All right, since you asked, here are the bare bones.

We were Hungarian refugees from the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1944. My parents and I fled to Germany on a moment's notice and got out on the last train before they closed the borders, abandoning everything in our home except for what we could carry. We went to Fuerth (Kissinger's birthplace), where my aunt lived. Her husband was a German soldier recently killed in action. She was made to do hard physical work in a factory, although her profession was prima ballerina and ballet teacher. People do whatever it takes to survive. The strong message for survival was to obey, to say little, to blend in, to obey. We never heard about death camps, only that Jews were to be deported out of the country. No one said why.

I have very clear memories of what we experienced, although as a 5-year-old I had no detailed understanding of the politics. I knew we had documentation to prove we had no Jewish ancestry for at least two generations. Part of our family were Catholic and part Protestant. My mother's family were landed gentry. My father's family were teachers; he was an engineer.

My aunt's apartment was next to the railroad tracks, which were heavily bombed. After each bombing raid, the people would go out with washtubs to see what they could salvage in the debris while the night sky was aglow with the sparks of cinders. The building in which we lived, and in whose basement we spent many nights when air raid sirens blared, was the only one left standing, its several neighbors on both sides collapsed.

My father managed to get us out of the city and into the Bavarian countryside. It was supposed to be far away from the action but ended up as the final front. We were hiding out in a bunker dug into a hill with about 100 other people and could not come out for 5 days and nights, until the day Germany surrendered. Wounded soldiers were brought in daily. My mother would try to shield my eyes from the sight of their blood. We slept on our suitcases. Slop buckets substituted for toilets and were carried in and out periodically. The stench was unbearable. I contracted TB but was not diagnosed until the following year.

After the bunker episode we lived in the attic room of a farm house, sleeping on burlap bags of straw. Americans came in convoys. We children ran alongside them to pick up cigarette butts. They befriended us children and gave us candy and sometimes a whole cigarette. Each kid and soldier just picked each other out as special buddies, even though none spoke the other's language. I learned German from the other kids. There was a great shortage of food, and my father would stand in line from 3AM on just to get a head of cabbage brought in from the farms. People were quietly cooperative and disciplined, no stealing or looting. Black marketeering, most likely, if one had anything to trade. Refugees had nothing.

My father offered his services to the Americans as an interpreter (he spoke 7 languages), and that saved us. We went back to Fuerth, where he continued to work for the Americans until our emigration to the U.S. in 1951. My first grade of school was set up in a former tavern because the military occupied all the school buildings. I then spent 7 months in a sanatorium in the Alps to be cured of TB. To cure all those childhood traumas took reading Rand.