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"One Person at a Time"
In June 2002, Louisiana State University Press published War Stories: Remembering World War II, Mullener's collection of fifty-three personal testimonies about virtually every major event of the war. "It was sometimes very difficult to find people," she said. "But like all journalists, I got a kind of network going. And eventually, I found just about everything I was looking for. In addition, every time I would run one of these stories, I would get calls from people who had stories of their own, so I began generating a large and very useful list of local people with some pretty juicy experiences."
However, some stories were easier to track down than others. "It was awfully hard to find someone who had any direct experience with the atomic bomb, because not many people did. I looked and looked and looked. But finally, with a tip from another reporter, I found a sailor who had walked the streets of Hiroshima not long after the bomb was dropped there. He was a sweet man, a former prizefighter. He was beginning to fade just a little, but his experiences in Hiroshima were still crystal clear to him. I used to interview him at a coffee shop near his house where he spent most of his days. He died not long after the story appeared in the newspaper, but every time I pass that coffee shop, I think of him."
Many of the testimonies linger in Mullener's mind. "I think that Christine Strevinsky, who helped murder a Nazi commander when she was nine years old, tells one of the most dramatic stories I've every heard. I think Lawrence Yatsu, who spent his 16th year in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans, had one of the most poignant experiences. Jeanine Burk had one of the most touching. She went into hiding in a stranger's house in Brussels when she was 3 years old and never saw her father again because he was killed in a concentration camp. And Paul Spencer, who was a guard at the Nuremberg trials and kept watch over the Nazi defendants, actually told Hermann Goering to go to hell one day. How many people can claim that?"
An unusually intimate history, War Stories illuminates the Second World War in a way no mere accumulation of facts can. Mullener says she "hopes this book conveys that war, like all other events, no matter how huge or how cataclysmic, takes place one person at a time."
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