As historian and documentary producer Charles Hardy has said, “At heart we are all storytellers and the stories we tell have consequences in how we act in the world.” Erna Torney was a storyteller with heart. What I took away mostly from her interview wasn’t a concrete understanding of the perils of war but rather a better understanding of character — the kind of human character that is tested and built during tough times.  My experience with World War II oral histories up to this point had been with veterans who shared their first-hand accounts of fighting in the Pacific and Atlantic theaters. Hearing from Erna gave me and the student intern working with us another valuable perspective of that war, and I will never forget her. To hear an excerpt from her interview and see a slide show of her photographs, go to the Marin History Museum’s website link: http://www.marinhistory.org/oralhistory.html or see it on You Tube, below.
Erna Torney: Story of a Red Cross Girl