THE COLORS I CARRIED Kindle Edition

He left home at seventeen with a tin box of money, a bag of paints, and six languages in his head. He did not know that the world he was walking into was already preparing to destroy everything he loved.Erno J. Pal was born the tenth child of a Jewish family in Beregszász, Hungary, in 1912, the youngest in a house full of voices, the quietest watcher in a family of remarkable people. By fifteen, he was painting murals on strangers' walls. By seventeen, he was gone, moving through Hungary, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, trading beauty and language for the freedom to keep moving.In 1937, in a small town called Csenger, he saw a seventeen-year-old girl named Rozsi Schoner walk into a room and was never the same again.What followed was a love story asymmetrical, obstinate, complicated by war and silence and the unbearable weight of what history did to both of them. It was also a survival story: four years in the Russian forced labor camps, the systematic destruction of his entire family, the long walk home to a town emptied of everyone he had ever loved. And it was, finally and most enduringly, the story of a man who responded to all of this by painting who carried beauty through the worst the twentieth century had to offer and set it down, canvas by canvas, in a room in Tel Aviv before departing this earth at the age of forty-eight.The Colors I Carried is Erno's own testament, written from the threshold of his final days a firsthand account of one man's extraordinary life, and a love letter to the wife who was always at the door, the daughter he lost before he could hold her, the sons he hoped would carry the light forward, and the strangers who would one day stand in front of his paintings and recognize something they did not know they were missing.“To make something that gives back to the world a light it had forgotten it possessed.” Read more