Chapter One

I don't know why, but the winter rains stopped and spring came early in 1945. When Hitler committed suicide at the end of April, the flowers and trees were in full bloom and the summer birds returned to their nesting grounds. Not long after the great dictator's corpse was incinerated in a bomb crater by his few remaining acolytes, the war in Europe ended. After so much death, ruin, and misery, it was remarkable to me how nature resiliently budded back to life in barns, fields, and across battlegrounds, now calm and silent. The Earth said to her children; it is time to abandon your swords and harness your ploughs; the ground is ripe and this is the season to tend to the living.

I was twenty-two and ready for peace. I had spent four years in the RAF as a wireless operator. I was lucky during the war; I never came close to death. While the world bled from London to Leningrad; I walked away without a scratch. Make no mistake, I did my part in this war; I played my role and I never shirked the paymaster's orders. For four years, I trained, I marched, and I saluted across the British Isles. During the final months of the conflict, I ended up in Belgium and Holland with B.A.F.U. My unit was responsible for maintaining abandoned Nazi airfields for allied aircraft.

When Germany surrendered to the Allies in gutted Berlin, I was in Fuhlsbuttel, a northern suburb of Hamburg. At the time, I didn't think much about Fuhlsbuttel, I felt it was between nothing and nowhere. It was much like every other town our unit drove through during the dying days of the war. Nothing was out of plac