A Labor of Love

Near the Danube Bridge won all four 2024 regional book festivals in the biography category!

The Great Midwest, the Great Southwest, the Great Southeast, and the Great Northwest book festivals each declared us the winner. Our book is getting noticed.

The Balkan area needs to be noticed. Its history begs to be heard. Its troubles aren’t over. Near the Danube Bridge opens the reader’s eyes to its past as well as similar world problems and how history repeats itself.

Back in 2022, when we began our project, we didn’t imagine how far it would go. The concept of writing a Yugoslavian survival story began as an idle request from Kalman, the book’s protagonist, to his daughter who didn’t even know where or how to begin.

Elisabeth approached me as a friend whom she could trust and as a writer she respected. It was just a few days after the first anniversary of her father’s death and not long after Russia had invaded Ukraine.

She handed me four DVDs, recordings of her father speaking to a Seventh-day Adventist congregation in Englewood, Florida, in 1995.

I took them home and watched them. With passion, detail, and believability, Kalman Hartig told his story of torture and incarceration for being a Seventh-day Adventist conscientious objector in what in 1950 had become the communist country of Yugoslavia. I wrote it down. I tried to put things in order – all the labor camp tales that spanned two years. Where exactly had he been? He’d been mining part of the time. Where were those mines?

I asked Elisabeth to do some digging. She delved into memories of her childhood – things her father had told her. She questioned family members in the United States and Europe. Then she discovered boxes of her father’s things she’d never opened or explored. In them she found gold!

Letters – almost all written from Kalman to his mother and siblings from the labor camps. His diaries. Dates. Documents. Pictures. We put all the pieces together like a puzzle. Each family member interviewed offered us treasures of Kalman’s and his wife Minka’s lives.

Their childhoods during WWII, their homes, families, experiences, all came together.

Near the Danube Bridge was a labor of love. It preserves the memory of Kalman Hartig. It opens a door and exposes what the people of Yugoslavia experienced. It is a part of history that deserves to be read about and pondered as history repeats itself around the world.

Winning the four regional book festivals is just the beginning.