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J.N. Stroyar
photo by Jadwiga
J.
N. Stroyar is a theoretical physicist currently living in Germany. She has also resided at various times in Belgium, England
and America, and conducted extended visits to the ex-Soviet Union and other former East Bloc countries. The international
nature of her research has also brought her into contact with exiles and asylum seekers.
The research for her books included
visits to relevant sites, studies of Nazi Germany and other oppressive societies, resistance movement archives, family accounts
of slavery and concentration camps, and personal interviews with torture victims, Holocaust survivors, and former Nazis.
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Q&A
WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO WRITE THE
CHILDREN’S WAR?
I had no choice – it was the only way I could get all the stories I had heard out of my head. As a
physicist with a full-time career, I did not really have the time to indulge in writing, but I couldn’t ignore the urge to
tell the stories of the people I had met and read about. After considering the true stories which had already been published
and the limited audience which they had reached, I decided to write everything in the form of a novel – mostly to come to
terms with the experiences and feelings which the people I had met must have felt, but also with the hope that one day a wider
audience might join me in gaining a glimmer of an insight into some of the brutal realities of our world – and maybe even,
in the rare case, perhaps take some sort of action against these on-going tragedies which we so often ignore or blithely accept
as inevitable.
ALTHOUGH IT MOVES INCREDIBLY QUICKLY, THE BOOK IS QUITE DENSE. HOW WOULD YOU EXPLAIN THE STORY FOR
READERS IN 50 WORDS OR LESS?
Good question! I certainly did not intend for it to be such a long story, but I felt
the need to lay out the culture and politics which would make the characters more understandable, and as the overriding theme
of the story is how very human we all are, whatever our race, gender, government, background…, I also had to expand upon the
themes of the characters’ own lives so that in the heat of the story, it would not be forgotten that they are human. (Too
human, some say.)
The story is about a man flung to the very depths of a society where one’s worth is defined not by
one’s actions, but by membership in a group. He endures torture and slavery and eventually escapes only to discover that
his fight for freedom has only just begun.
DO YOU HAVE ANY IMMEDIATE RELATIVES WHO EXPERIENCED THE HOLOCAUST? DID
THEIR STORIES HAVE AN IMPACT ON YOUR WRITING?
This depends on what you mean by “Holocaust”. In American society, the
term seems to be short-hand for the Jewish experience at the hands of Nazis in Europe in WWII and in that case, I have no
immediate relatives. If however, one remembers that not 6 million, but of the order of 30 million civilians were killed in
Europe during this time, and uses the word “Holocaust” to include all the victims of Nazi terror, then yes. Among my immediate
relatives there are experiences of concentration camps, slavery, death by executions, starvation, and overwork. And yes –
their stories are what started me on this long trek.
SO THIS BOOK IS ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST?
No more so than any
other event in history where people fell victim to being labeled as part of a group. The American South, India’s caste society,
South African apartheid, central African tribalism, the destruction of America’s native population, Colonialism, and the oppressions
of religious and political regimes from South America to Saudi Arabia, from Cambodia to China to the Soviet Union were equally
important in providing the background to this book.
HOW DID YOU COLLECT YOUR RESEARCH FOR THE BOOK?
Initially
it was not deliberate. More than twenty years ago, I went behind the “iron curtain” and there I heard the stories of relatives
and their experiences during WWII. This inspired me to learn a great deal about the history of the region and its people
and to learn more about the Nazi government of occupied lands in WWII. The information I gained was later supplemented by
the tales of colleagues and friends from the Eastern Bloc where I spent some time working and so I expanded my investigations
to include the Soviet Union.
Also, during the course of my work, I met some people with interesting stories – these
were mostly non-Europeans with recent experiences but all the stories were eerily similar to those dating from WWII. Out
of curiosity about my acquaintances, I began researching the long-term effects of torture, oppression, and violence as well
as the structure of totalitarian regimes and the ideas that support them. Though my sources were far-flung and of various
races, nationalities, religions and politics, I decided to pull all these accounts together into one story. Wanting to set
it in a land whose culture and history were familiar to me and most of my readers, I chose the Third Reich. I used published
accounts, personal stories, and my own experiences casually gathered over a period of fifteen years to give the story its
background, technical detail, and flavor. Though at times my investigations resembled my scientific research, I rarely kept
notes – what I learned was internalized and in some manner expressed in the book.
ARE ANY OF THE CHARACTERS IN THE
CHILDREN’S WAR BASED ON PEOPLE YOU KNOW?
Yes and no. The detailed backgrounds of the characters are entirely fictional.
As for their experiences – those are almost entirely true incidents, though rearranged and redistributed for the sake of
the story. The characters' reactions to what happens to them are based upon what I have learned from various sources, including
people I know, but no individual character is entirely based upon any individual person.
WHAT DO YOU HOPE READERS WILL
GAIN FROM READING THE CHILDREN’S WAR?
A sense of how very human we all are. I think as soon as people accept being
identified into groups – whether by those who wish to oppress or those who wish to empower – the effect is the same: we lose
sight of our own individuality, we begin to believe that our group is more important than who we are as individuals. The
Third Reich epitomized such a world, it was the natural outgrowth of the politics of the time which emphasized group-think,
and I would like readers to ask themselves – is this the world we would want for ourselves now?
I would also hope they
gain an appreciation for the people who fought in so many ways to defend freedom and I wanted to honor their often unacknowledged
sacrifices.
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