Why Did I Become A Writer – The Story I Needed To Tell

I decided to change careers from my professional background in corporate banking, senior within risk management, to becoming a writer when I was laid off from my position with PNC Bank in late 2021.  The voice inside me had grown too much and couldn’t be silent any longer.  I had to write about the unconscionable injustices that I saw with racial bias in our own government, and after the Hamas attack on October 7th, over the Gaza border into Israel. 

The racial inequality of our perceptions and antisemitism that has been polarizing the world more than I’ve ever remembered, and hasn’t been more prevalent than since the Holocaust.  I felt that what better way to let people see how dangerous segregation is for our lives than to be the themes of a memoir for my mother’s life, who was a “Schindler’s List” survivor who confronted generational trauma manifested in racism.  My brother and I inherited my mother’s trauma of the undeserved lifetime of hatred for my German stepmother and every other German.   

If I could tell a story of my mother’s life being saved by Oskar Schindler – a Nazi German and the irony of how her children grew up, that might change how we look at people differently than ourselves, based on nothing more than our own bias.  The research I conducted in both the Auschwitz and Plaszów concentration camps, where my mother was deported, helped me reach the intellectual capacity I needed to be well-versed in the details of this time period.  I was convinced that I had to write this story, but also continue writing.  My voice needed to be heard, and no one could take that away from me.  How could anyone not feel the priceless wealth of the unforgettable moment when someone tells you, by what you’ve shared, they see the relevance of your experience for their own lives, especially if they feel a part of you living your story.    

After what I saw in the concentration camps in what my mother had to have lived through –dehumanized for what another human can do to another, while there alive and when they were dead, there was an unrelenting conviction to articulate where racial bias can lead and its penetration throughout the world over the Holocaust based on nothing more than conspiracy.  While I could tell the story of Schindler, who was a member of the Nazi party, being the movement for the racist ideology that saw Jews only as parasitic vermin that must be exterminated on an unprecedented scale.  The guilty who bore responsibility for the Holocaust.  But after Schindler finally actually had seen the atrocities that were being inflicted on Jews in the ghettos and the camps, he saved my mother and many other unforgettable Jewish lives, who were not certain of their fate, which inevitably meant death.   If nothing else, writing could let me tell everything I felt inside of how the road for inhumanity reached a penetration not even conscionable that led Schindler to find humanity when there were very few that did in a world that didn’t feel differently.

Writing has also left me the rite of passage – the cathartic outlet that I never needed as much as I felt that I did.  It‘s let me find a release for the trauma my brother and I inherited, being the victims of everything my mother went through in the Holocaust, and when my father left her.  There was no way she could ever see what it had done to her and had inflicted on her children.  The voice that I never was able to share before has let me legitimize the pain.  But more than anything, it is my insatiable ambition to share the weight of the losses from what happened to our family.  Hopefully, it's learning that will stay with others to not let what we couldn’t help happen to them.  

Finally, writing is not only an expression that lets your voice be heard, but it also shows there is unquestionable hope when you feel no one else will listen.  It’s been that hard to understand, and honestly heartbreaking, when that many synagogues and sanctuaries for Holocaust remembrance have not been receptive to a story of a Schindler Jew that confronts generational trauma manifested in racism.  But what you write can let you feel that you can reach everyone with what you have to tell them.  How much do you remember the unforgettable emotion of finding real certainty that many others understand your story and everything it hopefully opens for what it means in their own lives.  

If you'd like to learn more about Robert Don, click here. Or you may pre-order in the midst of darkness. Click here.