I LOVE BEING A NOVELIST

I had the most unexpected thing happen to me last weekend at Barnes & Noble in Kennewick, Washington, where I was signing copies of my newest novel, WHEN HEROES FLEW: BLACK THURSDAY.

Near the end of my signing, a man whom I didn’t know came up to me with two copies of a book I’d written three years ago, DOWN A DARK ROAD. It’s a novel based on the true story of Jim Thayer, a young army lieutenant from Oregon who, with his platoon, had stumbled into (and liberated) a Nazi death camp in Austria near the end of WWII.

Hundreds of skeletal human beings, many a breath or two from death, had clustered around Jim and his fellow soldiers, clutching at their uniforms. They’d cried out and wept, pleading for food and medical attention.

Jim never forgot that heart-rending scene, and had no desire to ever return to Austria. But in 1992, when the US Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, requested Jim’s presence (Jim was now a retired army reserve colonel and a civilian aid to the Secretary of the Army) at a commemorative ceremony in Austria to pay homage to the millions of Jews who had died in the concentration camps, Jim decided he’d better show up.

He’d just arrived at the Vienna airport when a man Jim didn’t know approached him and introduced himself as Wolf Finkelman. They shook hands. “I want you to know,” Finkleman said in a low, husky voice, “I wouldn’t be standing here today if you hadn’t arrived when you did forty-seven years ago at the prison camp I was in. I was fourteen years old then and I would have been dead within twenty-four hours had it not been for you.” A tear ran down Finkelman’s cheek.

When I wrote DOWN A DARK ROAD, I had not had the privilege of personally knowing either Jim or Wolf. Both had passed away. I did work closely with a couple of Jim’s sons as I wrote the book, but never got to meet anyone who knew Wolf . . . until my book signing last weekend.

That’s when the man with the two copies of DARK ROAD placed them in front of me and asked me to sign them to the Finkelman family. I looked up, stunned. The man said, “I worked with Wolf Finkelman for almost forty years. I’d like to send the copies to the Finkelman family in Houston.”

Wow, how amazing and wonderful, I thought. Here in a small town in the Pacific Northwest I get to meet someone who actually knew Wolf, a survivor of a WWII Austrian death camp. And a real, albeit minor, character in DOWN A DARK ROAD.

I love being a novelist.