Biography

Trudy Dorn was born at the edge of the jungle on a tropical island named Sumatra, Indonesia, in 1929.  When she was three years old she stepped on a steamboat and sailed to Europe. She landed in the Netherlands and grew up there.  In May 1940 the Nazis invaded Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and France and bombed England. Trudy was 10 years old in 1940 when the Nazi occupation started and 15 in 1945 when it ended. She is deeply grateful to the Americans and Canadians who came to free Holland and all of Europe, including Germany itself, from the Nazi terror.

In the last year of World War II, she did not go to school. Instead, she risked her life in order to help feed families who were in hiding to avoid being sent to concentration camps.  After the happy month of May 1945, there was a new song of freedom in the air as World War II had ended with defeat of the Nazis. Trudy had earlier chosen a school that specialized in languages but she was now a year behind and needed to catch up.  She found books with grammar and words in French, German, English and Dutch.  Her high school teachers taught her how to pronounce words in these different languages.

After graduating from high school in The Netherlands, she obtained her nursing diploma.  When she worked in a French hospital in Brussels, Belgium, the Canadian government asked her to come to Canada and work there.  In 1957, when she was 27, she started a new life in Canada.  In 1960 she married Paul Dorn, who worked as an engineer for IBM.  They had four children and Trudy is so lucky they all having a loving relationship together.

People used to ask her, “Please, help us to read and to write English.”  Consequentially, she wrote two books on ESL (English as a Second Language) and made pictures for them. The books are: We Can Read and Write, Book 1 and Book 2.

Then she wrote a book to help give children self-confidence: “The Wizard with the Lizard.”

She gives a loving thank you to her son, Walter Dorn, who worked so hard to get her books published with Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), available on Amazon. And she thanks the KDP/Amazon workers who did a great job publishing her English-for-beginners books. When the lives of so many children are so disrupted by a global pandemic, with some children without any classroom, these books will hopefully be a welcome learning experience.  The pictures are meant to be amusing for younger kids. Have fun reading!