ORLANDO / MEMORY / INSPIRATION
Joanie
Holzer Schirm
The lives inside
four hundred letters.
By Rob Urban
Four hundred letters can be an inheritance. They can also be an assignment nobody told you was coming.
After her parents died in 2000, Joanie Holzer Schirm found the correspondence her father had preserved from the years surrounding World War II. Oswald “Valdik” Holzer had been a young Czech Jewish physician. His letters connected him with friends and relatives scattered by persecution and war.
His daughter knew the father who had raised her in Florida. The collection opened a much larger and more difficult history. She began following the people behind the names, tracing what had happened to them and seeking their descendants. Eventually, that work would produce books, exhibitions and classroom materials.
Schirm had already helped build an engineering business and bring the World Cup to Orlando. The letters gave her another demanding undertaking, one that reached across continents while beginning with an intimate question: how much of a parent’s life can a child really know?
Orlando
before
the archive.
Schirm founded Geotechnical and Environmental Consultants in Orlando in 1991 and led it until her retirement in 2008. Her career also included a prominent volunteer role in the city’s successful bid and host effort for the 1994 FIFA World Cup. In an Orlando Women interview, she recalls starting the business after a layoff. Former boss Jack Parker encouraged her to take the leadership role, and engineers she already knew became her partners.
These were substantial chapters in their own right. Helping a city host an international sporting event involves a very public kind of coordination. Building and directing a company requires another, sustained across years rather than concentrated around a tournament.
The later literary work did not erase that earlier life. It added a different use for attention, persistence and the ability to organize complicated material. A box of correspondence is not a business plan, but both can contain an intimidating number of loose ends.
Her publisher’s biography describes seventeen years directing the company before she became a full-time writer, speaker and curator of the Holzer Collection. Retirement, in this case, created space for an undertaking that would demand years of research.
That is one reason I find her story appealing. A later chapter can be substantial without pretending that the earlier chapters were wasted. Schirm’s public and professional work mattered. So did the different set of questions waiting in her father’s papers.
The father she knew.
The history he carried.
Holzer escaped Nazi-occupied Europe in 1939 and went to China, where he practiced medicine and met Schirm’s mother, the daughter of American missionaries. A 2019 Central Florida Public Media interview summary describes how his daughter began having the letters translated after his death, then devoted herself more fully to the project after retiring.
The correspondence came from seventy-eight writers. That fact changes the scale of the inheritance. This was a father’s history, but it also contained other people’s voices, their attempts to remain connected and their accounts of circumstances they could not yet see to the end.
In her own account of the research, Schirm recalls growing up with stories of her father’s Czech childhood and medical-student years. Later investigation brought those memories into contact with the persecution developing around that earlier life. She traveled to the Czech lands and met correspondents and descendants, extending the work beyond the documents themselves.
A family story can become smoother through repetition. Certain episodes are told often; others remain difficult to discuss. An archive interrupts that smoothness. A date, a name or a letter written in uncertainty can complicate what everyone thought they understood.
The point of doing that work is not to replace affection with suspicion. It is to allow a loved person the fullness of a life that existed before, and beyond, the role in which we knew them. A father can be familiar and still have carried experiences his child has scarcely begun to understand.
A sentence can carry
a world of context.
Schirm’s research depended on other people’s expertise. In an interview with University of Nebraska Press, she credits archivist Michlean Amir with connecting her to international experts and Czech filmmaker Lukas Pribyl with translating most of the letters, adding historical context and helping during research visits.
She also credits a wider group of fourteen translators and her assistant Kathy Bowman, who managed the collection’s database. That contribution belongs in the foreground. Translation makes a document readable, but historical understanding also requires attention to references, circumstances and the meanings a writer could assume a correspondent would recognize. A sentence that seems plain may carry a world of context.
MY DEAR BOY
Writing
in his voice.
The same interview explains Schirm’s decision to write My Dear Boy in her father’s voice. She experimented with approaches, listened to recordings and drew on his correspondence. The resulting book is presented as a posthumous memoir, shaped by a daughter’s research and reconstruction.
Readers can appreciate that creative decision while understanding the form. A surviving letter, a recorded memory and an author’s reconstructed scene are different kinds of material. Their relationship is part of how a historical narrative is made.
The books follow
different paths.
Schirm’s books include Adventurers Against Their Will, My Dear Boy and Steadfast Ink. The author’s overview presents them as related approaches to the history and to her own long experience of discovering it. The first follows the wider network of wartime lives; the second centers her father’s story; the third returns to the places, people and personal significance of the research.
An unfolding life.
A student listening.
The collection also became teaching material. Schirm’s education page provides lesson plans developed with Holocaust educators, including excerpts from the correspondence. The materials can accompany the books or be used independently.
That additional step matters. Preserving a document keeps it available. Helping a teacher use it creates another route by which its meaning can reach someone. A student may encounter a historical event through the voice of a person trying to navigate it.
The teachers quoted on the page describe pairing the letters with study of the obstacles refugees faced. That approach gives individual correspondence a historical frame. Students can examine both the rules shaping a person’s choices and the words that person used to describe the situation.
An old letter has a particular power in a classroom. The writer was addressing somebody, not composing an answer for a future exam. The reader encounters uncertainty in progress. Events that have become a timeline for us were still an unfolding life for the person holding the pen.
Schirm’s account of the Holzer Collection also records public exhibitions in Orlando, Frankfurt and Prague. The geographic movement is fitting for correspondence whose original purpose was to maintain contact across separation. The papers continue to bring people into relation with lives they would otherwise never encounter.
Keep the names attached.
There is an easy version of an inheritance story in which a discovery resolves everything. A box opens, a mystery is solved, and the family finally understands.
Schirm’s work suggests a longer process. Documents generate further questions. A translated name leads to another person. A book makes possible a lesson, an exhibition or a conversation with someone whose family history intersects with the collection.
Her contribution is partly the willingness to keep those connections specific. Four hundred letters did not remain a large, impressive number. They became the starting points for investigating individual lives.
I admire her patience with a story she had every reason to feel deeply about. She let it lead her to other people, other expertise, and questions that could not be settled by affection alone. That is a generous way to care for someone’s memory.
Orlando knows Schirm through business, civic work and writing. Her father’s correspondents gave her another community to look after: people separated by war, whose words survived long enough for someone to listen carefully.
About Joanie Holzer Schirm
Who is Joanie Holzer Schirm?
Joanie Holzer Schirm is an Orlando author, speaker and curator of the Holzer Collection. She previously founded and led Geotechnical and Environmental Consultants and chaired Orlando’s bid and host committees for the 1994 FIFA World Cup.
What is the Holzer Collection?
The Holzer Collection contains wartime correspondence and other materials preserved by Schirm’s father, Dr. Oswald “Valdik” Holzer, a Czech Jewish physician. Its roughly four hundred letters include seventy-eight correspondents.
What books grew from the collection?
Schirm’s books include Adventurers Against Their Will, My Dear Boy and Steadfast Ink. Her website also provides education resources developed with Holocaust educators, including lesson plans using excerpts from the correspondence.
Sources: Schirm’s published accounts and education resources; her Orlando Women interview; Central Florida Public Media’s April 2019 interview summary; and University of Nebraska Press’s book description and April 2019 author Q&A. Checked September 2026. Reflections are Rob Urban’s.
I write about people whose work rewards a closer look. For more of my observations, and a little about the writing and advisory work behind them, meet Rob.