Anita Tiemeyer has been a writer since elementary school, writing short stories and adding episodes to her favorite TV shows. She began writing her original book, The Guardian’s Son, in 1999, and within eighteen months, she had roughed out a 900-page, single-spaced historical novel spanning seventy years. Dividing the story into a six-book series, the protagonists are Joe Kaufmann, a child Holocaust survivor, and American army doctor, Major Grayson Pierce. The doctor rescues six-year-old Joe from a notorious concentration camp at the end of World War II and becomes his guardian. Book II, Sentence of Death Denied, takes the reader on a journey of bitter anti-Semitism, betrayal, and triumph over death in the Buchenwald concentration camp. A Brother for Sorrows, Book IV, begins in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1962, where Joe Kaufmann is now a doctoral student at Indiana University. This is a powerful courtroom drama where fiercely guarded family secrets go back to the concentration camp—a riveting tale with a surprise ending.
Extensive research has been done for these books. Ms. Tiemeyer has interviewed two World War II veterans who were among the first soldiers to arrive at the Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945. In Washington, D. C., Ms. Tiemeyer interviewed historians at the National Memorial Holocaust Museum. In Ithaca, New York, she interviewed many individuals who had lived during the time of the books’ setting in the late 1940s and 1950s. She has studied numerous books, periodicals, newspapers, documentaries, and videos to capture the historical backdrop of World War II, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust.
Ms. Tiemeyer was born and reared in Columbus, Indiana. She was a music education and history major at Western Illinois University and received her bachelor’s degree in 1980. She served in the United States Air Force from 1983 until 1991 at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Ms. Tiemeyer was awarded her master’s of music degree in 1995 from Butler University in Indianapolis. As a music educator, she has maintained a private woodwinds studio in Central Indiana for thirty-six years. She is a professional writer and guest speaker.
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