He is about 77 years old. I say about because WWII bombing raids destroyed most of his family, the hospital where he was born and all his birth records. He knows that in 1946, when the war ended, he was 16 or 17, and that was the worst year of his life.

His world didn't just fall around him once, his war started after the Allies moved in, and in full view of the Allied Occupation.

My friend's name is Henrich, but for decades he has been Henry, living comfortably on the Gulf Coast. I made his acquaintance in an airport, and he told me an incredibly important story about what war does to people.

When the war started, the Jews in my area were gathered up and taken to a camp nearby. My father was a printer and had friends make new IDs. We moved from Berlin to Brandenburg when Hitler took power in 1933. I was a baby. But my parents hid their Jewishness successfully and until a certain moment, I will get to that later, no one knew any better.

To get to my story we have to fast forward a few years and get to the end of the war. Allied bombing killed more of my friends than the German Army or the SS. On two separate days, bombs managed to destroy my home, killed my mother, my father and my brother. My biological father was killed by a German mob when I was little. I was taken in by a second cousin, a frail and lonely spinster who lived in a third story brownstone apartment in a nice little town east of Cottsbus. I called her Aunt Z. Her name was Zelda. Actually her name was Gita, she was of Hungarian descent but changed her name because German thought the European near the Balkans were all mixed race white people. So she took on a more German sounding name when she moved.

Across the street and down a little twisting road was a family called Reisenshtaller. The Reisenshtallers had seven kids, four boys and three girls. The oldest boy, Max, was my nightmare. His father was an SS Commander and Max dressed and acted like his father, even though he was just 16. The Reisenshtallers still kept a Swastika inside one of their windows. The Russians had to tell them to take it down. That's how crazy the Reisenshtaller family was. He was tall and strong for his age and incredibly intimidating. He was a mix between handsome and cruel and naturally strong. He was like that guy in the show the Office. He laughs at all his jokes and so do his toadies, but he is really disgusting. You know whom I am talking about? One morning, after the war, I walked to the market to get supplies it was free food supplied by the Russian Army as we were inside a Russian controlled sector.

My nightmare started when I was in line with a coupon for the food. I heard a voice behind me.

"Take your food and leave it at my door. We have a lot of family members and there is nothing but you and that old witch," Max R was staring down at me. "Why did your father not serve in the Wehrmacht?" he stood in front of me and behind him were three or four of his now Furherless Hitler Youth friends. One of them wore a Wolfshead logo on his hat; another had a Werewolf logo on his infantry jacket. It was cold outside and all I could do was shake with fear. I could see my breath and see theirs and knew trouble would come of this no matter what. There were people in our neighborhood who were very patriotic and when they saw Russian flags in yards or on cars, they tore them down. Someone had put a Russian flag up on the corner around our little cottage. We did not touch it. These teenagers, in a broken German economy, with nothing to do but relive their broken promises to the Reich were going to fill their emptiness by picking on me, an orphan.

"He was killed in a bombing raid," I answered.

"I never see your flag out. Why do you have no pictures of the Furher on your walls?"

"The Furher is dead," I answered.

One of the little Hitlers said "I heard your father was a Communist." The fact is, my father was a Communist and that is why he was killed. Hitler Youth who found his archives and arrest records in the town he was born beat him to death.

And I saw it. I saw it as he walked to his trolley stop with a trench coat and briefcase. I could see t from our third story brownstone. My mother started screaming and the neighbors tried to intervene bus Hans, my immediate next door neighbor got a blackjack across the back of his head. They jumped on my father like these cage fighters. Just pounded him and kicked him and called him Stalin's lover until he was unconscious. They strung him up down at the town center but no one would let me see him. Neighbors cut him down and buried him I guess. I never saw him again. That was of course three years before Herr Reisenshtaller showed up.

I remember a few days later we all heard a huge explosion in the train-yard. Some kids in the neighborhood had found an unexploded bomb and started kicking it around. It killed 5 children and maimed the rest.

When the war was over, we were being fed by the Russian relief organizations. They simply fed us the food they either fund or had shipped to them by the British relief organizations. Most of the infrastructure of Germany was not working. But we had lights. Sometimes the power went out. No one had a real job. People would baby sit, or do healthcare, or work removing the rubble from the streets. Buildings, half collapsed filled the center of the town, the victim of British Lancasters, and made perfect playground for the bored and fully indoctrinated children of the White Supremacists Nazis. In these buildings, people were dragged and raped and robbed and beaten.

I will get back to that. Anyway, I did not leave the food from the market on Reisenshtaller's porch.

That night a flaming projectile came through the kitchen window on our home and gutted the dining room. Aunt Z. was beside herself. It was dining room/den that held the only things she had after that war- memories, faded photographs and so forth. Outside I could hear the children yelling.

Which brings us to Hans, my immediate next-door neighbor. Hans yelled at them from his balcony. "The war is over. Haven't we all suffered enough? Go home."

"You have only begun to suffer. We know what you do at night."

Hans lived with another man and believe it or not I had not ever heard of homosexuality the way it really. When I was a kid growing up in Nazi Germany, I thought homosexuals were just effeminate. I asked Aunt Zelda and she told me what in fact they did at night.

Anyway that weekend Hans' partner's body was found under a bridge abutment. He had been tortured. He had his eyes poked out and fingers cut off.

So even though Hitler had died, there were those ho could not let go of him. Ancestor worship almost. Nazis killed themselves because they couldn't imagine living without National Socialism. They kept networks alive and even killed a few Russians in my area. But mostly, they were dinosaurs and they knew it. All they had was fear. Fear of communists, fear of homosexuals, fear of the Americans. Fear of Jews. Fear fear fear. That's how they fuel their power. From time to time one of those assholes comes back and tells us what will happen if Gays are allowed to teach schools or if Jews lend money. They rewrite history to justify their hatred. But deep inside, they know they are the last of the Mohicans.

Aunt Z packed her bags and went to her sister's in a little farm town just south of the Russian sector. I never saw her again either, and worse, I was now 16, and living alone in a little apartment home with a schnauzer named Schnapzie. Hans stayed where he was, and hardly ever came except to shop. You have to understand that Germans were still suffering greatly. No one had anything to give me and in fact no one knew for a few weeks, but one day there was a knock on the door and Russian soldiers were there. One of them spoke perfect German and he asked me where my family was and why I was living alone.

His named was Yuri and he eventually returned the next day with a box of groceries. There were military meals, powdered milk, bread and jelly and so forth. He came in and visited with me and wanted to make sure I knew how to cook and so forth.

I told Yuri about Herr Reisenshtaller and how he was terrorizing me because my father was a Communist. He listened carefully and wrote it down, and said he would come back and see me the next day. He was going to give me food coupons I could redeem at the market. When he went out the door Schnapzie ran out too. I don't know why, but never worried because she always ran out and came back soon thereafter.

I did not see her. I turned on the radio and fell asleep. About midnight I heard Schnapzie yelping, really long painful yelps. I yelled out the door, "Schnapzie!!!"
Hans yelled from his window for me to stay inside. Then I heard Reisenshtaller yelling my name. "Heinrich the Communist. We have your Communist dog. Come get her."

I heard a neighbor yell at the boys to leave the dog alone. "Shut up witch," one of them yelled. "We are teaching a Communist a lesson." Another brick came through the window, the same one we repaired earlier. Later that night I noticed that there was something tied to the brick. It was one of Schnapzie's paws.

By the time the Gendarme got there it was over.

About 2:30 AM, Schnapzie stopped yelping. Reisenshtaller and his little torturers had finally finished her off and left pieces of her. I had locked the door and pushed a chair up in front of it.

The next morning I awoke to shovels poking into the ground. Yuri and two other soldiers were digging a grave in the garden down below the living room window. They put a thing in it wrapped in a blanket. I knew it was Schnapzie. I cried so hard. I don't even know why. I didn't love Schnapzie, I just guess I was so tired of being afraid, of not having a safe place to sleep. A neighbor sat watching the Russians bury the dog while he sipped tea. That's what war does. It make violence remarkably dull and ordinary. Later I pulled the furniture away from the door and Yuri and the soldiers came in.

"Take these coupons and go to the market and come right back here," Yuri told me. "When you get back I will pick you up and I will have some friends with me. Then we are going to find Reisenshtaller."

"Do I have to come with you? I know where he lives."

Out they went and I followed. Before they went to a garrison nearby they spoke with some of my neighbors. And I went to the market.

I never made it to the market. Reisenshtaller and three of his friends found me. First with a rock that bloodied me right between the eyes and I never even saw them. I took off to the town center and started screaming. No one lend the slightest hand as they beat me in the town square. Four 16 year olds beating another 16 year old. The assailants wearing ragtag Nazi paraphernalia. This was Germany 1946. "He is a communist," my assailants yelled.

They broke my elbow. They knocked three teeth out. They put cuts all over me.

{He extended his elbow to show me he still could not extend his arm all the way out.}

One of them grabbed my lapel and started dragging me. I was prone, being dragged into a back alley, watching neighbors avert their eyes, maybe yell something to the boys to try and stop them, but nothing stopped this endless trip. I was numb and started feeling a sort of peace. I knew death was around the corner and there was nothing could do to stop the inevitable. I would die in a town square, yet completely alone. My neighbors, Germans, would act like the animals they so screamed about. The veil of civilization is so thin, my friend. It is so thin.

I did pray once in my life. And my prayer was answered. I said "God help me. Please."

Ultimately it wasn't the die hard Nazis or the Russians or the bombs all over the place that we had to fear. Likewise Bush is just a boogeyman, Cheney is a phantom. You should beware of your neighbors. Yes. They are more dangerous than all the terrorists in the world. Like the neighbors we had that believed in the war when it happened...went along with everything...and then slowly disappeared when it was over. The neighbors who could not see you when you were suffering.

This is what wars do. They do not end on the battlefield. They destroy people. People who once could see nothing wrong with a neighbor suddenly see a racially impure thing. War creates hates and destroys long after the bombs have stopped falling. Look at America now. Openly hating Gay people, calling war heroes cowards, questioning the authenticity of science itself and the advice of reasonable people. This is the punishment war wreaks on those who wage it. It creates a lower quality citizen. One inured to cruelty and or their own mistakes. Americans all around who have never been out of the country lecture me on foreign policy because they have just had a primer from Rush Limbaugh or that O'Reilly fool.

The only county in the whole world where one third of the population thinks Bush is a good president is the United States. It is that one third that will happily stand by if you are beaten. It is that one third of the country that will piss on laws and tell lies, all because they believe they are acting to protect something higher than law. The other day a reporter or a pundit asked a Muslim congressman to prove he wasn't a terrorist.

That is what war does. It creates bigots. It destroys brain cells. It burns reason to a crisp. Every explosion results in resentments

Anyway, I heard a thud, and the dragging ended. Then someone else dragged me somewhere else. I looked up and it was a Russian soldier, a field medic, who started feeling for broken bones. An older couple also came and helped him put me on a gurney.

What happened was that Yuri and about a dozen Russian soldiers found Reisenshtaller and his little friends. I would detail what they did to him, but this may be more than I can do today Judah. I will venture to say that even though they killed the dog and beat me and scared me, none of them deserved what the Russians did to them. But I can't. I can hardly even think about it. I cannot even talk about this anymore.

{Henry started crying. I turned off my machine and put my pencil down and hugged him. He was an old man. And crying set him back fifteen minutes or so with handkerchiefs and nose blowing and glasses wiping.}

{ He continued and finished his story.}

I made it here and live in between here and Mexico. I have made a good life and a good pension. I will show you this {he pulled out a picture of his son} This is my son. I named him Yuri.

{I packed my stuff, and shook his hand and said hello.}

"It's time for me to go Henry. I am so sorry I awakened that pain in you." I apologized to him.

"That's OK friend. Sometimes old wounds need to be opened and drained and redressed."

I turned and headed back to the airport.