Sharing Too Much by Richard Paul Evans

Author:Richard Paul Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2024-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

THE HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR

There have been times in my life and career that I have experienced remarkable and unlikely coincidences. Returning to America from a book tour in Poland was one of those times.

I have a loyal following in Poland, and, to my delight, my Polish publisher arranged to have me tour the country. (I had always wanted to eat a real pierogi.) I was kept busy with media and book signings and didn’t have the chance to visit some of the sites I had hoped to see. One of those sites was the Sobibor extermination camp. I had especially wanted to see Sobibor as I had made a character in one of my book series—The Walk—a survivor of the camp.

There weren’t many survivors. Sobibor was created with one despicable purpose—to kill Jewish people as efficiently as possible.

Sobibor was also one of the few camps where the prisoners had attempted an uprising, and some three hundred prisoners escaped, though, in the days following the revolt, most of them were hunted down and executed. Of the nearly 250,000 Jewish people interned at Sobibor, only fifty-eight are believed to have survived.

The character in my book was a Holocaust survivor named Leszek. After much research, I based him on one of those escapees from Sobibor, specifically on one of two brothers who had escaped and been hidden from the Germans by a sympathetic Polish farmer.

As I waited for my flight home in the Warsaw airport, I saw a dozen or so Jewish men and women dressed in Orthodox clothing. I noticed that their activity seemed to revolve around an older man with a thick gray beard. I guessed that the man was perhaps a rabbi or someone else of importance in the Jewish community.

After I boarded the flight, the elderly man was escorted onto the plane and, to my surprise, was seated next to me. The men helping him were speaking a language I didn’t know, so after they left, I smiled at the man, but we never spoke.

The flight from Warsaw to Miami took a little over eleven hours and the elderly man slept for most of the flight. He was sleeping when the pilot announced our approach into Miami International Airport and the flight attendants came down the aisles checking the passengers’ seat belts. When an attendant woke my companion, he seemed a little confused, as if unsure of what the attendant was asking him to do.

“I’ll help him,” I said. I reached over and buckled his seat belt for him. He nodded a thank you, then looked ahead. A moment later he turned back to me and said in perfect English, “Are you Polish?”

I was surprised to hear him speak English. “No. I’m American.”

“So am I. Why were you in Poland?”

“I’m an author,” I said. “I was on a book tour.”

“You’re an author,” he said. “How interesting. What kind of books do you write?”

“Novels,” I replied. “Inspirational novels.”

“You should write my story,” he said.

“Do you have a good story?”

“I don’t know if it’s good, but it would be interesting to read.

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