Largely Unknown History

[Wild Bill]

Amazing, Eva!

My father never said anything to us about his sister and mother and father and how they survived the Allied bombings or the Russian onslaught of Berlin. I am not even sure he told my mother about it. The attack on Berlin supposedly went out of my grandparents' farm near Kuestrin on the Oder--then Brandenburg, now Poland--where the Russians had their headquarters for the attack on the Seelow Heights. As I understood it, my father's parents lived near Tempelhoff Airport in Berlin--at least after the war, in the American sector.

My father went back to Germany in 1973. We told him no funny business and he was to stay out of the Soviet zone and East Germany. Evidently he did so. The only trouble he had was that he spoke to the American Customs agents in German when he came home. I have often though of speaking to the Border Patrol in Spanish at the compulsory stops in Arizona, but discretion has triumphed over valor (or idiocy). so far. The apple does not fall far from the tree, I guess.