How has your family history from wars, World War 2 and Vietnam, and racism affected your life?

My mother was born in East Texas on the one year anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and her father, William August Punessen, enlisted soon afterward. He fought and was wounded in France. He came to the US as a teenager with his family from Rotterdam, South Holland, the Netherlands. His father left Germany after the first World War and met his mother in Holland where they owned nursery and ice cream businesses. They left for Pennsylvania during my grandfather’s teen years after a depression hit the businesses hard.

My father, Major John Mason Frye, Sr., served for 13 years in the US Army before dying while on active duty in 1978. My first introduction to Germany came when my mother, three older brothers, and I would gather in the living room, turn off the lights, and see photos of Germany from slides projected on the living room wall. My father was stationed in Germany for three years from 1965-1968, arriving only 20 years after WWII ended. They lived a year and a half in both Bremerhaven, a port city on the North Sea coast, and Augsburg, one of Germany’s oldest cities in the South. I can still picture the photos of the green countryside and castles in the snow. My brothers, John and Steve, were born a year apart in Germany, and my third brother Eric was born a year later in Mississippi while my father was in the Vietnam War. He came back after a year, and I was born 18 months later in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Both he and my grandfather suffered greatly from the wars and our family has continued to carry the weight of their suffering as well. I hope my book will honor the sacrifice of families, those directly part of the military and those in supporting roles. For Bonhoeffer, he had several close family members serving in the military who were part of the resistance and were executed for trying to stop Hitler. In the book, you can see how his sisters, sisters-in-law, parents, nieces, nephews, and friends all put their lives in danger to help Bonhoeffer, his brother, and brother-in-laws. Many more people in their lives helped, too, which children and adults can learn more about in longer biographies.

My Bonhoeffer children's book shows how Bonhoeffer opposed the racism toward his Jewish friends and family and how that had terrible effects on so many people. My paternal grandfather, Abner “Marshall” Frye also suffered from racism with rippling effects on our family. He worked in his hometown of Hattiesburg, Mississippi where he served as the manager at Hercules Powder, a large business where one of it’s products was extracting pine rosin for explosives. His paternal grandfather came from North Carolina where he had fought in the Civil War before marrying Marshall's grandmother who was Cherokee. Marshall's father met and married Marshall's mother who was from a local Choctaw tribe.

I am thankful for my father’s and both of my grandfathers’ service and sacrifice. Many people around the world continue to experience the suffering that comes from both war and racism.