March 04, 2012.
Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
… Award-winning Ukrainian Canadian children’s and young adult author discusses her most recent novel, Making Bombs for Hitler.
Listen to the March 4 broadcast interview:
Listen to the full Interview
About the author
Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch has received numerous awards and honours for her picture books and young adult novels, including a nomination for the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year in 2007.
In 2008, Marsha was awarded the Order of Princess Olha by the Ukrainian President, Viktor Yushcehnko, in recognition of Enough, her children’s picture book about the Holodomor, the 1932-33 famine in which millions of Ukrainians were deliberated starved to death by the soviet communist regime.
Surprisingly, up until the fourth grade, Marsha did not know how to read! She says that after she failed a provincial test, she taught herself how to read with Oliver Twist – a large novel that took her a year to complete. Ever since, Marsha read as many books as she could get her hands on, and had a new dream of becoming an author. After completing an English and Library Science degree, backpacking across Europe, and working for an industrial sales company, Marsha eventually focused on writing. After a hundred rejections, her first book was published in 1996.
For more information about Marsha, visit her website/blog and follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
About the book:
Lida and her younger sister are caught by the Nazis and separated. Lida is sent to a slave labour camp, where she works from dawn to dusk on only bread and soup. clad in one thin dress and no shoes. Even if she manages to survive the war, how will she find her sister again?
Marsha’s children’s novel Making Bombs for Hitler is a heartbreaking yet inspirational story of one child’s fierce determination to uncover her past against incredible odds.
Making Bombs for Hitler tells the story of Lida, who is abducted from Reichskommissariat, Ukraine in 1943 and forced to work for the Nazis in Germany as an Eastern Worker, or Ostarbeiter. The Ostarbeiters are subcontracted as slave labourers for both private industry and the military. They receive nominal payment, but heavy deductions are made for the starvation diet they are given and the prison-like accommodations in which they are forced to live.
Based on the true stories of surviving Ukrainian Ostarbeiters, it has only been in the last few decades that Ostarbeiters have felt comfortable enough to share their wartime experiences, as they initially feared extradition to the Soviet Union and imprisonment there after the war.
The book is dedicated to a one such survivor, who provided much of the inspiration for this story.
Order the book!
If you’d like a copy of Making Bombs for Hitler, and its companion book, Stolen Child, they’re available from Amazon and other major retail outlets.
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