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I grew up in Hitler's Germany. I came here in 1938 and I was not going to focus my life on Jewish things.
I went into the army and served in the ski troops. We fought our way up the Apennines.
After the war, intriguingly enough in terms of today's events, we were pushed against the Yugoslav border because there was a conflict between Tito and Michaelovitch at the time, and they did not know how it would end. The cold war was beginning right there and then.
I borrowed a jeep from my Captain, I was a forward observer for the artillery, and asked him if I could drive to Germany to see what happened. So I went up to Munich to find my family, to learn what happened to them. I went to Dachau and saw people emerging from Dachau. It subconsciously had a great impact on my life's development.
When I came back I switched from engineering, my original goal, to social studies and social sciences. I began taking innumerable courses in Jewish studies, Jewish history, Yiddish, Hebrew, you name it. I studied not only at City College, which was my school, but at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Hebrew Union College, and the New School; in a subconscious effort, I suppose, to find out why it happened.
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