In my case, it was really at the suggestion of my wife after I'd written a Business Book - CORONA THE INSIDE STORY OF AMERICA'S #1 IMPORTED BEER. She suggested that I could turn that story - with all its twists and turns - into an interesting novel. I wasn't so sure, but it got me thinking.

A cousin of mine in London had completed a Genealogical research into our family history, which he had published privately under the title - A TARNOW CONNECTION. He had retired and decided he would spend a few months creating a Family Tree. The few months eventually turned into five years, by which time he had traced 1500 members of our family through 42 branches, back to 1760, and had communicated with many of them around the world. His research produced a comprehensive encyclopedia of information about the history of Tarnow, located 45 miles west of Krakow, when it was part of an independent Poland, part of the Austrian Hungarian Empire, and during occupations by the Russians and more recently in the mid-20th Century - the brutal Nazis.

As I read through this award-winning piece of Genealogical research, I started to formulate a story based upon our family experiences, coupled with my knowledge of the Beverage Alcohol Industry and some of the characters that one meets over a busy lifetime.

The result is BEAR ANY BURDEN - A Cold War Espionage Thriller set in Poland in 1983. Sir Alex Campbell, head of an international drinks company is on a business trip to Poland, a country in the midst of political turmoil. A new "Solidarity" movement is rising on the streets, and the Communist government is cracking down mercilessly. Alex Campbell has an additional mission, a "little job" for the British Secret Intelligence Services. He will deliver an airline bag containing money and passports to a British agent who is to help the world-renowned nuclear scientist, Dr. Erik Keller, escape across the Iron Curtain to the West.

Alex meets the beautiful Anna Kaluza, the British agent, whose life, like his and that of Erik Keller, had been impacted forever by their World War II experiences.

Alex agrees to help Anna complete her mission.

Alex Campbell had been a nineteen-year-old Lieutenant in the British Intelligence Corps in April 1945, at the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, with all its visual horrors of dead bodies, walking skeletons, and disease. He had also witnessed the suicide of a fanatical Nazi officer, who had attempted to kill him before taking his own life. These traumatic experiences stayed with him for forty years.

Anna Kaluza, the daughter of an aristocratic land-owning Polish family had been born in a Russian labor camp in 1940. She spent the first five and a half years of her life in that camp, followed by two more years in a refugee camp in Uganda operated by the British before moving to Australia.

Erik Keller was fifteen when the Nazi forces marched into Tarnow in September 1939. Over the next three years, before escaping into the forest, to fight with local partisans, he witnessed the gradual abuse, starvation, and ultimate killing of half of the population.

What begins as one of many routine "little jobs" Alex has done for the SIS, quickly turns into an increasingly dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, involving murder, bribery, and international politics.

I hope I have created an interesting Espionage Thriller, which illustrates the lifetime impact of war-time traumas, and is also a family saga spanning 90 years of European History.