By Allen Paul

I’ve been searching most of my life for just the right word or words. When I was ten, I wrote a poem about how my little brother, then a toddler, quickly scooted across the floor in his small rocker. The poem may have been borderline gibberish, but my ever-vigilant Mom, always on the lookout for signs of potential in me, sent verses off to Jack and Jill magazine and somehow they got published.

I was lackadaisical in high school, spending way too much time on sports. But my Mom pushed me to read good books, and, gradually, I came to see that reading could be great fun. That led to my decision in college to major in English. I soon discovered how great writers like Jane Austin, Thomas Wolfe, and Ernest Hemingway came up with the bon mot time after time. Has anyone ever written a more perfect opening line than Austin in Pride and Prejudice? In just one sentence, she managed to summarize her entire book—

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man

in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

After college, I worked the graveyard shift at the Associated Press Bureau in Raleigh, NC. I learned there to write fast and accurately under pressure. Like Pavlov’s dog, we responded to a system of bells signifying the relative importance of stories—one being for mundane, five for catastrophic. In nearly two years at the Bureau, I’d never heard a fifth bell go off. Then, at 1:30 pm on November 23, 1963, I heard a fifth bell on our radio wire. I jumped up and ran to a printer just as these crushing words appeared: “President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas.” I knew then that the world would never be the same.

About a year later, I went to Washington, to write speeches for a senior member of the House of Representatives and the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. I later wrote speeches in a presidential campaign. I soon learned the truth in an old adage: “If it’s a good speech, it’s the senator’s; if it’s a bad one, it’s always yours.”

Back then, a funny story was making the rounds. It seems a burnt-out speechwriter had decided to resign. His boss had become so dependent on what he wrote that he tucked speeches, unread, inside his coat pocket. Once he’d complimented all the mamas and their babies, he’d haul out the speech and launch in. On one fateful night he intoned: “There are a timid few who say we cannot restore peace to the Middle East, clean up our rivers and streams, and bring crime in our largest cities to an end. And tonight I will tell you how to accomplish these worthy goals.” At that point, the senator turned the page, and there in the familiar handwriting of his ghost found the unwelcome words: “Okay you S-O-B, I got you this far, now you’re on your own.”

After a number of frustrating years on K Street, AKA Lobbying Row, I enrolled in a master’s degree program at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. I wanted to gravitate to writing books and thought graduate studies would help me find and research a subject. I finished my degree at Hopkins’ Center for European Studies in Bologna, Italy. While there, I found my subject: the Katyn Forest Massacre, a crime perpetrated by the Soviet secret police in which more than 21,000 Polish officers were murdered. Though little known in the West, the crime remained a major barrier to normalized Russo-Polish relations.

When I came back to the U.S., I learned that the best Katyn sources were in the Library of Congress—a detailed seven volume report by a special committee of Congress that investigated the crime in 1951-52. I soon came across a bibliography with 236 entries that left me wondering, What could I possibly write that hasn’t been covered already by these books?

While wrestling with this question, I came across a section of the congressional report that included cards and letters exchanged by the victims and their families. One in particular caught my attention. It was a missive from eleven-year-old Olenka to her father which read in part: “Hurry home Tata. Weizio (her eight-year-old brother) opens the atlas every night to find where you are. He continues to search because no one here can answer his questions.”

Those words struck me like a thunderbolt. An epiphany occurred on what I could write that had not been written before. One word – a bon mot, if you like –leaped out: “Humanize … humanize by telling the stories of Polish families who suffered so tragically.”

I began, almost immediately interviewing families of the murdered officers and finally chose three whose stories I could weave into a two-stream narrative that, first, explained the tragic impact on those who suffered most, and, second, told of Poland’s heroic but futile struggle to remain free of Soviet domination.

Scribner’s published my first book – Katyn: Stalin’s Massacre and the Triumph of Truth – in 1991 to widespread praise in leading newspapers all across the U.S. A Polish edition sold more than 100,000 copies. The book was translated into four languages and, more than three decades later, has never been out of print in English.

Though it was a painful transition, I have never regretted my decision to shift gears to book writing. I’m working on my fifth book now and recently completed my second novel. It tells of a little known mission of the Polish Underground in 1944-45 to seize and exploit German-held evidence of the Katyn crime to forestall the Soviet takeover of Poland. I collected most of my research on that subject during a year-long Fulbright Fellowship to Poland.

My search for the bon mot continues. At my advanced age, I consider myself very lucky to have interesting work that I find engaging every day. I have never grown tired of the endless search for just the right word or words.