It’s A WAR BONDS-AVERSARY!

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Feb 14

Soon after publication, I received an email from a man named Leonard who lives in California now but grew up in the turbulence of the wartime Europe. Leonard’s parents were Dutch Jews and had relocated to England years before the war began. He told me he is a real Colin, having been evacuated to the English countryside (in his case, the coast) with his gas mask around his neck. He was seven years old at the time and years later, wrote about it this way in a short piece called “A Child’s War:”

Nearly all children in London were being sent to the countryside, to get us away from the bombs that were expected to fall on the capital city. Our school was being sent to Brighton, on the south coast. I don’t remember being scared. It was only exciting. It didn’t occur to me to miss my parents because, never having been away from them, I didn’t know what it would be like.

Leonard, it seems, responded much the way the children in the first chapter of WAR BONDS do on their train ride out of the city—with excited anticipation because they have no idea of the difficult days to come. Leonard went on to live a remarkable life, eventually moving to the United States and becoming an executive in the film industry. His Dutch relatives were not so fortunate. He recalls a photograph taken before the war, when he and his family traveled back to The Netherlands for his grandmother’s 75th birthday:

A handful of years later, 30 of the 42 people in that iconic photograph— aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws—would be dead, all of them shot or gassed by the Nazi killing machine. That included my grandmother, who took her last breath in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. She was eighty.

On February 15, 2024, WAR BONDS went out into the world. In the year since publication, I have heard so many of your stories about the members of your own families who fought this war, then quietly returned to civilian life without ever calling attention to their own courage, without ever taking credit for the vital role they played in beating back tyranny. Had I learned these stories earlier, WAR BONDS would have been much longer with an even larger cast of characters. Perhaps I need to write a sequel!

Writing a book is one thing: getting it into people’s hands is quite another, especially with a smaller publishing house. Your word-of-mouth recommendations are what account for the accelerating sales of WAR BONDS and the many invitations I continue to receive to speak and attend book clubs. Please know how grateful I am for your invitations— and keep asking! Diving into deep discussions with well-read book clubbers is among my most favorite things to do.

***Pure Barre East Cobb, Marietta, GA***

***Signing books at the launch, February 17,2024***

It’s impossible for me to adequately thank Leonard and others for reaching out and so generously sharing their remembrances, as painful and personal and life-altering as they surely are. But we would all do well to remember the broader history as well as these poignant stories as a bulwark against the tyranny attempting to assert itself once again. I pray that WAR BONDS properly honors the heroes of history, but also, that it reminds us today of the vital importance of pushing back when our rights, and the rights of our fellow human beings, are violated, Millions of soldiers and citizens died on European soil and across the Pacitic fighting for a just and fair world. We pay them honor by our willingness to pick up what tools we have and carry on with the fight today.

Thank you for reading, recommending, reviewing, and loving WAR BONDS. I’m more grateful than you know