An Autobiography Spanning Three Continents. Jewish Child Forced into Slavery by Nazis. A riveting true story that illustrates the power of luck and the human desire to survive. A captivating story of hardship, hope and success.

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I cannot claim to be a holocaust survivor as I never went into one of those wretched concentration camps. You can see this by the absence of any tattoo on my arm. Yet the scars I bear are very similar. In 1938 my family were sent to an internment camp just over the German/Polish border and whilst there, I was selected by the English wife of a German SS General to join her in their Berlin home as her personal slave.

I was only six years of age and never saw any of my family ever again. In service, I wore the uniform of an Arabian boy, never spoke a word and attended her at all social functions both at home and when visiting outside of it. The term for such a position was ‘picanniny boy’ and I was required to darken my skin by lying under an ultra violet light every day. There were certain rules governing my behavior at all times the most important of which was that I was to act as a ‘deaf mute’ and only respond to her instructions given to me in the English language. To manage to do that, I went through a twelve-week metamorphosis learning to understand that language. I was totally surrounded inside her mansion by adult British servants. I remained in her service for just over six full years working every single day. Fortunately I never fell sick. In the mansion, I could talk but only when spoken to first by any of the adults and always in English. I totally forgot my native German language. The only good thing I have to say about the entire experience was that I never went hungry living in the safety of that mansion.

Then, early in 1945, I was abandoned in the city of Hamburg when she and her entire staff sailed away in a Swedish boat heading, eventually, for England. I was in Germany and unable to understand one word of the language. Staying in the home we had occupied in that city, I awaited the arrival of the British Army. When they arrived, being a thirteen-year old orphaned boy, and speaking only English, I eventually obtained a British immigration visa. It was only a few days before my fourteenth birthday when I stepped off the boat train in London. The scars I spoke about were caused by the loss of my family, my religion, my childhood, my adolescence and, as fourteen was the Secondary School leaving age in England at the time, my education. Speaking, reading and writing the language of Shakespeare was the only knowledge I possessed.

Fortunately, I had been born an optimist. My glass has always been viewed as half full. My book of memoirs is entirely due to my religiously maintained daily journal that I had begun in 1946 and kept going until the mid-nineteen-nineties. I had to do that as I have always suffered from having a rather frayed memory. It tells the story of a life of survival guided by my twin friends of Happenstance and Serendipity and lived on three continents, Europe, Asia and America.

It was America that proved the most opportunistic as well as the harshest environment for me. I had managed to save half a million dollars for my retirement years but lost it all in the Orange County, California bankruptcy due entirely to a crooked bank official. I was in my early sixties at the time and all I had left was forty-nine years worth of daily journal jottings plus the knowledge of how to work a personal computer. I transposed those daily notes to it and worked on them until they eventually became this book.