Caroline E. Heller

As a painfully shy child and young adult, I wrote letters to people (even if they were in the next room!) to convey my ideas and feelings. My father, a concentration camp survivor, inspired my belief in the written word. My father was deeply traumatized by his experiences as a prisoner in Buchenwald and Auschwitz during the years of World War II. As a survivor, he expressed his most essential feelings, which he struggled to convey in person, in letters, many of them to me.

It was many years before my belief in written words transformed into the desire to write books. My first, Until We are Strong Together, explored the writing lives of economically poor and homeless women who shared their written work in weekly gatherings in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco.

Reading Claudius: A Memoir in Two Parts, released August 4, 2015, is my first book with Random House. It explores my parents' and uncle's lives in pre-World War II Prague, highlighting the youthful and vibrant intellecture culture of the years 1933-1939, while "next door" Hitler rose in power. Little by little, Hitler's desire to overtake all of Europe unraveled the young Czech democracy. My uncle and mother emigrated to England and the US. My father was arrested in the first official roundup in Prague and spent six years in Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Utilizing rich source material, Reading Claudius focuses on these years, as well as on the post-war years, when the scope of trauma inflicted by Hitler and those complicit with his goals showed itself even more fully in the lives of those who endured it, as well as in their children and grandchildren.