The Little Gray Notebook

            The Little Gray Notebook is the fourth chapter in our family history from 1920 to 1943.  The earlier ones were published in 2006 and 2008.  Their titles were The Barbed Wire and Under the Crooked Cross.

            We three boys were born well after World War I.  We grew up in an ancient village east of Cologne and spent our high-school years in equally ancient Coblence, a city founded by the Romans -- Confluentia -- where the Moselle joins the Rhine River.  For us, these were “the good old times,” even though Hitler had come to power in 1933.

            He and his party wrought major changes in society and eventually plunged the whole world into the violence, misery, destruction and death of World War II.  There had never been slaughter on such a scale:  some twenty million Russians and eight million Germans perished in that bloody struggle.  And millions of Jews were wantonly killed -- just because they were deemed to be different.

            The Little Gray Notebook covers the hungry years from 1946 to 1948, when the Marshall Plan, the currency reform and German industriousness combined to raise Germany from the ashes.  That Germany was divided into east and west, along the Iron Curtain.  In 1989 it was reunited.  Few had expected such unification, ever.  I certainly did not.  But such are the sometimes surprising and even friendly turns of history.

            Since then, many more years have come and gone.  And I have become an old man, quite old indeed.  When I was younger, I thought that, with luck, I might make the new millennium.  But already, eight more years have passed.