This picture of my mother (on the right) and her girlfriend Ilse was taken in 1936. My mother left her home in Sudetenland the following year and came to Berlin where my parents met and I was born. My mother had a greater impact on my life than my father. Her constant reminders to wash my hands before eating, or her constant reminder to wipe my feet before coming in, or most importantly not to lie, took hold. When I bumbed into a support pillar of the covered parking lot of my condo unit while parking my 1985 Nissan truck I put a dent into the fender, and I contemplated various options to get it fixed. One of the options was to report this as a hit-and-run on a Supermarket parking lot. The damage was just about enough to be plausible. And then I thought about my mother. That she would be ashamed of me for even thinking of doing something like that, and of course I didn't file the claim. The damage never got fixed. Other memories date back to the period between the end of WWII and the time my father returned from POW camp. Germany was in upheaval and civilized behavior went by the wayside. Everybody for themselve and women fought for their children like lionesses fought for their cubs. Scheduled train service was non-existing. Trains ran when they could. If a train for instance had a capacity for 1000 passengers, but 2000-3000 people were waiting, there wasn't anybody that voluntarily gave up their chance to get on that train, because nobody knew if there was another train, or when it would come. It was everybody for them themselves. It was on one of those trains that I almost got trampled to death in the stampede of boarding. The winter 1945-46 was unusually cold. Just about every night my mother and I used a little old sled to steal wood from abandoned barracks that had housed foreign workers. We did this secrectly, as did hundreds of others. Neighborhoods stole from each other, a 4 story high Birch tree in front of our apartment building disappeared over night one day, cut down by a group of neighbors. We went constantly on trips around Berlin to barter, or beg, for food. My mother used items she no longer deemed essential to get a glass of milk for me, or get some potatoes, or a few slices of bread. We did a lot of walking when not on a train. Walks of 20km or so were common, and she coaxed me when I got tired. One day we got on a caboose of a train, no glass in the windows, and the train came to a stop over a River, I think it was the Havel. The tracks were on a temporary bridge, no way for us to get out, with ice flows drifting down the river and wet snow blowing through the caboose. In late spring 1946 my mother decided to go back into Sudentenland once again, to salvage more of our belongings. This time she took me along. As we were starting to cross the woods that straddled the border between what ultimately became East Germany (DDR) and Czechoslovakia we ran into a Russian machine-gun position. Those soldiers good-naturedly waved us back. I was scared and wanted to go home, but my mother wanted to make another attempt. So we pretented to go back, but tried again to cross the border some distance away. This time we ran into a two-man Czech patrol. They turned us over the the Russian commandant. We spent what seemed all afternoon in this office in a requisitioned villa with a Russian orderly, waiting for the commandant to show up. The windows were open and it was warm. Sometime during this time my mother unwrapped a slice of bread for me to eat. This must have caused the Russian orderly to feel sorry for us and he let us out the back door. He indicated with hand signals, that if we get caugth it not only would be our necks, but his also. We didn't have to be told twice. The lesson I learned from that was that not all Russians were communists and bad. One cannot judge the people of a nation by their government. This picture is scanned. Thank you for viewing and commenting and any favs, Sig...