My Jewish grandfather was a seventh-generation goldsmith who worked for Fabergé in Odessa, in the Ukraine. After he and his fiancé were caught in crossfire during the murderous pogrom of 1905, they vowed never to raise their children in such peril. He brought his wife, children, and in-laws to America.

My Bavarian grandfather was Czech, and lived near the German-Czech border. He refused to fight for Germany in WWI after Bismarck suppressed his Czech language and his nation’s freedom of self-rule in 1870. He stowed away on a Norwegian sailing ship for two years before he landed in Canada. He walked across the Canadian/New York State border and met his future Lutheran-Hungarian bride in Philadelphia.

Holiday dinner conversations in my youth sparkled in English, Yiddish, and high- and low-German dialects. The old guard’s wild tales of life before America underscored strong beliefs in peace, personal responsibility, and the power of love and dignity. They were a cultural mix religiously, economically, and artistically. They shared exuberant diversity and intense belief in learning, along with ironic, heartwarming (and sometimes, dark) humor. They rooted dialogue, stories, and settings into my heart. Their suffering taught me to give back for blessings received. They championed my love for literature, music, and fine arts. I sought spiritual understanding through the Tao, Judaism, Christianity, and Eckankar.

My father, an eighth-generation jeweler: a platinum smith, was born in the United States. His experience taught me never to forget the Holocaust. A twenty-one-year-old American tourist (a sculptor), he and his older brother (a violinist), were in Salzburg, Austria on the eve of Kristallnacht in November 1938. They heard the glass shatter during the looting of Jewish businesses and smelled the synagogue burning.

The following day, in Munich, he almost picked a fight with an SS standing in front of a Munich art museum. My uncle, born in Russia, grabbed my dad by the scruff of his neck and whispered, “Moishe, what the hell’s the matter with you? You’ll get us arrested! My passport is in my Jewish name, Pincus. They’ll know we’re Jews! We don’t know if we have protection as Americans and we’re not going to find out—right, boychik?”

Apparently, my dad’s oral history would not be my only enlightenment. In 1957, in fourth grade, a boy in my class accosted my neighbor and me on our walk back to school at lunchtime. This classmate called my neighbor a ‘dirty Jew.’ I had a knee-jerk response and slugged that boy hard in his stomach. I was a pert little blonde, pigtailed gamine with pierced ears, who wore baby earrings, a sure advertisement that I was from European immigrant stock. My bully classmate ran home and never returned to our school. Apparently, he mistakenly assumed that because I looked like a carbon copy of my Aryan mother, and played with a girl named Dagmar, that I would side with his insult.

My mother brought me through this profound childhood trauma that first ignited my passion for human rights (not unlike my father’s reaction to being in Nazi Germany). This sudden altercation thrust me, quite rudely, into an adult world. I had upended my social rules of civility. I could not explain to myself, or to my parents, why my knee-jerk response was violent. My mother took me to Quaker meetings of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). She taught me respect for all people, and explained civil rights and Afro-American history to me. In 1959, she sent me to stand in her place in the municipal courtyard of Philadelphia, with a group of adult resisters, in silent, weekly, anti-nuclear war/peace vigils sponsored by the WILPF. I was twelve years old. To this day, I remember how people passed us and stared. I looked back and silently gave them love in a piece of my conscience—hoping my message would resonate in their hearts. Little did I know I was being prepared for a career that would take me abroad to work in other cultures, many struggling against dictatorships, like Nicaragua, where, in May 2018, after thirteen years’ lecturing in Managua, I taught all day and listened to gunshots ring out all night.

My childhood history of fighting injustice haunted me into adulthood. By the time I met my husband, almost thirty years later, I had marched peacefully (in the early sixties) against the war in Viet Nam and later that same day had been tear-gassed in the Pentagon parking lot. I volunteered on Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker soup line on the Lower East Side in the 1970s.

My marriage to the late Reginald Libby, a WWII Marine veteran, inspired me to write the first book of the trilogy, Ingrid's Wars: The Résistance Between Us, beginning in July of 2001. Once he was installed as the main gunner on the USS Arkansas, Reg realized the horror of actually killing someone. Even though he had to do it, this was not the way he preferred to serve. Reg saved the lives of the men and officers on their boat, instead.
As an answer to young Reg’s continued prayers, he was awakened many times while he napped on deck over the next two years. He always felt directed to call the captain on the bridge and tell him to move the ship. One time there were kamikazes in the clouds at 3:00 o’clock. Without questioning Reg’s alert, the Captain moved the battleship. Less than two minutes later, enemy planes appeared out of the clouds, already locked in position to strike. They hit the Pacific. Neither Corporal Libby nor his other gunner had to fire their weapons. His shipmates and the ship were safe, far enough away, just in time, from their previous position.

I married a man older than me who was in the war that could have wiped out my father’s family. Ghastly footage of human suffering I saw on TV, as a ten-year-old became much more real when I actually worked in Poland. It took me seven years of trips there, until 2005, before I had the stomach to visit Auschwitz. By then I was a widow. That dreadful camp was a devastating reminder that if my grandfather, grandmother, and their families had not left the Ukraine when they did, they would likely have died in a pit in 1941 from gunshots to the back of their necks—Genickschusse—in the Odessa Massacre.

Yes, I am passionate about human rights. It is my sincere hope that this trilogy: The Résistance Between Us, Hard of Healing, and Hostage to Life will resonate in your conscience, your heart, and your soul. May we, in peace, heed the lessons of history to rise above wars of death.

“...Riveting first person narrative ... Smooth, in-the-moment prose and realistic dialogue enliven a haunting tale tightly packed with historical facts .... Kirkus Reviews”
– Kirkus Reviews