Hi Emily, Thank you for sharing this! I love how his German diction is coming through. I love reading stories about WWII for some reason. My grandfather was in WWII also. He was a radar officer on a ship in the Pacific. His ancestry was German too, but our family had been in the U.S. for a couple generations by the time he was born, so he fought for the U.S., not Germany.

Maybe the reason I’m so intrigued by WWII is how it turned everything upside down. Men and women, political or not, found themselves suddenly enemies of people they would have considered family, or who were just like themselves, but conversely, it also put them shoulder to shoulder with people from other races and classes they never would have interacted with before.

Somehow, your grandfather’s story made me think of that, even though it’s the opposite. There he was, in a prison camp in a foreign country, lying next to someone he might have known from home.