Paul Calvert chats to Kay Wilson about her traumatic experience, writing her memoir and going on to create The Yellow Brick Road project helping children in Israel.

The other reason I wrote it for was because if you haven't been to Israel and you only feed off the media you are going to think that this is a war zone like the Zionist occupiers. So I wanted people to see the normalcy of Israel, the every day, the funny side of things too, so I called it The Rage Less Travelled because I think rage is a very important aspect of dealing with this kind of thing, it's my right to rage, I was violated in a terrible way and by owning and limiting my right to rage, that's what is helping me become more healthy.

I must tell you one more thing about the book.

I worked with a book agent and I worked very hard at writing, I am no genius and after really strolling through mud for years I came up with a very good book which I was pleased with. So one of the top agents in the world sent it to all these big New York publishers and I was thrilled. I was complimented with saying like, "this is so well written, we felt like we were there" and "what an out of the park story, how many people have survived something like this?" But then one of the publishers said, "Because Wilson does not mention the suffering of the impoverished Palestinians, we will not be publishing her book". And I think that is outrageous because this is a memoir, this is something that happened to me, memoirs by their very name is the authors story. I am not writing a history book so in the end I self published. I did an audible version where I read it and I just want people to read it.

Paul: Many people commented on your book as well?

Kay: Yes I got some amazing reviews which I was very, very happy about and a journalist from the Sunday telegraph, Julie Burchill, I think she called it indelible, mesmerizing, monumental debut. These things are very, very meaningful for me and also Colonel Richard Kemp. He is a wonderful man who used to be the commander of the infantry forces in Afghanistan, he wrote a review to the book, very, very beautiful review.

Paul: So anyone who would like to get the book and hear your story where can they get the book from?

Kay: You can go to Amazon, just type in The Rage Less Traveled, it's on kindle, paperback or audible.

Paul:You have also created the Yellow Brick Road, tell us a little bit more about that?

Kay: The Yellow Brick Road is a volunteer project. It goes back to the title of my book as it seems as though these days the worst thing that you can do is hate or rage, there is a shutdown of freedom of speech. But I understood that we must rage at evil, there is a saying in the Talmud, it says, "He who is kind to the cruel shall be cruel to the kind".

So I understood I needed moral clarity, that people who murder people and have no remorse, that we should do everything we can to seek justice and relate to them for who they are alright.

I also understood that by hating evil I have no right to hate innocent people and by making that moral separation a lot of Arabs, a lot of Palestinians reached out to me. In fact I hid them at the risk of my own life by, I hid two Arab young men in my house, Muslim men from other Muslims who wanted to murder them. So I became quite loved among some of the Arab community and a couple of years ago a Palestinian young man reached out to me, he lives in a refugee camp and he said "Kay, thank you for not blaming us all" and we met and I asked him what he wanted to do and he says, "I want to stay where I am and help these children not to indulge in perpetual victimhood". One thing that struck him about myself he said was "I don't want to be a victim".

So together we've created this after school club where we are teaching children English, because the moment they are taught English their world opens up. We teach them music to soften their hearts, we teach them how to clear their trash up, we teach them what their own personal property is, we teach them to visit a neighbour if they are sick, we teach them moral and social responsibility.

I called it the Yellow brick road because I was composing this arrangement of 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow' from The Wizard of Oz. I think we want to teach children emotional intelligence which would be the scarecrow. We want to teach them to empathise with one another and hopefully later on for their neighbours, the Jewish people, and that would be the tin man, we want to give them a heart. And we want to empower them to think for themselves so that they would have the moral fortitude and courage to stand up against adults in their authority who would groom them and send them to their death and that would of course would be courage.

It's an amazing grass roots project and I have found many, many Palestinians who say to me "Look we want to be part of this, we want to be a social worker, we want to be the chief we want to be ...". So anyone who wants to take part in this venture, it's not your regular NGO where there is big salaries, all the money without exception goes to the people who need it to run the school.