Voices Within

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Lana Stasek doesn't write to please. She writes like she's peeling skin off old wounds - her own and everyone else's. This isn't a polite scrapbook of dates and places. It's a memory under a spotlight family laid bare the invisible debts no one ever asked for but everyone drags around. If you're here for comfort wrong book. What you'll find is recognition - the kind that stings first heals later.</span></p><p><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Voices Within: Life Before and After</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> doesn't play nice. Dreams aren't fairy escapes - they're x-rays showing what the body already knows but the mind keeps locked up. Immigration isn't a victory parade. It's freedom with a price tag: exhaustion humiliation endless reinvention. Even sunlight through a borrowed window feels like rebellion when the rest of your life screams dependence.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>And the dark? It's here too. A cold mother. Soviet brutality. Silence that turned into armor - and into a weapon. Sometimes that silence blew outward turning her into the kid who bullied others. Not many admit this. She does. Because cruelty never just disappears. It circles back like a boomerang - maybe not to the same hand but always close enough to cut.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Every insult here is a study in power. Every neglect a test: is pain passed down or does each generation manufacture its own fresh supply? Nothing is random. The abandoned dog the watered-down milk the petty betrayals - they're not accidents. They're the blueprint of a world where survival often means repeating the very violence you swore to end. Illness and loss aren't blind fate either. They're echoes. Consequences. The unpaid bill.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>And yet this book isn't just a diagnosis. It's a fight. Between graves and bureaucrats there's laughter - sharp survival laughter. Not because it's funny but because silence would kill faster. This is a book about refusing to vanish. About standing knee-deep in the ruins and still saying: here I am.</span></p><p><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Voices Within</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> isn't tragedy though scars run through it. It isn't nostalgia though it looks back. It's truth dragged into the open - a witnessing that won't let silence stay cheap won't let wounds be forgotten won't let a single voice once found ever go unheard.</span></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>