Fragments

"I think we both are at the border," she says...

..."And we both have to cross over."

A well-known American war photographer of thirty years struggling with PTSD, and an English forensic archaeologist digging at a Polish concentration camp, haunted by personal ghosts and the ghosts of the Holocaust, seek understanding in loss, and find meaning in one another.

In an 1890s shtetl in the Russian Pale of Settlement a young man dreams that music from his violin might warm the heart of the daughter of a tavern, only to encounter life's tragedy, and life's journey...

In 1942 a patient at the Krakow Babinski Mental Home remembers the boy who loved her and the old man who spoke kindnesses. She alone survives by embracing memory and finding hope. And in 1943 a young man traveling the secret Polish frozen paths with his father and brother is determined to save a young woman who has escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto, determined to hold onto her name. To remember her story...

Tying these disparate generations is a broken violin called Memory-real and imagined fragments of experience that bring hope and salvation in word, in images, in music. What begins in the Russian Pale of Settlement in the 1890s takes the reader on a journey through the frozen fields of Poland in 1942, and leads to the Polish / Ukraine border in March, 2022 as refugees stream over, seeking refuge from a war they neither sought, nor wanted.

Referencing characters and some true events both from the sister novel A Requiem For Hania as well as stories lived today, Fragments continues a journey of meaning, a search for self, a fundamental exploration of human experience through that which is lost, and that which is found. Finally, in this love story of two people finding one another through conflict and trauma, Fragments is a story of hope and redemption.

    What remains is the photograph. The story without words, where words are not needed.

What remains is that point of time, the spot of time past, present, and in many ways future.        

    What remains is memory. Memory of what we are, of our humanity, of our failings, of our weaknesses, of our hopes,

of our dreams, of our frailty, of us.

    We are remembered, us. We are the photograph.