It’s a dream come true to finally have one of my novels translated into Ukrainian and published in Ukraine. The translator is the brilliant Yulia Lyubka and the publisher is Books XXI. Stolen Child (Stolen Girl) holds a special place in my heart because it was written at the urging of my late mother-in-law, Lidia Skrypuch, who was a kid during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine and half of her classmates were victims of the Lebensborn program. That this translation is coming out now is sadly appropriate because the new Nazis, aka Putin’s Z army, are doing Lebensborn all over again: kidnapping Ukrainian kids, brainwashing them and placing them in Russian homes. My mother-in-law used to say that there was little difference between the Nazis and the Moskali: both were genocidal killers and thieves, but the Nazis had better boots.
This is a photo of my mother in law as a baby, before anyone in their family had an inkling of what the future would hold.