Diane Roman (pen name Diane Trost-Roman) is a retired educator (reading and English teacher and professor) who now splits her time between reading, writing, volunteering, with some travelling (Hawaii, Poland). In addition to being a member of three book clubs, she is a member of various Catholic women’s organizations where she has held leadership roles. Diane is also a member of the Center for Learning in Retirement (CLR) offered through the local community college and has presented a two-hour talk based on the information she is using in her book.

Diane is no stranger to public speaking through the various leadership roles, being a lector at church, and the CLR presentation. She is willing to speak on: the grief journey after losing a spouse, the struggles ESL adults go through to learn English, the benefits of volunteering, the evils of book bans, and about the book. Diane is able to speak on these topics through personal experience, or through the experience she gained through her various volunteering activities. She tutors ESL adults learning English (helping two of them pass the citizenship test). Diane is also an advocate for minors who are in the court system due to abuse or neglect (she writes court reports based on her home visits). Finally, she volunteers weekly at a food pantry and in the Collections Department at Midway Village Historical Museum doing research for Rockford’s Camp Grant during WWI and WWII.

This background makes Diane the perfect person to write a book about the five million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust. As an avid reader, she has read numerous books on the subject (she bought 13 books at the Birkenau gift shop and has read most of them) beginning with The Diary of Anne Frank and Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place in jr. high. Her interest deepened

over three years ago when she visited the Holocaust Museum in Skokie, IL. It was then that Diane realized there was a hole, with only information on the Jewish victims. After the Skokie trip Diane began researching and writing the book entitled: The Silence of Five Million: The Non-Jewish Victims of the Holocaust. When she went to Poland, it included a tour of Auschwitz.

This book will add to the information about the Holocaust partially answering Dan Stone’s book The Holocaust: An Unfinished History. People are still very interested in reading about the Holocaust and WWII as evidenced by Kelly Rimer’s book The Things We Cannot Say (2019; 15,989 reviews) and Larry Loftis’ The Watchmaker’s Daughter, a biography about Corrie Ten Boom (2024; 3,887 ratings).

Other projects Diane is working on: writing articles based on the information in the book that are being submitted to editors of various appropriate periodicals, and beginning to do research for the next book about the Harlem Renaissance that took place between WWI and WWII.

For any questions or further information, please contact Diane at:

Ditroro58@gmail.com or (815)566-9746