(Just the first draft)

Over the weekend, I finished the sequel to Army of Worn Soles. Looking at the outline a week ago, I realized I had only one chapter left to write to complete the story arc. So that’s what I did: I mapped out and then wrote that last chapter.

What a great feeling. But now a new phase of hard work begins: straightening out a tangled web of prose into a clear story.

To clarify: I have been working of the story of my father-in-law, Maurice Bury, for many years, and in June 2014 I released Army of Worn Soles. That tells the events from March to December 1941, with flashbacks to Poland in the 1930s. The second book will focuses on 1942 and 1943, a tumultuous time in Ukraine, when the Red Army drove out the occupying Germans.

That period, and the book, begin with Ukraine under German occupation. The man sent by Hitler to govern the western part of the country, Erich Koch, described himself as “ruthless dog.” The nazis arrested and/or murdered intellectuals, political and community leaders and hundreds of thousands of Jews. The Germans confiscated food grown on farms, and took thousands, if not millions of young people from Ukraine, Poland and other occupied countries, sending them into slave labour in factories and fields. Young men became workers, women often maids for high-ranking Nazi officers and officials, or whores.

In the second book, I will tell the story of Maurice’s struggle against both Nazi and Communist occupiers in the underground, as an intelligence officer and occasionally an operative.

The challenge now derives from the fact that it has taken me many years to write this book, and I did not write the chapters and events in the order that they happened or that they will appear in the book.

I began over 20 years ago, talking with the subject of the story, Maurice. After he passed away 12 years ago, I had to do a lot of historical research. And over a year ago, I realized it made sense to break the story into three books, based on the three distinct phases of Maurice’s experience: as a drafted officer in 1941, up to his capture and escape; as an underground fighter in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and then the Ukrainian National Revolutionary Army; and finally, in 1944 and 1945, as a reluctant second-time draftee, fighting across Poland and Germany to Berlin.

Now that I have written a complete first draft, I know that I have a lot of work still to do. I realized that I have written about the same events, background and ideas more than once.

So the job now is to re-read and reorganize all that stuff, merge and eliminate the repetition and figure out the best order to tell the story. And that’s what I’m focusing on in my writing now. I intend to finish that process by the end of this month — about three weeks.

In the meantime, I’m still open to suggestions for titles. So far, I’m going with Under the Nazi Heel, but I would appreciate your thoughts about that.

I’ll let you know how it’s going.