Until Our Last Breath: Questions and Answers with Laurel Corona

WHAT WAS IT LIKE WRITING THE BOOK?

I wrote much of the book in a state of shock. When I would start feeling overwhelmed or despondent about the subject, I would tell myself I had a job to do. My job was to try as best I could to describe the Holocaust. My job was to teach about the Jewish underground and partisan movements. I would think about what needed to be written and ask myself how I could convey it. That gave me the intellectual distance not to be overpowered by emotion and unable to write. Writing requires detachment, to be able to say things like, "Is this exactly the right word?" or, "Could this point be made more effectively with a sentence structured this way?" If you're imploding you can't do any of these things.

DID YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF HOW TO WRITE A HOLOCAUST BOOK EVOLVE OVER THE TIME YOU WERE WRITING UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH?

It certainly did, often painfully. When Michael and I first started discussing the project he was still actively uncovering new information about his parents, but it was clear he would never find enough to fill an entire book. We agreed, therefore, that their story had to be a narrative thread woven into a broader history of the Jewish Partisans of Vilna. I could see from the outset that even that was going to be difficult. People had to care enough about Leizer and Zenia to want to follow their story, and since neither of them stood out historically as individuals, just touching on them here and there might be perceived as a distraction by readers.

Since Michael and I both wanted a greater emphasis on his parents' biography than could be accomplished with what we knew at the time, he agreed that I could use them to portray a more general picture of the lives of Jews in the ghetto and partisan camps. Even if they had never spoken of having the exact experiences I was describing, I could place Leizer and Zenia on the scene at actual events. Using witness reports and other documentation, I could write scenes through their eyes. They would be point-of-view characters not only to dramatize historical events, but also to depict the typical, commonplace things that were part of life in the ghetto and forest. If the goal was a riveting book about Jewish resistance, we agreed this was the best way to tell his parents' story.

I gave each chapter to Michael as I finished it. If he was comfortable with the way I had represented his parents and the overall history, it stayed. If he wasn't, I removed or revised it. When he was satisfied with the completed manuscript (approximately 100,000 words), he gave it to our then-agent, Anne Hawkins, so that she could find a publisher. The feedback we received from the editors who reviewed that version, and from others with whom Michael privately shared the text, was quite brutal. People agreed the book was exciting and powerfully written, but parts of it read too much like fiction. Despite how good the imagined scenes were, they undermined readers' trust in the facts presented. This is a serious mistake with a Holocaust book, and the book simply could not be published the way it was. Hard news to take, but I accepted it, and in the end I saw it as a valuable lesson I could share with others. In the wake of problems with books like Herman Rosenblat's Angel at the Fence, I use my experience writing and revising Until Our Last Breath as the foundation for the workshops on ethics in non-fiction that I now teach at writing conferences.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

When I realized the book would require significant revisions, it took me a few weeks to go through what was essentially a grieving process. I had spent eight months working at a grueling pace to finish the manuscript. Now, in the middle of the fall semester at my college, exhausted from having spent the summer writing, I realized I would have to take on the equivalent of a second full-time job to rewrite the book. But I was grieving for more than the loss of a few months of time. Many thousands of words I had crafted into a compelling story of empowerment, loss, and triumph would fall victim to the delete key. I felt as if I had to carry out a sentence of execution on my own work.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross tells us that the final stage of the grieving process is acceptance, and after a few weeks I came to grips with the fact that it fell to me to do a revision of publishable quality. If I didn't, the plain and simple fact was that there would be no marketable book. I rewrote the first couple of chapters and sent them promptly to Michael, to assure him that my revision was actively under way, and to assure myself that I was proceeding in a way he found acceptable. His response to the new chapters was positive, so I told him I would finish the rest and send it to him all at once, which I did in early January 2005.

HOW DID YOU GO ABOUT REVISING THE BOOK?

To other writers this will probably come as no surprise, but the scope of this revision made it harder and more complex at many points than writing the original draft had been. Dramatized scenes with Leizer and Zenia were almost always there for the purpose of conveying factual information, and I had to find ways to work all that material in elsewhere. I then had to write transitional passages to link together sections that had not appeared next to each other in the original, so the fluidity of the narrative could be restored. After roughly four months, however, I finished a new version that flowed as well as the original and contained all the necessary facts.

WHAT WAS THE REACTION TO THE REVISION?

The most dramatic reaction was that it sold! St. Martin's Press published it in May 2008, to excellent reviews. Recently Michael Bart and I received a Christopher Award, which honors books, films, and television productions that "affirm the highest values of the human spirit," and "celebrate the humanity of people in a positive way." It is very gratifying that a group as prestigious as The Christophers felt Until Our Last Breath accomplished these things.

No one can fully convey the experience of Holocaust, not even those who experienced it. It is truly beyond the confines of language. Nevertheless, as the Christopher Awards criteria eloquently and succinctly state, it is the author's task to "craft words and images into a clear, cohesive vision." It was my job to determine what messages and themes could be found in the information I had, and to make those the subtle driving force of Until Our Last Breath. As a reader I know that the books hardest to put down, however painful the topic, are the ones that do not announce the author's point or preach too directly, but instead find a way to let people use their hearts and heads to construct meaning for themselves.

I don't think Until Our Last Breath would have won a Christopher Award without the story of two real people to work with, and I feel honored to have been in Leizer and Zenia Bart's company, if only indirectly, as I wrote. But I also think the book would not have received this attention if I hadn't painted a broader human picture. Leizer and Zenia were a jumping-off point for exploring the confusing, shifting realities of day-to-day life during the Nazi occupation. They were a means to portray the frightening decisions people had to make (often without reliable information) in what was a nearly incessant life-and-death situation. Leizer and Zenia are but two examples of the decency and dignity with which countless Jews fought back, both personally and collectively, actively and privately. Rachel Kostanian-Danzig has called this overarching reaction to oppression and brutality "spiritual resistance," and I think that may be what the Christophers committee saw and decided to honor.

Note: Some readers may be aware of Michael Bart's representation of himself as the author of Until Our Last Breath. He bases this on the claim that he laid a new foundation for the book by his editorial work on the original manuscript. Although most people understand that editing a manuscript does not make one the author of it, Mr. Bart's claims may cause some readers to think this could be an exceptional case. It is not. The facts demonstrate clearly that Mr. Bart's claims are not justified.

Readers who wish to see concrete evidence that the writing in Until Our Last Breath is mine may be interested in viewing a powerpoint that includes side-by-side comparisons of the original draft (which Mr. Bart acknowledges I wrote) and the version sold three years later to St. Martin's Press. These comparisons show that my original draft was not edited, corrected, and rewritten into a new foundational text, as Mr. Bart claims, and that I am now and always have been the writer and author of the book.

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