Deb Bowen is the first to admit that she didn't have a plan for what has become A Book by Me, a series of short books for children, mostly about Holocaust survivors, written and illustrated primarily by middle- and high-school students.

"I don't really know why I took the initiative to do it [initially], except that I felt their stories were so important," she said last week.

The seed was planted in 2003, when she attended a Yom HaShoah event so her daughter could get extra credit at school. There, she learned that three Holocaust survivors in the Quad Cities were all named Esther. "I'd never been to a synagogue before" that Holocaust remembrance, said Bowen, who's a Christian.

Father Patrick DesboisThe window is closing.

The mass graves aren't going anywhere, and neither is the forensic evidence - cartridges and bullets and bones. The archives are safe. But Father Patrick Desbois has but a few years to talk to people who saw the murders, and only they can identify the exact locations of the bodies and illuminate the problematic accounts in German and Soviet documents.

"We are in the small window I would say, because it's the end of the life of the witnesses, but it's also perhaps the only period in which ... they begin to feel free from the Soviet Union," Desbois said last week in a phone interview. "It's a short-term project. We think six, seven years maximum ... ."

Desbois, a Roman Catholic priest from France, has since 2004 conducted investigations into the "Holocaust by bullets" - the murder of eastern-European Jews by German soldiers during World War II. He will speak at St. Ambrose University on August 27.

Ralph Troll. Photo by Marla Neuerburg, Augustana CollegeRalph Troll spent 40 years teaching biology at Augustana College, and he only told the story there twice.

The first time was in the late 1980s, when he was asked to speak to a German class, because he was from Germany.

"It was just kind of part of the story," he said last week.

And then in the 1990s, the college asked him to give a senior-recognition talk. "I'm a biologist," he said. "They didn't want to hear about anything like that.

"I decided: This is a good day to do this. ... That's really the first time I told the whole story."

In all, Troll - who is now 77 years old and an emeritus professor at Augustana - said that he's told about his family's experiences in Germany during World War II five times, which is five more times than his mother talked to her children about her stay in a concentration camp. He'll lecture twice next week, on Sunday at Davenport's Temple Emanuel and on Monday at Augustana College.