Excerpt from They Are My Children, Too by Catherine Meyer, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I will not, cannot, remain silent before such a barbaric injustice. My only concession is not to name them, because above all I want this book to be published in Germany where my sons are living, a land that forms a part of the tapestry of Europe, a land that must review its system of justice in cases of child abduction.

We are citizens of a democratic society, and I want to see my children grow up in this free world. No one should be allowed to deny us the freedom to love and speak. No one should be allowed to separate a mother from her children in the name of a nationality.

I want everyone to hear my call. Alexander and Constantin are my sons. They were only nine and seven when they were abducted, and they are unaware of what has been done to them. Even their photographs of me have been destroyed, their mother tongue has been forgotten, and London has been erased from their minds. These are the lengths to which they have been manipulated, the extent of the wickedness perpetrated on them.

This book is like a bottle tossed into the sea. It will float away and, someday, reach my children. Only then will they finally know the true facts and understand how in spite of the justice and decency in which I naively believed, we are being kept forcibly apart. Only then will they realize how cruelly and unnecessarily we were separated and how this book is the only way I have left to communicate my undying love for them.

© Catherine Meyer 1999.  Published with permission of the publisher, Public Affairs.