Eycke Strickland

Award Winner: "Eyes are Watching, Ears are Listening: Growing up in Nazi Germany, 1933-1936" (e-book). elit - Excellence in Digital Publishing, April 17, 2015.

Award winner: "Eyes are Watching, Ears are Listening: Growing up in Nazi Germany, 1933-1946" (e-book) at IPPY: The Largest International Independent Book Publishers Award Ceremony, New York City, May 27, 2015.

The author Eycke (Laabs) Strickland, an educator, ceramic artist and writer, was born in Germany the year Adolf Hitler rose to power and eventually drew the world into the maelstrom of World War II.

Eycke's father, Karl Laabs, an architect, risked his life and the lives of his family by rescuing Jews during the Holocaust. Eycke was witness to extraordinary events while living only 11 miles from Auschwitz, Poland, where her father had been assigned. For his rescue activities, he was posthumously honored as a "Righteous Gentile" by Yad Vashem, the Memorial to the Victims of the Holocaust in Jerusalem.

After 23 years of teaching ceramics in the Studio Art Program at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, Eycke retired in 1997, and, together with her American-born husband, moved to Port Angeles, WA on the northern coast of the Olympic Peninsula. There she began writing her memoir primarily from a child's viewpoint, focusing on the years in Germany leading up to the war, shifting to her family's years in Poland and ending with the family's flight back to Germany and the chaotic years after the war.

The book "Eyes are Watching, Ears are Listening: Growing up in Nazi Germany, 1933-1946" was published in 2008.

During the spring of 2014, Eycke took a multi-media course in "E-book design and publishing." In May, she formatted and self-published the English edition of the book, and in June the German edition entitled "Augen sehen, Ohren hören, Eine Kindheit in Nazi-Deutschland 1933-1946" with Kindle Direct Publishing. The latter has been on the Amazon.de Kindle bestseller list of recent publications in the historical biography and memoir genre.

Eycke also prepared the paperback edition of "Augen sehen, Ohren hören" and self-published it at the beginning of August with CreateSpace. After she catches her breath, she plans to work on a sequel.

"Whoever saves one life, it is as if he saved an entire universe." Talmud.