HOW THE STORY OF KAROLINA’S TWINS FOUND ME

by Ron Balson

I was inspired to write Karolina’s Twins by a remarkable and courageous woman named Fay.

While on tour supporting Once We Were Brothers in 2012, a woman called me and introduced herself. “I am a survivor,” she said, “and I’ve read many books on the Holocaust. Your book got it just right. I thought I was reading about my family.” I asked her to lunch and we found a nearby cafe where, over a sandwich (for me) and a salad (for her) and many cups of coffee, she told me her story.

When the Nazis occupied Fay’s town, Fay’s father made arrangements for Fay to stay with a farm family and money was sewn into her clothing. She was later arrested by the SS when she left the farm and was forced to sew uniforms at the Shop, sent to Gross-Rosen Concentration Camp when the Shop closed, and was arrested and sent to Auschwitz when she tried to buy a chicken. Fay luckily escaped while on the Auschwitz death march.

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 Chrzanów, 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 Chrzanów and walked in her footsteps, to her house, to the market square, and to the Chrzanów 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 Chrzanów 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.

 

—Ron Balson