We cannot control the wind, but we can direct the sail.

​One time when we were making pierogi, my mother was telling me about the time a German guard at the ammunitions factory hit her on the left side of her head with the butt of a rifle so hard that she was knocked to the ground. For the life of her she didn't know what precipitated the assault. Maybe she hadn't been working fast enough, maybe this, maybe that. Who knew? The guard didn't have to answer for his actions and she was, after all these years, still puzzling it out, still looking for answers that were essentially, unanswerable.  I wondered what it was that helped her survive those horrible war years in Nazi Germany. She didn't always answer my questions but I asked her anyway. She thought about it for a while.  "I always told myself that everything would be alright," she said, " that I would manage, that my situation would change, that it would get better. I had to think that way and tell myself that. Any other thought was to fall into a pit that you couldn't get yourself out of, to start courting dangerous thoughts of suicide. I saw that, too," she said, but wouldn't elaborate when I pressed her for more information, just a final "always tell yourself that things will work out."
  I've thought a lot about what she said to me that day, how important it is to self talk, to convince yourself in spite of evidence to the contrary that everything would come out all right. I've never had to deal with war or starvation or brutality at the hands of others but I thought a lot about what she said to me that day after I took on the task of trying to write the very book she inspired, Wearing the Letter P: Polish Women as Forced Laborers in Nazi Germany 1939-1945. The more I read and translated, the deeper I researched and read, the more overwhelmed I became about what I had set out to do. It just seemed impossible to pull all the various threads together to make whole cloth, to get the facts straight, to write a unified story that made sense. There were times when I felt my efforts were futile, my goal -impossible. Years went by. And then I remembered another thing she used to do. Before starting a task, even something as simple as beginning a batch of pierogi, she would make the sign of the cross on herself out loud:  In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen. And then say  "W Imie Boże."  In God's name. She was asking for success in what she was doing, asking God's help. Following her lead,  the first words on any translation, on any page of writing, I began with the words "W imie Boże."  
It wasn't just my thoughts about my mother that kept me working on the project. As I read about other Polish women as forced laborers and what they did to manage their intolerable situations, I took on their examples. They couldn't control their situation, only their response to it. Like the women had done so many years ago, carrying photos of their loved ones to sustain them as they left Poland for Nazi Germany,  I surrounded my desk with photos of  my family - the concrete evidence of my mother's self talk, realized.  There were other photos: my aunt in Auschwitz, my mother before deportation to Germany, and oddly enough, a photo of American pioneer women, living on the dusty prairie in sod huts with dirt floors and where running water meant a nearby stream. They were reminders.  That, I said to myself whenever I looked at the photos, that is hardship. Keep working. Keep writing. Everything will turn out alright.