Sitting in K's yard drinking warm Ipswitch stouts. Talking with K's father, Gerhardt, and his uncle, Wolfgang. Next month Gerhardt is going to Russia in hope of finding his father's grave. In September 1941 their father was a young draftee in Hitler's Werhmacht. That summer he marched and fought his way across the vast Ukrainian steppes deep into Russia. It was outside a small village about 20 miles from Moscow where he met his end. While dragging a wounded comrade off the battlefield, a sniper's bullet fired from a distant bell tower found it's mark.

Gerhardt and Wolfgang, ages 5 & 6, spent the rest of the war in Berlin with their mother, enduring the endless days & nights of Allied air bombardments, and then, the final Soviet seige which ground Hitler and the city to dust. They're story amazes me. Never have I heard such calm recollection of such a nightmarish childhood. They are soft-spoken survivors of hell on earth.

Their father was buried in a makeshift battlefield cemetary, but when the revenge-hungry Soviets advanced they desecrated the graves of their despised enemies. It is only now that German and Russian officials are allowing old wounds to heal and are cooperating to help families find the graves of their relatives who were killed in the war. Gerhardt says his father's grave may lie under a building or a parking lot or, as he hopes, a blooming garden.