I wasn’t expecting anything at my box so it’s all really a surprise but inside was this book, Weird Missouri, from the writers. My gift for allowing them to use one of my photos. :)

My photo is a full page bleed on page 73. It’s been some time ago that I was contacted for requesting to use the photo and I ended up giving the guy permission to use anything he wanted or could use. All I wanted was a copy of the book, haha. Well, I completely forgot about it until today and they ended up only using the one photo, but I’m happy. I am a bit disappointed that the Bonne Terre Mine didn’t make it into the book at all (I had some photos from inside it that he also expressed interest in), it would have been nice to have seen a piece on the mines, even if they didn’t use my photos.

So, anyway, the photo?

I told you it was weird!!

By the way, here is the piece that these same guys did on the mines for their History Channel show:

(The mines are extra special to me because three generations of my ancestors worked there, two as miners and the third as a machinist. Also, it’s too bad the video gets cut off slightly early…)

So, anyway, to WeirdUS: thanks! I can’t wait to actually sit down and read the book. :)
Everyone else: buy the book! heehee :)

Well the other night Elijah brought me the book to read to him which is funny in itself because he never does that. So we sat to read it and the first scenario (which you can see pictured if you click the book then click it again at amazon to read inside and click on excerpt) says:

Mommy says, “Do you want peas for breakfast?”

What do you say?

So I read it for him and asked him “what do you say?” He paused for a second, thinking about what to say then finally said, “PLEASE!!”

That’s my kid for you, outside the box!

Of course, I had to shatter his tiny little ego and let him know that not everyone likes peas as much as he does because when you lift the flap, the little girl is clearly disgusted with them and she says, “No thank you!”

:-P

The front of the dust jacket has the photo you will see first on the video slideshow if you watch it and the back has the lyrics to the song which was in the wedding. The inside flaps have parts of the lyrics to the song they used as their recessional then the binding part has their name and date.

Except for a few photos you might recognize as being mine, one by Steve, a few by my in-laws, and a very small amount by some of the bridesmaids… Well I know that sounds like a lot, but really, 95% of the photography was done by Sutterer Bay Photography and I tell you what — Liz and I found each other online and she has been amazing to work with. She did a great job and was very flexible for us, she did exactly what I needed/wanted (yup, photography was assigned to me, believe it or not).

So, without further ado, here’s the video. It is simply all the pages of the book put to music. It’s so much easier to just do that, than to try and post all the images, though I will be posting the bulk of the photos somewhere for family, if our aunts or whoever wants to get some prints. Just not sure on that right now. Also, thanks to Linda for all her advice on the book. :)

What do you think?

By the way, I’m using blurb.com to print. They were the ones that did that 24 Hours of Flickr book and the quality was beyond superb and their prices affordable so it was no question I’d use them. I can’t wait to get it though, hopefully no one will ask me questions about the photos before it comes in because they don’t know they’re getting this. I can trust they won’t see this too, haha, since they are currently computerless. :P But I don’t want to have to tell them before it comes in and I don’t want to give them their photos beforehand either, so hopefully no one will ask!! :) But for now, to go ahead and order a handful of prints…

NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month, 2007!

I was going to try and restart the book I’ve been trying to write for the last four years. I know: LOL. I seriously get started then I scrap it then I start all over. And again, I started it and scrapped it for the fifth time… already. It’s another historical fiction based on some ancestors (sounds boring, I know, but it is a really cool story), much like the short story of 1861. However, I just need more research on the times and such before I really get into that. So when I start to get to the point where I need help, I get frustrated.

So a few months ago, this whole first chapter of a book popped into my head out of the blue and so I’ll go with that one. Total fiction, none of this ancestor stuff. Plus, I seem to have a real problem with what I refer to as “filler.” I have the basics all worked out but I have a hard time getting from Point A to Point B and an extra hard time writing dialouge. So hopefully I can keep this one flowing enough to finish before running out of steam like I typically do. I have so many ideas started, gone in a few hundred words, then dropped, uninspired.

So here’s my excerpt, or rather, first few lines. What you think, bored yet?

It was one of those ponds that was deep, covered in that green algae that spanned the whole of the surface water. Stagnant. Stale. Putrid. When the sun was setting, if you looked at it just right, from the East, it would seem it was just another dry, boring patch of land. You might expect you could actually walk on it.

Heck, that and the 500 words following totally DO NOT even sound like anything I would ever write. I mean, seriously, it’s weird. Really weird…

An absolutely amazing story of survival, Rena’s Promise speaks of Rena Kornreich, a young Polish Jew who is on the first Jewish transport to Auschwitz. Soon thereafter, her sister shows up as well, and Rena keeps the promise to her mother that she will “watch over the baby.”

Throughout the book, Rena holds nothing back. She speaks of all the horrors she saw during those three or so years she spent in camp. This has been the most frank book I’ve read so far describing camp life and their lack of all things we take for granted, and the reality of death every day.

How often do you think about the food you eat? They had next to none. Jewish prisoners were only given 300-something calories to eat a day. If they were lucky and Germany was doing well at war, they might have gotten a single bite of pork to eat.

What about the hair on your head? Every three weeks they were shaved… all over their bodies. The women were humiliated each time as they had to stand naked all day before each other, the SS, and their fellow men, prisoners who were forced to do the shaving. And yet, the lice and bed bugs continued to bite and make life miserable.

There was no getting a good night’s sleep on the wooden planks the camp-builders called beds. Room for two was filled by man, many more people.

What even about the toilet paper? How often do we take this seemingly small thing for granted? In the camps, they had nothing.

There was, oh, so much more, camp life was literally hell on earth.

Death was everywhere. Those who were brought in and selected for the gas chambers, she even speaks of seeing hundreds of children at one time, clutching toys, walking in lines, as they headed to the gas chambers. People who ran for the electric fences, certain they would not survive the selections the next day. Someone who died in the night and was ice cold by morning. Young girls with their skulls crushed into the mud by an SS boot for some minor infraction such as lifting one’s nose to get a precious breath when all faces were told to be in the mud. Stragglers on the Death March who were shot simply because they were a little bit slower than everyone else.

And even when not faced with death directly… she finds and admires a fur coat in “Canada” (where all the items stolen from the victims were sorted, cleaned, etc., and sent back to Germany to be worn by members of the “Aryan race”) only to see the tag and realize she’s holding her aunt’s coat. She lasted at that job a day, she would have rather worked out doing hard manual labor in the fields.

Yes, Rena and her sister Danka both survived. They survived cattle car train rides, Auschwitz, Birkenau (Auschwitz II), the death march, more cattle car rides, Ravensbruck, and another fourth camp. It is only by the grace of God and the help of each other and other people, such as Polish soldiers who only wanted to have a conversation with a Polish woman, that they survived. People who argued over food and tried to hoard everything for themselves did not survive. It was not so much the will for oneself to live, but teamwork and the true care and responsibility for someone else’s life.

There is so much I could say about this book – so many passages I could quote, but it would be too much. Instead, read this book for yourself, you will not be sorry you did. Learn, and tell your children, let’s not let this happen again.

In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer – Irene Gut Opdyke with Jennifer Armstrong

Irene Gut was a good Catholic girl from Western Poland. She didn’t start out with a goal to save people’s lives and end up as a resistance fighter, it just happened that way. Doing one right thing led to another and before you knew it, she was hiding 10 Jewish people in the basement of the Nazi officer’s home… right under his nose.

She was only sixteen when she left home to go to nursing school in 1938 Radom, Poland. The first year went pretty much without incident as she threw herself into her work but not long into her second, the war in Poland errupted and her life was suddenly in shambles. She traveled with a group of nurses and Polish soldiers, caught between Germany in the West and the Russians in the East. A group of Russian soldiers captured her, beat her, raped her, and left her for dead in the cold snow.

It wasn’t long before another group picked her up and took her to a hospital. It was here that she recovered and began her long years of working for the enemy… both of them. She worked hard first in a hospital run by the Russians and when things happened there and she had to get away, she worked with a single doctor in a small village for a year. She soon headed back to try and find her family but instead was yanked out of church on the German side and put to work in a factory. One thing led to another and she ended up working in the kitchen and housekeeping departments for a German officer. With more resources at her disposal, she began leaving food for people in the Ghetto which was right behind the hotel she worked in and from there her resistance activities escalted until the end of the war for Poland. She had saved at least 16 lives directly and many, many more indirectly (by feeding information to the ghetto about aktions and roundups, etc, warning the people to try and escape or to hide, etc. There were many risks and costs involved for her during this time as well, she was even forced to become the officer’s mistress when he found out about the people in the basement towards the end of the war. She also had one of her sisters with her and looked after her, even making the decision to send her back to their aunt when the local labor camp’s commandant (a very evil man) took an interest in her. She did not see her sister again for forty years. The good Catholic girl once “confessed” to a priest. He told her that it was a mortal sin to be this major’s mistress and harbor the Jews and that she should get rid of them instead. Even the priest was evil, not caring about the lives of these ten people.

Even after the Germans began retreating, the Russians began moving farther West, and her Jewish friends were safe, Irene knew she had to continue with resistance work and joined up with some Polish partisans fighting against both the Germans and the Russians. After a few years of this work, a lost love, and many sicknesses, she set out to find her family again. During this time, she was captured by the Russians and interoggated until she escaped and it was in this time that she began to discover just how far her efforts had reached and many people who had been indirectly saved by her in turn now cared for her. Ironically, now needing to get out of Poland (because the Russians were still looking for her), her friends dyed her hair black and gave her false papers identifying her as a Jewish woman and send her into Germany. She worked at a displaced person’s camp for about three years before meeting with a UN respresentative who, at his own suggestion, helped her get to the United States. A chance running into him in New York about 6 years later, they were soon married.

She was inducted into the Righteous Among the Nations and has a tree on the Avenue of the Righteous at Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, Israel. In 1984, she was finally able to be reunited with her four younger sisters. If it is one thing I wish the book had covered more, it would be a bit about what happened to her sisters during the war and afterward. Irene had not been able to receive any letters of them during the war and with Poland being behind the Iron Curtain for so many years, she did not have any news of them during that time.

I enjoyed this book about as much as one can enjoy a book about evil, horror, and sadness.

There is one passage that will remain seared in my brain forever… Irene and her sister traveled with their new friend Helen and her mother to “a nearby village” in the hopes of finding Helen’s husband, a Jewish man, they had heard that the Nazis were bringing many Jews to this village and many, many people came to try and find their loved ones. As the women were chased away by Nazi guns, they hid in an abandoned house.

By this time, the four of us were crying uncontrollably. Helen was on her knees, sobbing in her mother’s arms. Janina turned her face away. But I watched, flattening myself against the window. As I pressed against the glass, I saw an officer make a flinging movement with his arm, and something rose up into the sky like a fat bird. With his other hand he aimed his pistol, and the bird plummeted to the ground beside its screaming mother, and the officer shot the mother, too.
But it was not a bird. It was not a bird. It was not a bird.

What happened to the rest of the people? They were led out of the village, those who were not fast enough were shot on the spot, but outside the village, all were shot. All.

This image also stayed with the author for her entire life and seems to be one of the driving forces of her resistance and she often recalls it… when she’s riding the train home, for example, she sees something out of the corner of her eye, and for a moment, she thinks it is happening again. We now understand, at that point, what she meant in the very beginning of the book, in the introduction:

There was a bird flushed up from the wheat fields, disappearing in a blur of wings against the sun, and then a gunshot and it fell to the earth. But it was not a bird. It was not a bird, and it was not in the wheat field, but you can’t understand what it was yet.
How can I tell you about this war? How can I say these things? If I tell you all at once – first this happened, and then this, and these people died and those people lived and then it was over – you will not believe me. Sometimes I wonder if these things could have happened. Was it me? Was that girl me? Was I really there? Did I see this happening? In the war, everything was unnatural and unreal. We wore masks and spoke lines that were not our own. This happned to me, and yet I still don’t understand how it happened at all.

There’s a lot to learn from this book though – it’s another reminder of the evil that humans are capable of, another reminder of the past so we don’t repeat it. But more important, it’s a reminder that one person can make a difference. Even if you don’t see the results of your actions now, trust that they are there, they do exist. Your life reaches more people than you will ever realize, make it worthwhile. She was only a girl, she says several times. When the war was over, she was younger than I am now. But she made a difference, in at least the lives of those sixteen people she directly saved and the lives of at least two who are mentioned that she indirectly saved… and all their descendants (including and especially one certain baby conceived during the war while in hiding), friends, relatives… She made a difference.

More:

2001 Interview with Irene Gut Opdyke
Nazi Officer’s Mistress Risked Her Life to Save Jews
Teenage Nurse Rescued Jews During the Holocaust