Meet-the-Author Recording with Sharon Cameron

The Light in Hidden Places |

Sharon Cameron introduces and shares some of the backstory for creating The Light in Hidden Places.

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Sharon Cameron: Hello. This is Sharon Cameron, and I am the author of The Light in Hidden Places. I turned on my television in the middle of the day, and there was a woman on my screen, and she said five words that completely changed my life. She said, "My name is Stefania Podgorska," and so I sat and listened while she told me about her life, about being a young Catholic girl from rural Poland, sent to work for a Jewish family in the city. How she was sixteen years old during the Nazi occupation of Poland, and how she became alone, destitute, on her own, the sole caretaker of a six-year-old sister, Helena. Then, she described the midnight knock on the door and the young Jewish man on the other side who had just jumped from a moving train taking him to a death camp.

Stefania and Helena decided to hide that Jewish boy and others until there were thirteen Jewish men, women, and children living in a secret space in their
attic until the next knock on the door, this time from the Nazis, announcing that they were moving in. What came next was one of the most incredible stories of bravery and sacrifice, of heroism and humanity that I had ever encountered. Stefania and Helena became my heroes that day, and I never forgot their story. Twenty-three years later, when I'd become a novelist, I decided to find Stefania and Helena, and again, their story changed my life. This time, it took me on a journey.

The first place it took me was to Stefania's son in California, and he took me to a nursing home in Los Angeles where I got to meet and sit at the
feet of Stefania Podgorska. He let me read her unpublished memoir, and then we went across the world together to Poland to rediscover her life. I held the hand of Helena, the little sister, my second hero. I stood in the gas chambers. I put my feet on the floor of the attic, and I listened to the memories of the hidden.

When I came home, I no longer wanted everyone to know the story of my heroes, Stefania and Helena, and the horrors they face during the Holocaust.
I wanted every reader to feel their story with all its triumphs and all of its pain. I wanted every reader to be challenged like I was, to decide what we are going to do today to stand up against hate.

I'm going to read the first chapter of The Light in Hidden Places when Stefania hears the first midnight knock on the door.

Chapter One. Przemyśl, Poland. November 1942.
Someone is out there. In the dark.

I open my eyes. And the dark is the same as always. A blank page. I can smell the cabbage Emilika boiled two floors below us. Feel the sigh beside me that is my sister's sleeping breath. But the dark has also changed. There's an echo inside it. A sound my ears have missed.

Someone is here.

Now I am awake.

I fold back the blanket, quiet, listening, stretching my legs to the floor.
A mattress spring pops like a gunshot. My sister breathes, but she doesn't stir.

if someone is here, they are not in this room.

I tiptoe, barefoot, across the boards, and put a finger to the edge of the rug I've nailed over the window. The streetlights glare, hard bits of snow, glinting like dust as they fall through the light. But the sidewalk below my building is deserted, the windows across the street rows of dead eyes, dark with curtains and dresses and rugs. Like mine are.

In Przemyśl, light is like a candy poster. And it's not smart to hang signs showing where the sweets are.

I let the rug fall back into place and go to the door, pressing an ear to the wood before I turn the lock.
The empty hall outside our room stretches to the other empty rooms of the empty apartment. As it should. Everything is as it should be. And then a noise shoots through the silence. Louder than a gun. A grenade of fear inside my chest. And I know the sound I have missed.

Someone is knocking on my front door.

They know. They know. They know.

The words beat with my blood.

Another mattress spring pops, and I feel Helena coming up behind me. She doesn't speak. She is six years old and doesn't have to be told that this is not the time for questions.

This Meet-the-Author Recording with Sharon Cameron was exclusively created in September 2021 by TeachingBooks with thanks to Scholastic.