Karolina's Twins (44 page)

Authors: Ronald H. Balson

BOOK: Karolina's Twins

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I based my character Lena Scheinman on Fay. In my novel, Lena engages Liam Taggart as her investigator and his wife, Catherine Lockhart, as her attorney to help her fulfill her sacred promise to her best friend, Karolina, to go back to Poland and find Karolina's twin babies lost and abandoned during the Holocaust. The novel traces the lives of Lena and Karolina from their childhood in ChrzanÃ³w, Poland, through the Nazi occupation, the forced labor camps, the concentration camps, and eventually to the escape from the Auschwitz death march.

My fictional account is based on these true events, with Fay's permission. I am grateful to her for seeking me out, sharing her story, and entrusting me to bring it to you.

I did my best to be faithful to the facts, and my research was extensive. I traveled back to ChrzanÃ³w and walked in her footsteps, to her house, to the market square, and to the ChrzanÃ³w ghetto where she lived while she was forced to work sewing German uniforms at the Shop. I located her high school in Krakow. I went to Auschwitz and to the brick barracks, known as Sector B1, where Fay slept in the lower concrete bunk. I studied numerous historical accounts of ChrzanÃ³w and the camps where she was sent. I did additional research through the Holocaust museums in Washington and Skokie, and in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Though it is a novel, a fictional account, it mirrors Fay's life, including the heartwarming story of how she met her husband after her liberation.

I hope Lena's story has touched you as deeply as Fay's touched me that first afternoon.

âRon Balson

ALSO BY
R
ONALD
H. B
ALSON

Saving Sophie

Once We Were Brothers

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

RONALD H. BALSON
is a Chicago trial attorney, an educator, and a writer. Balson was a finalist for the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction in 2014 and a finalist for the Premio Bancarella Italian Literature Award in 2014. He was an honoree at the Chicago Public Library Foundation's Carl Sandburg Literary Award Dinner. He is the author of
Saving Sophie
and the international bestseller
Once We Were Brothers
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