Heal the Traumas of War: A Conversation with Jason Prokowiew

Jason Prokowiew’s War Boys is an astonishing memoir that tells two interwoven stories. In the first, a young boy in Minsk gets caught in the devastating violence of World War II and spends his childhood fighting to survive. After his family is murdered and his hometown is reduced to rubble, he must find ways to survive as an orphan in war-torn Europe. His journey takes him from Belarus through Poland to Germany and eventually to America. His name changes from Volodya to Wolfgang to Władysław to Walter. It’s a story of resilience and gut-wrenching trauma—a front-row look at the horrors of war.

The second story also starts with a young boy—Jason, the author—suffering at the hand of an abusive, alcoholic father. That first boy who witnessed such horrific wartime violence is now an adult, and his unresolved wounds are manifesting in the constant verbal and emotional abuse of his youngest son. Jason, as a result of this abuse, thinks he is stupid and worthless, false beliefs that will take decades to overcome. As the memoir moves forward in time, we witness Jason’s own story of survival. He must release himself from the generational trauma that was passed down to him. Part of that process means interviewing his father about his experiences and putting them into narrative form—in other words, telling his father’s story as part of his own.

Jason and I spoke over email in March 2026 about how these two stories came together, the difference between understanding his father and forgiving him, and what we can learn from the past in this volatile historic moment.

 

Mary Elis Tharin: War Boys is a kind of dual memoir. You tell your father’s story, which is a gripping tale of wartime survival. And interspersed with that narrative is your own story of personal growth and overcoming the trauma that your father inflicted on you as a child. Did you always envision weaving your father’s story and yours together, or was that an idea that emerged as the project developed?

Jason Prokowiew: Initially, I only wanted to tell my father’s story. When I brought the project into my MFA program in creative nonfiction in 2003, I had fifty hours of interviews with my dad that I’d done between 1999 and 2002 and expected I’d only tell his story. That model fit in well with the creative nonfiction I read in my program, such as books by Julia Blackburn that told a story outside the writer’s immediate experience while also including how/why the writer was drawn to that story. I imagined I’d include an introduction to the book explaining why and how I came to know my father’s story, and then I’d get out of the narrative’s way. By the time I put War Boys (then called One Little Bolshevik) aside in 2009 as a result of an insurmountable writer’s block, that was still the plan for the book.

I returned to the manuscript in 2018, and by that time, nonfiction and memoir had grown in such a way that I now saw new ways of telling my father’s story by adding the perspective of one of his children to the telling. One specific example of a template I was drawn to was Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body, which tells the story of the writer’s work as a lawyer on a murder case while also discussing their own familial story of abuse.

I also started taking classes in 2018 at the GrubStreet Center for Creative Writing in Boston and was reconsidering through those classes how I’d write War Boys. Between 2018 and 2021, I was reading heavily in the memoir space, practicing in class how I might tell my story as it relates to my father’s and recognizing the potential to tell these stories together. I did much of that labor of weaving my story into War Boys in a year-long Memoir Incubator program at GrubStreet from 2021 to 2022. I call War Boys a braided memoir because it tells my father’s story, my story of being raised by him, and there is the third strand—the interviews we did.

MET: How was that process? Did you find it challenging to dig into your own trauma, to recount those difficult experiences from your childhood and adolescence? Or did it flow easily?

JP: Very challenging and rewarding. The day after I learned I was accepted into the Memoir Incubator and knew I’d be grappling with this abuse history in War Boys, I sought out a therapist. I wanted that professional mental health help while I worked on those scenes. Artistically, it took me a while to find the balance between the child Jason on the page and the adult Jason writing about past experiences. Personally, the work drudged up emotions, memories, and thought distortions that I brought to therapy. In this process of writing in the Incubator and processing in therapy, I found a lot of internalized shame hiding in corners of myself about my abuse history that I had to decide to either leave there or bring into the light. I chose the latter, but it was not an easy choice. The fear that kept presenting itself was: Would people—and, I mean, mostly people I cared about, like my husband or friends—think less of me if they knew that many people in my early life, from family to members of my larger childhood community, treated me as worthless? This was the work of that year initially in 2021, and it’s ongoing. It’s often challenging, but I find it makes me a better husband, friend, dog dad, etc. to look at what hurts and let the wounds get the attention they need and potentially heal.

I also read work that came before mine (for example, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called “It”) to help me stay brave during the sharing process in the Incubator and in therapy. If other writers could share moments that might feel embarrassing or shameful, couldn’t I? Hadn’t I actually felt less alone when reading their work? Didn’t I want that for my own potential readers? My answer is yes to all of these.

MET: Going back in time a little, I’m interested in how your father’s story first came to you. How you first received it. Were you aware of any of this family lore as a child? How did you think of yourself, back then, in relation to your father’s background and history?

JP: My father was never shy about telling his stories. I can remember hearing them as a child as he relayed them to other adult members of my family. I have a large family: I am the youngest of thirteen, and there are twenty-two years between me and my oldest sister. So when I was seven, hearing my dad tell some of these stories, he was telling them to adult siblings or their partners. I can remember playing with my new Christmas toys while hearing my dad tell stories to my brother-in-law, for example. The stories seeped in, and in retrospect, my father was always eager to share them with someone.

Though many of my father’s stories contain unbelievable tragedy, violence, and overcoming, hearing them from such a young age normalized them somewhat. I write in War Boys about how I assumed everyone else’s dad was adopted by Nazis, too, that there was nothing unusual about it.

As far as my relationship to the stories, I felt as a young person and through my teens that I was somewhat outside the stories. They were my father’s, they were exciting, but they were not about me. He had also found ways to tell the stories, I’d come to find later, that were comfortable for him. Yes, they contained brutality, but he found ways to lighten their weight for the listener. He found humor and positivity in the barbarism of war that I trusted because he was a good storyteller, and he’d practiced how these stories were to be told. For a long time, I was just his kid hearing his stories and never questioning them, until I started questioning them.

MET: You were in your twenties when you started interviewing your father about his experiences during the war, and that’s when his full story emerged. What motivated you to want to excavate that history more fully?

JP: Once I was in college in Ohio, with some distance from my dad in Massachusetts, I began to wonder about Russia, for starters. I took Russian language and history classes my first semester at Oberlin College, and in one Russian politics class, the professor showed us the Russian film Come and See about the Nazi invasion of Belarus in 1941. The main protagonist returns to his village after the invasion and sees death and destruction, and the film felt familiar, in line with my father’s stories. I was drawn to that professor’s office to babble about the familiarity. My professor showed great interest in my father’s stories as I recalled them to him best I could. That chain of events—watching Come and See, speaking to my professor, registering his interest and facing his questions about my father’s history that I didn’t have the answers to—led me to my initial interviews with my dad in January 1999. Oberlin has a month-long winter term meant to encourage independent study, and that same professor sponsored my project of interviewing my dad. I didn’t know then how these moments were planting the seeds for the work of War Boys.

MET: I’ve recently been digging into my own father’s World War II memories. He experienced the Pearl Harbor attack—in Pearl Harbor—as a three-year-old and spent years of his childhood waiting for his father to come home from a prisoner-of-war camp in Japan. Thinking about him through the lens of this trauma helped me understand some things that I didn’t when I was growing up, like why he buries his feelings and why he’s so quick to anger. I know you had similar realizations. Would you say your relationship with your father changed through the process of recording his story?

JP: I’d say there was my relationship with my dad before and after the interviews. There was an alchemy to our work together that changed us as individuals and us in relationship to each other. For me, it’s the greatest personal gift of the work.

As War Boys details, I grew up in an abusive and neglectful home as a result of my father’s drinking, which was—in part—a result of his wartime trauma. I was furious with my father at the time I first sat down to interview him, but part of my training in my particular alcoholic family was to bury those negative feelings. That burying led to a host of mental health struggles that have been the ongoing work of my life to untangle and heal. I came into my interviews with my father holding an underlying rage, one that was not permissible to express in my family. I was good at compartmentalizing. I could be journaling alone about my anger in one moment and the next be sitting with my dad, hearing his stories. I didn’t have the language or the consciousness at the time to understand that I needed to hear his stories in order to understand my own upbringing. I am careful in War Boys to express that, although I eventually came to understand the connection between my father’s experiences and my experiences of him as an abusive alcoholic, I’m not exonerating my father of that abuse. Is there healing in understanding? I found that, absolutely, there is, but it doesn’t mean that the history of abuse gets erased or redeemed. I hold all of these difficult things at once; it’s harder than writing a redemption arc for my dad, but that’s the work I wanted for War Boys.

Oof, now I am fascinated by your father’s experience of “waiting for his father to come home.” Say more, please. I want to know everything.

MET: You know, I went through a similar process of uncovering my father’s trauma. His father was a fighter pilot captured very early on in the war, so between the ages of three and seven, my dad lived without a dad. No one knew whether he’d survive or come home. I’d never thought deeply about this until I found an old newspaper article that ran when my grandfather finally came home at the end of the war. There’s a photo of my dad looking up at him, and there’s such joy and relief in his little face. And I thought about how hard it would have been for him. His whole family. The whole country, the whole world. Everyone whose life has been affected by a war or conflict or a history of subjugation. After a while, you start to wonder if we’re all carrying around these inherited traumas.

Which brings me to my next question. How has it felt diving into these stories at this particular time in history? Does it feel different now than it did when you were first doing the recording sessions?

JP: Who could have imagined that we’d be where we are now as a country? I am experiencing reactions from early readers about the content of War Boys and how familiar moments in War Boys feel to recent American moments. For example, Trio House Press, my publisher, is based in Minneapolis, and my publisher Kris Bigalk lives not far from where Renee Good was murdered. During the occupation of that American city by our own government, Kris sent me an email that read, “I hope that your book will remind others of how important it is to hold the line for democracy—what can happen if we let this continue.” I’m glad that the work I did felt beneficial to Kris at that moment, and also sad and gobsmacked that that’s where we are in 2026 in America.

There is a scene early in War Boys when I am sitting outside with my dad on September 11, 2001, feeling all the fears that so many other Americans felt that day as I looked up at a sky devoid of planes. It was actually comforting to sit with him at that moment because he could speak to similar moments in history that he had lived through and suggest to me that the quiet sky was actually a good thing, “precautionary,” as he said.

My father passed away about six months later, and I’ve been curious how he would react to America today. Would fascist developments here surprise him? I write in War Boys about my dad’s decision in 1949 to immigrate to America after World War II and how, as he considered moving to America, he thought of it as a “young country” with a lot to learn. Would he look at current affairs and see this as a young country learning lessons the hard way? Would he be frustrated and flummoxed that we couldn’t learn it from world history rather than going through it ourselves? Returning to the material now feels, unfortunately, timely.

MET: I love his perspective of America as a young country. We certainly are a nation with our own traumatic past that we brush under the rug, even though it very much impacts our present. You close War Boys with a reflection on how cycles of trauma get passed down. You yourself carry the violence that your father experienced. Do you think you’ll continue to carry that violence, and the repercussions of it, forever? Has writing this book been a form of release?

JP: I think one of the most helpful parts of the therapy process since 2021 has been sense-making. I feel a lot as a person, but I’m also a thinking person, and one part of my thinking process involves putting chaos into some semblance that allows some sense to be made of it, by me. If I can take a traumatic memory, be it my own or my father’s, and make some amount of sense of the context, I can at least look at it with some understanding. This doesn’t negate the work of sitting with the feelings those memories stirred, be it those feelings of abandonment, unlove, fear, etc. It is at least, for me, a way to hold those traumas and not let them hold me as much. It’s delicate work, and sometimes the structures are shaky, but it helps me to live with and not be ruled by the trauma. I think I’ll hold the violence and trauma for the rest of my life, but that feels less impossible to me now. It’s also not all I hold, and for a long time as a child, I thought that that was all there was. I have a pretty full life outside the past now that I can draw from, that buoys me, when the trauma taps on my shoulder and says, “I have something else to teach you.” I don’t love that reminder, or that call to do more work, but I’m not terrified of or turning away from it either.

War Boys: A Father and Son Memoir is available now for pre-order. You can learn more about Jason and his work at www.jasonwprokowiew.com.