After a long career in the Chicago area as an internist, I retired and moved to Florida. Decided to take a fiction writing class with Hollis Alpert, an elderly well-known author, editor and movie critic. After perhaps a year of basic fiction writing, including critiquing many novels and short stories and following his guideline of “write—rewrite—get it right,” he gave us a list of five topics for a short story. One was “A Silver Box.” I had long been interested in the Holocaust, since all the men, women and children of my father’s Lithuanian family had been sent to a death camp by the Nazis and exterminated. Hollis later suggested I turn the story into a novel, and Hitler’s Silver Box is the result. Various illnesses  slowed the process down, so a number of years passed before completion.

All my achievements during my medical career. Nothing from writing fiction.