Gift of Darkness: Growing Up in Occupied Amsterdam - Paperback

by Francis Weller (Foreword by), Craig K. Comstock (Author)

"Gift of Darkness" tells the story of a boy who, like Anne Frank, lived in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Unlike Anne, he was not taken into early hiding, but was able to move around the city, even to help serve its Jewish community, and observe first-hand the ominous things that were happening. Robbert Van Santen lived each day not knowing how or when the war would end, not being sure that he would survive, not imagining that as an elder he would articulate his experiences to an American author. To put one of Mary Oliver's poetic phrases in a new context, his story is "a box full of darkness," but in the telling he offers the author and the reader the gift of stepping into his shoes and thus the satisfaction of coming to understand a teenager's challenging life. What did Robbert do afterward? He sought "to find joy in life despite what happened. Not instead of the memories, but as a response to them."

Author Biography

Craig K. Comstock has worked mainly with private clients as a "book creation coach" and also, for five years, as director of the Ark Foundation, seeking ways to end the Cold War. A graduate of Harvard College, he was the features editor of the Crimson and winner of the Frank Knox fellowship for study abroad. After graduate work at Stanford University on "social imagination," he became co-director of the William James Center for Adult Development at the Wright Institute in Berkeley. Following a childhood in the New York City suburbs and an adulthood largely in the San Francisco Bay Area, he now lives with his wife in southern Oregon. The author or named editor of several books, Craig is now revising a draft about amazing people, some of whom he met in his forties and who illustrate the process of enlarging one's comfort zone.