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About Lila Perl

I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and had a very ordinary and uneventful (as it seemed to me) childhood. I read voraciously, but it never occurred to me that I would one day become a writer. For one thing, I had never met a "real, live author," as young people do nowadays in their schools and libraries. And, in any case, most of the writers I read in my growing-up years, like Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott, were dead.

I didn't begin to publish juvenile fiction and nonfiction until my own children were in the fourth or fifth grades at school. I was stimulated by their expanding interests and by the realization that I had a great need to explore the long-silent world of my own childhood.

Soon I was writing contemporary novels for middle-graders, among them the Fat Glenda series. I also became intrigued with the reaches and challenges of nonfiction. I ventured into the American culinary past with titles like Slumps, Grunts and Snickerdoodles: What Colonial America Ate and Why (Clarion). And I traveled to distant Egypt to do on-site research for Mummies, Tombs, and Treasure (Clarion).

When I met Marion Blumenthal Lazan and heard her speak about her experiences as a child survivor of the Holocaust, I knew that here was a story that had to be put into book form.

As part of the Blumenthal family's six-and-a-half years under the Nazi yoke, Marion, her parents and her brother spent fourteen months in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in Germany. This was the very camp in which Anne Frank had died and at the same time that Marion and her family were there. Anne Frank left us no writings of her life in the camps. But Marion was able to convey to us the details of daily life, and of death, in that place of most indescribable horror.

When Marion told me about the "four perfect pebbles" that she sought to gather each day on the barren grounds of the camp, I felt that that would be the perfect title for the book. For the lonely and frightened nine-year old, the sets of matching pebbles offered some kind of assurance that Mamma, Papa, her brother Albert, and she would survive Bergen-Belsen, if not the war-long effects of the Holocaust itself.

My background for writing Marion's story included several trips to Germany and Eastern Europe where I visited the former concentration camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald. And, in the course of writing the book, I did extensive bibliographical research and made yet another trip to Germany to visit Trobitz, the town in which Marion's father died and is buried.

It's a source of great pride to me that Four Perfect Pebbles: A Holocaust Story, which Marion agreed to co-author at great emotional expense, is my fiftieth published book.

Other recent nonfiction tittles are The Great Ancestor Hunt and It Happened in America: True Stories from the Fifty States. My most recent books for Benchmark Books/Marshall Cavendish are To the Golden Mountain: The Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, and Behind Barbed Wire: The Story of Japanese Internment During World war II.

My latest book, Open for Debate - Terrorism, was published by Benchmark Books/Marshall Cavendish in December 2003.