Go Fund Me Letter, Updated from This Morning
Wednesday, November 7th, 2018My daughter-in-law Maura has helped me tremendously with Go Fund Me. Here is the edited letter I wrote that she”sculpted” succinctly!:
Stories of Holocaust Resilience
This is Cherie Goren’s cover of her now out-of-print book, A Time to Keep, about her life in Lithuania before fleeing the Nazis. (I was able to get a copy of the cover later this morning.)
Here is the link to GO FUND ME: https://www.gofundme.com/stories-of-holocaust-resilience
We are raising $1,000 to cover the costs of self-publishing the incredible stories of two remarkable but unknown women who fled the Holocaust.
Cherie’s father had the foresight and funds to leave Lithuania* right before Hitler took it back, thus saving his family from the ovens.(Cherie is now 92.) One hard copy survives of the memoir Cherie typed 20 years ago.
Sidebar: Cherie’s nephew, Freddie, recently produced a Vimeo about his family that provides background for Cherie’s family’s safety after leaving Memel, Lithuania, as well as information about Memel and WWII that is worth watching. Here is the link: https://vimeo.com/256360106/2c142b998f
My friend Rina spent part of the war in a Russian detention camp with her mother, a midwife. Rina was sent to Israel by Kindertransport and eventually migrated to the United States. She started her story and it deserves to be shared widely.
With my writing colleague, Krista Nelson, who handles book design and photo retouching, I plan to publish these two tales of hope and resilience. The costs of editing, developing, formatting, and self-publishing both titles should run approximately $1,000. This summer I republished **Flight to Freedom: A Tale from Tarpiluvka on Amazon’s author platform and am confident in our ability to bring these stories to readers quickly and professionally.
So, if you think that positive stories, rather than horror stories, about immigrants who came to America to flee the Nazis is a worthwhile project, we welcome any amount you are able to contribute. I am calling this project WordWorks.
In October, my website, www.menupause.info, received 702 unique visitors. If each of you, my readers, contributed a dollar or two, we could get this project off the ground immediately.
Thank you for your ongoing support of my writing. Comments welcome.
ellen sue
Here is the link to GO FUND ME:
https://www.gofundme.com/stories-of-holocaust-resilience
*The November issue of Smithsonian Magazine has devoted almost the entire magazine to the Holocaust and two diaries recently found, one from Lithuania. If you Google the Smithsonian magazine, you will find several links. The cover’s title is “The New Anne Frank,” and the story of the young Lithuanian poet, Matilda Olkin is entitled: “Finding Her Voice.”
I don’t believe in coincidences. This issue of the Smithsonian inspires me to move forward with Cherie’s Holocaust refugee story of Lithuania and Rina’s refugee story from Russia during WWII.
**Note: This is the front cover photo of my family from my book, Flight to Freedom: A Tale from Tarpiluvka, available on Amazon. (Back cover is in the Go Fund Me letter.) It tells, in historical fiction form, about the survival of my mother’s family because my great-great-grandmother sent her two sons from a shtetl in Russia to the village of Tarpiluvka in then Austria-Hungary to save them from conscription in the Russian Army at ages 9 and 12. They were adopted by a Jewish family in which the wife could not have children and thought the boys’ arrival was a miracle. My grandmother is second from right and these are six of her 12 siblings who migrated to America and made a new life here. My goal is to help others with resilience tell their stories.
