At first I thought he was talking about his work. I heard him say that he wasn’t happy and wanted to move on. I overheard my mom and dad having a serious, rather heated, conversation in the adjacent living room. I was downstairs putting on my makeup in our one tiny bathroom, pleased our family was going to have a nice Christmas together. Sadly, the Christmas I remember most is the Christmas he arrived home from an extended work trip in Michigan with a gift that none of us wanted. Yet no matter how brilliant our ideas might have been as young children, he always challenged us by saying, You can come up with something better than that. My dad taught us early on that material things were only temporary. Another, I remember making a beaded necklace for my mother. One year, I wrote a Christmas play and asked him to perform all the parts. My mother had already made the preparations for our traditional Christmas Eve dinner of ham and cheesecake, the tree was decorated in my mom’s red and white Danish flags, and in our annual tradition, rather than buying a gift for my dad, I had written something for him.įor our holiday gifts, since our youth, Dad always insisted we build, draw, paint, or write something ourselves, rather than giving store-bought presents. No matter how much time passes, it is one of those raw memories that still breaks my heart every time I think about it. On Christmas Eve 1983, Dad told us he was leaving. I felt as if he had abandoned us years before. As we said our prayers and scattered her ashes under a clear blue sky that September 25-her birthday-I couldn’t help but think of my father. In fact, though Mom loved him until the day she died, Dad continued to keep his distance from us during her extended illness, unable to show tears or express any emotions, which not only infuriated me, it hurt me to my core. Nor had he been there for the church service in her hometown. My dad wasn’t with us the day my brother Alan and I scattered our mother’s ashes into the ocean off Connecticut. As Rita drew these stories from her father and uncovered secrets and emotions long kept hidden, father and daughter forged a new and precious bond, deeper than either could have ever imagined. In turn, Rita convinced her father to join her in a dramatic return to his battered homeland for the first time in sixty-five years. but one that he eventually revealed to the journalist. It is the story of a daughter coming to understand a father whose past was too painful to share with those he loved the most, too terrible to share with a child. This is Richard Cosby’s story, but it is also Rita’s. After being nearly fatally wounded, he was taken into captivity and sent to a German POW camp near Dresden, finally escaping in a daring plan and ultimately rescued by American forces. Before the Warsaw Uprising, he lied about his age to join the Resistance and actively fight the enemy to the last bullet. By the time he was fifteen, he was covertly distributing anti-Nazi propaganda a few blocks from the Warsaw Ghetto. and chilled her to the bone.Īt the age of thirteen, barely even adolescent, her father had seen his hometown decimated by bombs. When she finally did persuade him to break his silence, she heard of a harrowing past that filled her with immense pride. Gazing at these profoundly telling relics, the well-known journalist realized that her father’s story was one she could not allow him to keep secret any longer. Now, however, she held in her hand stark mementos from the youth of the man she knew only as Richard Cosby, proud American: a worn Polish Resistance armband rusted tags bearing a prisoner number and the words Stalag IVB and an identity card for an ex-POW bearing the name Ryszard Kossobudzki. He had always refused to answer questions. Rita knew little of her father’s past: just that he had left Poland after World War II, and that his many scars, visible and not, bore mute witness to some past tragedy. Opening a battered tan suitcase, she discovered it belonged to her father-the enigmatic man who had divorced her mother and left when Rita was still a teenager. Years after her mother’s tragic death, Rita finally nerved herself to sort through her mother’s stored belongings, never dreaming what a dramatic story was waiting for her. Now, in a compelling and powerful memoir, she reveals how she uncovered an amazing personal story of heroism and courage, the untold secrets of a man she has known all her life: her father. Įmmy® award–winning journalist, TV host, and New York Times bestselling author Rita Cosby has always asked the tough questions in her interviews with the world’s top newsmakers. When a father reveals his haunting past, a daughter takes an incredible journey of self-discovery.
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