ABSTRACT
Seven years after American soldiers entered Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald, Dachau and other locations, I was born in Bad Rothenfelde, Germany, the fourth child of my German parents. My father was a pilot in the German Luftwaffe. He was shot down behind Russian lines, but survived the war. My mother had to flee across the frozen Baltic Sea to escape the advance of Russian troops. She survived the flight, but many others did not. Among the many lives lost in World War II were those of 6 million Jews, exterminated by Hitler, the Nazis, the complicity of ordinary Germans, and the complacency of the United States and much of the rest of the world (Berenbaum 2006). My parents were not Jewishthey were German Catholics. When I ask them about the Holocaust, they answer that there were many rumors during the war, but that the rumors were so awful that they did not believe that they could possibly be true.
