The war tore thousands of families apart. These are the years-long battles I fought to bring the shattered pieces of mine back together again.

It is hard enough to have a decent life when your country slips so easily into war, harder still when your husband is snatched off the street to fight in it. But the worst day of my life, the day my world fell utterly to pieces, was the day I received the heartbreaking news that my eldest daughter suffered from a terrifying medical condition. I soon learned that lifesaving treatment was available only outside the country, but I was blocked from seeking it by a heartless bureaucracy and an increasingly oppressive regime. I was left with an agonizing decision:

Do I stay and jeopardize the life of one child, or save her by fleeing my beloved homeland, leaving my husband and second child behind. . . possibly forever?

Relentless is the powerful and inspiring memoir of an Eritrean woman who defied Africa's most corrupt and murderous regime, and became an American immigrant success story.

There is a proverb in my native Tigrinya language, both warning and admonishment. It goes like this:

"Haki tseraba mot keraba."

It means, if you speak the truth, you will gather many enemies.

The Dreams of Freedom stories:

The year is 1991, and a bloody thirty-year war with Ethiopia has just ended, earning Eritrea its first taste of freedom in over a century. But peace is a delicate flower easily trampled. Soon, the small Horn-of-Africa nation finds itself in the grip of a despotic madman. In the midst of exploding violence, a family torn apart by circumstance will risk everything to save themselves and their children from a life of oppression, all on the slim promise of a future as bright as the one they had imagined for themselves.

One shattered family, two powerful accounts of love, heartbreak, and determination deep inside one of the world's most isolated and ruthless regimes.

Relentless - An Immigrant Story

by Wudasi Nayzgi and Kenneth James Howe

I Will Not Grow Downward - Memoir Of An Eritrean Refugee

by Yikealo Neab and Kenneth James Howe

I WILL NOT GROW DOWNWARD - MEMOIR OF AN ERITREAN REFUGEE

ONE MAN'S LONG AND PERILOUS FLIGHT FROM AFRICA'S HERMIT KINGDOM

A century of bloody oppression never broke the spirit of the Eritrean people. After winning their freedom, a young man returns to Asmara to begin a new life, but his dreams of a home filled with happy children are quickly shattered when fighting resumes. Brutally rounded up for conscription into the army, subjected to inhumane conditions, forced to serve a despotic leader waging a war nobody wants, he will have to sacrifice everything just for a chance to get back what he has lost - his family, his freedom, and his birthright.

I Will Not Grow Downward offers an exceedingly rare glimpse inside the highly secretive and brutally repressive regime known as Africa's North Korea.