Toni Morrison once said, “If there is a book that you want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Like so much of her writing, this statement speaks to us about more than the writing of books. It is about the living of life, the courage to act, and the call to produce change.

For many years Trudie Strobel could not speak about her personal history as a child prisoner of the Nazis, but when Trudie began to depict those years in thread, she started to heal. Trudie's story - her survival, her perseverance, her crippling depression, and the art that led her out of it- stands as a testament to the strength of the human spirit and the power of expression.

Taken together, Trudie’s body of work is a portrait of an artist who survived the brutal waves of racism and xenophobia that sought to kill her. Importantly, it is a cry for tolerance.

Racism and xenophobia continue to pollute our communities, infect our politics, and infest our way of life. But xenophobia, by definition, is born of fear-- fear of the unknown, the different, the unknowable. If we can make the unknowable knowable, if we can humanize the dehumanized, if the perpetrators of racism can meet a survivor like Trudie, experience her work, and know her story, then maybe little by little, and together, we can begin to write a new book. A book that we would all be proud to read.