My story is a story of survival, revenge, and above all luck.
Both survival and revenge required cunning, risk, quick decisiveness, stealing, lying, cold heartedness, and uncounted despicable acts, but in the end it was pure luck that determined if you lived or died. My story is not one I'm proud of, but shame is also not a part of all that I did. Guilt is perhaps the only feeling I have as a result of those times, but not guilt over what I had to do to survive and extract revenge ... if anything it is survivor's guilt that I sometimes encounter. I often wonder, ask, why did I survive when so many others, good people, women, children, innocent, decent people died. Survivor's guilt is my guilt.
My story begins in 1939 in an area outside Berlin, in a small village that we here would consider a suburb of Berlin, but separated by a few old farms and a small river. And though Hitler had already taken power and invaded and annexed other countries, we in our unimportant township had seen little of German soldiers, the army, or the Nazis. In 1939 that all changed. But let me go back a few generations, because that is where my good luck really began.
