Across the rural towns spanning the Illinois-Iowa border, sobering tales of Nazi-era Europe come alive thanks to a Christian farmer’s daughter with a passion for history.

She is Deb Bowen, an unlikely champion of Jews with a mission to make the Holocaust real for local children. After first meeting survivors at a 2003 Yom Hashoah event, Bowen founded A Book By Me, an intergenerational storytelling project that pairs middle- and high school-age children with survivors of World War II and the Holocaust and their children.

“I kept thinking the same thought, that I do not want their story to die with them,” recalled Bowen, who lives in Illinois. “There’s just something about a kid and a senior together,” she reflected. Survivors “are going to say more to the kid than they would to me.”

Over the past two decades, those interviews—from live, phone or Zoom meetings—have yielded 140 student-penned and illustrated books, which Bowen has distributed to 50-plus schools in Iowa, Illinois and beyond. Funded by grants and private sponsors, the books are self-published through Bowen’s nonprofit volunteer organization, Understanding Works.

One of those books will soon tell the story of Aida Lipschitz, a Hadassah member. Bowen recruited the retired New Jersey legal assistant after they met on a 2019 Panama cruise. Lipschitz has since shared with student interviewers how she grew up in Uruguay to parents who’d fled Berlin just after Kristallnacht in 1938.

Telling stories like hers, reflected Lipschitz, “enables the younger generation to understand the extent of inhumanity that can occur.”

Bowen’s fascination with Holocaust narratives dates to her own childhood, when she discovered Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl at her small-town library and had to ask her teacher if the incredible tale was real. “I was always drawn to true stories,” Bowen said.

She later worked in library children’s programming and in multicultural outreach initiatives, including with local Muslim students after 9/11. “I brought the world to my hometown, always fighting intolerance,” she said.

After that 2003 Yom Hashoah event, Bowen reached out to a friend at the Jewish Federation of the Quad Cities (which, along with the Holocaust Education Committee of the Quad Cities, is now a sponsor of A Book By Me). Bowen secured a Federation grant for Understanding Works.

“The power of the human story does break down barriers,” she said. “Sometimes it lasts a lifetime, and sometimes it’s temporary. But we have to keep chipping away. We cannot give up.”

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Hilary Danailova writes about travel, culture, politics and lifestyle for numerous publications.