Notes from other lives

News last week that an original post card from 8-year-old Anne Frank to a friend surfaced in an antique shop near Amsterdam recalled an earlier trip through troubled times.

In 2003, on the days before the U.S. invaded Iraq, I traveled from the parched flat lands of southern Ethiopia back to Boston, via Amsterdam. During a flight layover, I visited the Anne Frank Museum and later wrote an essay about the coming war and the one that took Frank's life, in 1945.

Another unexpected turn of recent days, this in the pages of "What is the What," a novel by Dave Eggers inspired by the life of Sudanese "Lost Boy" Valentino Achak Deng, took me back to southern Ethiopia in a different way. There, Eggers recounts days of difficulty and death in the mid-1980s as Deng and other children take shelter from war in southern Sudan.

The post card - which wished Frank's friend luck in the new year - and the novel - full of humor and the shared, simple pleasure of a boy's real life - are two windows into the fullness of individual lives torn apart when a place falls into war.

Travel into such places, even at times of peace, can confront the toll for civilians caught amid such things. From afar, then, here is the latest today on Iraq.