Black learns that resilience is not an item on a to-do list. It is a part of us, as long as we have the agency to express it.
The children whose diaries are featured in this book found that agency through keeping their diaries. "The journal writers made it clear that writing was the path to maintaining any agency at all, which in this context was life," Black writes. "To do creative work was to be — and feel — alive."
The children who kept these diaries were exposed to unimaginable horrors. Yet they found the will to live through scribbling words on a page. I take great hope from that.