miles.

 

The friends, with the two Sabra agents and three other men,
accompanied the children through heavy snow in the fields and woods. Twice,
they paid off Russians who stopped them, but the third time, at the German
border, they had to make a run for it. They abandoned all their belongings in
their dash for freedom. Older children carried the younger ones. Russian
bullets followed them. Once safely across, the children continued through
Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Cyprus and then into Israel. But Susan still did
not want to go to Israel. 

 

Later, Susan said she regretted that decision and felt pride
in what Israel stood for. “You know, even if you have to die, if you die on
your feet fighting, it’s a heck of a lot different than to be shoved into a gas
chamber [to] die like mice or cockroaches, or whatever.”

 

Susan lived in Germany for three years, then married a GI
and came to America in 1948, becoming a U.S. citizen. She had two children,
Diane and Leslie, and lived on Long Island, NY. Struggled with multiple health
issues, she worked in various factories to pay her medical bills before getting
a clerical job on Mitchel Air Force Base, which turned into a civil service
career of 30 years. 

 

She divorced and eventually married another serviceman. With
his transfer to Maxwell Air Force Base, they moved to Montgomery, Alabama.

 

Ferry and Katherine joined relatives in America, and the
three friends kept in touch for the rest of their lives. Finally locating her
mother, who had returned to Budapest, Susan brought her to Montgomery in
1956. 

 

Susan Petrov Eisenberg died in Montgomery, Alabama, in 2008.

 

 

Note: I had the privilege of compiling Susan’s story. She was one of the survivors who made Alabama their home
after WWII. Others’ stories and a wealth of educational material about survivors and the Holocaust is available
at the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center website—bhecinfo.org

 

 

 

T.K. is a retired police captain who writes books, which, like this blog, go wherever her interest and imagination take her.

 

 

 

 

THOUGHTS ON LIFE DURING A PANDEMIC

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by Kay Kendall

Anyone
who knows much about me realizes how much I love learning about history. I used
to study it in school and always enjoyed reading historical novels. I still enjoy
those books but now I write them too–historical mysteries. I’ve occasionally tried to understand why
I enjoy delving into the past so much, particularly because so many others do
not.

Lately I have come up with a new angle in my appreciation of the past. It is SAFE back there. I know how all the various historical plots turn out—which contending princes end up seizing the thrones—which nations vanquish which. I never grow anxious reading a novel set during World War II, worried that the Axis Powers will prevail and conquer the whole world

Sure there’s
plenty of bad activity, monstrous atrocities, folks killed, bad guys putting
down good guys every which way—and so on. But still. I know how everything
turns out. I see how everyday people ENDURED.

Because
of my well-honed perspective on how people lived—back then, once upon a time—I don’t
feel especially hard done by as I shelter in place now during this raging worldwide
pandemic. Five weeks have passed since my husband’s and my routine changed
drastically. That is a long time. I used to think I could make it to the end of
April without getting stir crazy. I now think I can make it until the end of
May. Furthermore, if I have to go even longer, which may well be the case, I
can do that too. Easy-peasy.

Why?
Because I know my life could be so
much harder to endure. I’ve read a lot about living through the two world wars
of the twentieth century. I know what citizens put up with back then. Think of
the blitz that hit England in the early 1940s. If you didn’t march off to war,
you stayed home and “did your bit” for the war effort, caring for your family,
hunkering down, staying home, and at nighttime when the air raid sirens blew,
you ran with your brood to a shelter. You never knew if the bombs would fall on
you and yours and if you would live to see another day.

That
explains why I answer the way I do these days when someone asks—by phone, text,
Zoom or what not—‘How are you doing?”  I
always say, “I am just fine thanks. After all, no bombs are falling.” And I
really mean that with all my heart.

Long
story short, I caution you never to say, “Things can’t get any worse.”
Look–Don’t tempt
fate. Things most assuredly can worsen. And perhaps they will someday. But not
right now. If you and your loved ones are lucky enough not to have cases of
CV19, then just stay home. That’s the least you can do for humanity right now.
And while you’re at it, feel free to ask me to recommend a good historical
novel, now that you have some extra time on your hands.  

~~~~~~~

 

Award-winning author Kay Kendall is
passionate about historical mysteries.  She lives in Texas with her
Canadian husband, three house rabbits, and spaniel Wills. Visit Kay at her website http://www.austinstarr.com/  
or on Facebook  https://www.facebook.com/KayKendallAuthor

New Release from Bethany Maines

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by Bethany Maines
Today is the release date for my new novella – Wild Waters!!  This is my first time doing true romance (sex
scenes – eep!) and I’m very excited for everyone to get a chance to read it!
Purchase Wild Waters at:

Or enter to win a free copy on my website:
WILD WATERS (with Sienna Lance)
His duty. Her secrets. The mission that brings
them together will tear them apart.
In the steamy jungle of 1960’s era Vietnam,
when a team of Navy SEALs are brought together with a pair of reporters, no one
is prepared for the explosive secrets their encounter will reveal. Lt. Ben
Kolley, former WWII frogman, leads one of the first teams of Navy SEALs in 1968
Vietnam. His wild pack of soldiers  have earned their reputations as
“green ghosts” on the Mekong River and none is more elusive than Catch,
the point-man with an uncanny sense of the water. The reporters, a bumbling
drunken writer, and Kahele, a female photographer with a sharp
mind, dark eyes, and an even darker secret are the first allowed to
interview a SEAL team and both are intent on nailing their assignment. But
neither Kahele or Catch are prepared to discover an attraction for each other
that’s like nothing they’ve ever experienced. Soon, Catch is breaking all
the rules to be with her, and Kahele finds herself entangled by a passion
she’s never felt before.  But for Ben, Kahele dredges up horrifying
memories of an old mission – one where not all of his team returned. Can Kahele
be trusted or is she the monster Ben fears? The clock is ticking, and soon all
their lives may depend on Ben’s decisions.  SEALs believe
they can survive anything, but can they survive the truth?

***
Bethany Maines is the author of the Carrie
Mae Mysteries, Tales from the City of
Destiny and An Unseen Current.
 You can also view the Carrie Mae youtube video
or catch up with her on Twitter and Facebook.

Saving Private Ryan—and Everyone Else Too

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By Kay Kendall

Many anniversaries in the
last few weeks remind us of the wretched world wars that ripped apart the
twentieth century. Right off the top of my head, here are three important dates:
* June 6, 2014—70th
anniversary of D-Day.
* June 28, 2014—100th
anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, precipitating incident
of World War I.   

* June 30, 2014—80th
anniversary of “Night of the Long Knives” in Germany, when Hitler ordered murders of his Storm Troop leadership, thus cementing ties between the
Nazi regime and the German Army.

Those first two dates
received lots of publicity, but the third did not. June 30 was an important event that enabled Hitler to become Führer of National Socialist Germany and to claim absolute power.
Sometime in my
twenties I realized that I think about war and its fallout far more than most
females do. War is so common that many take it for granted, I think. But consider
this: Some psychologists estimate that it takes three generations—three!—for the
effect of having a family member serve in combat to work its way through the
offspring.  Now, multiply that times the
millions who served in both World Wars I and II, and then you begin to get a
sense of how enormous and long-lasting is the legacy of twentieth century
battles.

I also study history,
enjoying every detail, trying to understand why events turned out the way they
did…and also what could have been done to change tragic outcomes. There are
others like me, but far more people keep track of the Kardashians’ activities
than they do historical dates.


Because of this, and
because I think it is critical to know something about history and not to
forget lessons learned, I have chosen in my own small way to write about a long
ago era. If you set a fictional story within an accurate backdrop, then readers
can pick up a sense of the time and place almost by osmosis. My chosen era is
the Vietnam War.

Mystery authors who
have inspired me include Alan Furst, Philip Kerr, and Jacqueline Winspear. Each
of these writers has new books out this year. Furst and Kerr set their
thrillers within the lead up to and early years of World War II. Winspear has a
famous series about Maisie Dobbs, a nurse in World War I. Her current book,
however, is a standalone called The Care
and Management of Lies. She is the third generation in her family since her
grandfather was gassed in the trenches of France. Her father fought in World
War II. She thinks and reads about war and its aftermath and writes about it
too. The Care and Management of Lies is
her homage to the Great War, and she describes eloquently why she wrote it, see
http://thecareandmanagementoflies.com/camol-inspiration.php
Many moviegoers were made aware of the
importance of D-Day by director Steven Spielberg and actor Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan. Since then Hanks
has produced and participated in many films and television shows that memorialize
that great conflict, World War II. The enormity of that war seems to get into
your soul and will not let you go.
World War II is often cited as the “good
war,” the one that was necessary to fight. On the other hand, World War I,
originally called “the war to end all wars,” sadly did not live up to its name.
In fact, historians now see the two great wars as parts of the same whole.
Philosopher George Santayana famously
wrote, “Those who cannot remember
the past are condemned to repeat it.”

If we do not
want to produce millions more Private Ryans who must eventually be saved (or
brought home in body bags), we need to ponder how humanity bumbles into wars
so easily, and then decide what we as citizens can do to stop this idiocy.
Waging war is too significant to be left to politicians alone.
*******


Kay Kendall’s debut novel, Desolation Row—An Austin Starr Mystery, takes place in 1968. Mysteries about World Wars I and II inspired her to use the Vietnam
War to illuminate reluctant courage and desperate love when a world teeters on
chaos. 

Kay’s work in progress is Rainy
Day Women, when her amateur sleuth Austin Starr must prove her best friend
didn’t murder women’s liberation activists in Seattle and Vancouver. She is an
award-winning international PR executive living in Texas with husband, three
house rabbits, and spaniel Wills. Terribly allergic to bunnies, she loves them
anyway! Her book titles show she’s a Bob Dylan buff too.
Discover more about  DESOLATION ROW, here at
http://www.KayKendallAuthor.com

Cold War Terrors–Redux!

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By Kay Kendall

The
lure of historic catastrophe hit when I was eight. On the movie screen a small American
town celebrated the return of victorious soldiers from World War I. How exciting it must’ve been to live during real
wartime, I thought.

Even
at that tender age I knew America was engaged in a dangerous cold war with a vicious enemy, the
Soviet Union. This massive Euro-Asian power—encompassing the former Russian empire
plus pieces of the Hapsburg monarchy—threatened my freedom. If the US-USSR stalemate
heated up, there would be drama and chances for glory ahead.
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev said the USSR would “bury” the West. 

What
did I know about war? (In my own way, I must have been as naïve as those
deluded British soldiers in August 1914 who marched off to fight the Hun in
what became World War I, feeling sure they’d be home by Christmas.)   

Flash
forward nine years. The Cuban missile crisis pushed the entire world to the
brink of Armageddon. Only six hours before Khrushchev blinked—promising to
withdraw his missiles from Cuba—I took my SAT exams. What the heck, I thought. If everyone faced nuclear annihilation,
then I had little at stake and wouldn’t take my college entrance exams so seriously.

Now,
decades later, those memories flicker in my head while I watch events in Ukraine
on my television screen. As I write this, Russia has troops in the Crimean
region of Ukraine and even more troops and a thousand tanks ready to cross the
border. Pro-Western riots in Kiev have resulted in deaths and have been
answered by pro-Russian protests, perhaps Kremlin-instigated. Centuries of ethnic
bloodshed in this region lie behind these events.

Russian
President Vladimir Putin says “extraordinary” circumstances allow him to send
troops into Ukraine to protect ethnic Russians there. Meantime Ukrainian Prime
Minister Arseny Yatseniuk says Russia has “invaded” his country and places his
troops on high alert.

Media
pundits debate what the West can do. One points to a meaningful statement that
presages these events, made by Putin a year ago. The Russian leader said the
collapse of the Soviet Union was the worst geopolitical event of the entire
twentieth century. Yes, really! The foreign affairs analyst confidently
predicts a resurgent Russia under the crafty hands of Putin, whose first name is
the same as Lenin’s, who built the communist menace in the first place. Oh, the
portents are bad indeed.

This
new threat to the world’s balance of power is a long way from playing out. Who
knows where events will lead next? What will China do? North Korea? This may be
high drama, but it is not entertainment. This is not fun. All these nations
have nuclear weaponry. Are we in fact entering a new version of the old Cold
War, or will things suddenly turn hot? Red
hot?

Many people clamor for fiction that features massive
annihilation as a backdrop.

How do we explain being drawn to spy stories, horror
movies, serial killers’ tales and the like? As a writer who kills fictive
people for a living, I ponder this quite a lot.

I believe fiction like this works because it shows how people
can act valiantly in ruinous times, overcome their fears, and emerge on
top. When we read novels set during past wars,
we can get scared but we’ll know how things turn out. The Nazis always lose, even if
a few survive to plot another day.

As indicated, I grew up when the Cold War was in
fact pretty hot. An intercontinental ballistic missile was placed a few miles
from my hometown in Kansas when I was in grade school. That excited me, rather
than terrifying me. Serious tomes were written about “thinking the
unthinkable.” Yet, to me, the unthinkable was preposterous. I assumed that mutually
assured nuclear destruction would work as a deterrent. Surely rationality would
prevail. Anything else would be unreal. In a word, fiction.

I moved rapidly from a severe case of Nancy Drew-itis
to being mesmerized by John le Carré’s twisted spy stories. Smiley, his British
master spy, was always at pains not to let the ends justify any means. His adversary
on the other side of the Iron Curtain, Soviet master spy Karla, seemed to lack
all scruples and toyed with him, playing a vicious cat-and-mouse game. Smiley’s
bed-hopping wife Anne even got ensnared.  

When I finally felt compelled to devise my own
mysteries, it was natural to turn to my favorites as models. For two years I
drowned myself in mysteries set during World Wars One and Two and the Cold War.
There were so many excellent ones—too many, actually. Of all the major wars of
last century, only the wars in Korea and Vietnam weren’t “taken,” weren’t
overrun with thrillers. Vietnam offered a dangerous yet fairly empty gap that
needed filling…and I concluded I’d do the filling.

What I studied in college and graduate school was
Russian history. Obviously the Cold War fascinated me. These days, in our
a-historic times, it’s important to recall why the United States got mired down
in fighting a land war in Asia in the first place. The domino theory supplied
the reason. If South Vietnam fell to the communists pushing down from North Vietnam,
then that domino would fall and knock down another Asian country and another
until they all fell into communist hands.

My penchant for historical wars helps explain why
my debut mystery is set among the draft resister community in Toronto, Canada,
ca. 1968. I enjoy writing about historical turmoil that lends itself to personal
drama, intrigue, and murder; I can control the world that I build on the page.
That is comforting.

But now I must return to my television screen, to
wait for the newscasters to tell me that the crisis in Ukraine is escalating,
waning, or mutating in some as yet unforeseen fashion. I watch, mesmerized, waiting
for comfort to come, even if it is only temporary. Only until the next geopolitical
horror fills my screen, or screeches from the headlines of the New York Times. Sadder and wiser than in
my youth, I no longer trust the nuclear deterrent to work.
*******

Kay Kendall is an international award-winning public
relations executive who lives in Texas

Kay & house bunny Dusty

with her husband, five house rabbits,
and spaniel Wills. A fan of historical mysteries, she wants to do for the 1960s
what novelist Alan Furst does for Europe in the 1930s during Hitler’s rise to
power–write atmospheric mysteries that capture the spirit of the age.



Discover more about DESOLATION ROW, here at
http://www.KayKendallAuthor.com

This is My Birthday Month

/in /by

This is going to be a really big birthday for me–I’ll be 80! I can’t believe it, I sure don’t feel 80. (Well, maybe physically. I don’t really look forward to flying anymore–and I can’t pick up some of my heavier greatgrands.) However, in my mind I still feel young.

Being honest though, how on earth could I have all these memories without living 80 years on this earth?

My childhood holds memories of World War II, scary stuff we saw on the newsreels at the movies, air raids where we kept blackout curtains over the windows and hid in an inner room with no windows and played board games by the light of a lantern, playing hide ‘n go seek with friends while our parents were at a block warden meeting, making poison with a girlfriend to poison the enemy when they came to shore and we would be child spies, telling everyone my sister was a princess from Europe we were keeping safe (poor kid thought she was adopted for awhile), not being able to get bubble gum.

Radio was the big nightly entertainment for a long time–and the best radio shows were on: Let’s Pretend on Saturdays (and I can still sing the commercial for Cream of Wheat), One Man’s Family on Sunday’s (and a friend of mine grew up playing a part on that show), and of course many great mysteries and scary shows: Inner Sanctum, The Shadow Knows, and much, more. I did my homework while listening to them. 

We were the first in our neighborhood to get a television because my dad made one from a Heath kit. My sister and I helped all night as he asked us to bring him this wire and that. We also helped hold guide wires when he installed a huge antenna on the roof–as did almost every kid in the neighborhood. We watched whatever was on the one channel–Beannie and Cecil (hand puppets), wrestling (my favorite wrestler was Argentine Rocca), roller derby–and frankly, that’s what I remember best from that time period. Of course the whole neighborhood came and watched with us. 

In sixth grade, I came down with rheumatic fever. In those days, you had to stay in bed for 6 weeks, so no school for me. My teacher brought me work to do. I graduated with my class and got all A’s on my report card.

We went to the movies almost every Friday night and it didn’t matter what was playing. Always two features, one a first class movie, the second a B movie, a newsreel, a cartoon, and of course a game played at intermission time where some lucky person won dishes. The B movies I remember were about gangsters and I had lots of nightmares about them.

I had my own little Philco radio and for some reason it picked up police calls. I wasn’t supposed to listen to them, but I often did long after I was supposed to be asleep. I heard the police calls when the Black Dahlia’s body was found–and what was said by the officers was graphic and detailed. In the night, I reached down and found what I though was a leg and screamed. My mom came in, turned on the light, and the leg belonged to my sister who had been frightened by what I’d been listening to and climbed onto the bottom of my bed.

And that’s only a small part of what I can remember–so I guess I have lived for nearly 80 years.

Marilyn aka F. M. Meredith

A Bit of History

/in /by

By way of introduction, I am the granny of the group. I’ve been on this planet for a long, long time. I remember listening to President Roosevelt on the radio announcing that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. (Maybe my memory has been enhanced a bit by hearing that announcement so many times afterwards.)

Despite the fact I grew up during World War II, I had an absolutely wonderful childhood. In fact my imagination was enhanced by the war. Because they were sending English children to various places to be safe, I told everyone my little sister was a princess and we were caring for her until the war was over. No one really believed me except my sister, who for years thought she was adopted.

Blackouts (when the whole city of Los Angeles went dark) were great fun. You have no idea how exciting it was to ride in a car with no headlights, no lights on the street or traffic lights. (I’m sure my parents were not as thrilled as I was.) We had an inner room inside our house where we could wait until the air raid was over and a place we could have a small light. We played board games and ate snacks my mom had stashed away in the cupboards.

My secret ambition was to be a spy if and when the enemy took over our city. Who would suspect a kid? My friends and I dug secret tunnels in the empty lots and concocted poisons to take care of the enemy. None of our parents had any idea what we were up to because back in those times, as long as you were home for dinner no one worried.

On a regular basis the air raid warden held meetings at his home and everyone in the neighborhood was expected to attend. The adults learned how to grow victory gardens and do first aid, we kids had a great time playing hide’n go seek and various other games. The refreshments were always great despite the fact sugar was rationed.

I organized 4th of July parades with the kids in the neighborhood, everyone decorating their bikes and wagons.

And to bring it around to writing related matters, I wrote plays for my friends to perform, in middle school (called junior high back then) and I put out my own magazine and authored all the stories and articles.

Now, I’m the author of the Deputy Tempe Crabtree series (Judgment Fire) as well as other books. I’d never thought of my series as being cozy, though since my characters don’t swear, not much blood is spilled on stage, there’s a laugh or two, and yes, the bad guy always gets it in the in, I guess the term cozy fits.

Years ago I wore high heels, now I stick to whatever is comfortable. Despite all this, I’m extremely pleased I was asked to join these talented young women.

Marilyn
http://fictionforyou.com/