hansi krauss / ap
 

What’s LOST ON EARTH about?

It’s about how the fall of the Berlin Wall triggered a sequence of events that led to the biggest movement of people in history.  And how the world responded, which was by closing its borders.

Why should we care?

There’s a vast population in transit.  If these people could form a nation, it would be the tenth biggest.  Most of them want to come to the West.  Not only that, these refugee crises regularly compel American troops to pop up in places like Bosnia and Somalia and northern Iraq.  Kosovo or even the Congo could be next. You know what the Pentagon fears most? That the United States will find itself completely engaged in two places at once.

The book looks at these really major events through the eyes of regular people.  Why?

This is, more than anything, the story of what it’s like to lose a home, a country, a place in the world.  An East German girl, a Rwandan rebel, an Iraqi deserter, a nurse from Ohio who winds up in a very decadent, very dark world in Somalia. A private detective hired to spirit a busload of orphans out of Sarajevo. Their lives unfold and intersect against the backdrop of earth-shaking events.  We see remarkable history through their eyes.

Are there any silver linings?

There is violence and depravity, but the stories are about the living.  People ramble down the road, fleeing their homes, but they also escape from danger.  Whether it’s a young girl just bolting blindly through the woods, or a bookkeeper plotting her elaborate escape from a town’s twisted bureaucracy of ethnic cleansing, the stories are pretty astonishing adventures with some exhilarating endings. Some people wind up here in the U.S.

And these events you write about all emanate from the fall of the Berlin Wall?

The end of the superpower showdown destabilized the world. Take the war in the Congo and the countries that surround it. It was triggered by the conflict in little Rwanda five years ago. And Rwanda exploded in part because the United States and Soviet Union no longer had any reason to compete for global influence. The ripple effects of this era will be felt for generations.

Why did you write this book?

I’d just come back from working overseas.  I was invited to sit on a U.N. panel and talk about refugees of the post-Cold War era.  And I listened to speakers talking about how Americans don’t care much about what seems like the same faceless mass of people, trudging down the road, begging for help. And it just hit me: These people were all part of the same phenomenon, the same stunning journey into the same lost dimension.  It felt like science fiction.  These people inhabited a hidden world, a scary world, a place where some of our parents or grandparents once dwelt. I wanted to throw some light on it.
 
 

mfritz