In August 1914, my father was called to war and then taken prisoner. He died in captivity in Germany on March 27, 1915. My youth - indeed, my entire life - was deeply marked by this, directly and indirectly.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My father was in the First World War.
My father served as an Army doctor in West Germany in the late '50s and early '60s. As a result, he and my mother - both native southerners - were acutely aware of what had happened during the Holocaust.
My father was killed by a German mine, while I lost other relatives in Allied bombing attacks.
When I was a kid, my dad went to World War II. I didn't know him. I was born in '41.
Both my father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. Apart from my parents, every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis.
My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died.
On the death of his brothers, my dad lied about his age and joined the army in 1918. He was in the trenches long enough to be gassed and contract the early stages of tuberculosis from which he would eventually die just before my birth.
My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.
My father was one of the fortunate wartime servicemen: he made a full recovery from his injuries, was promoted to captain, survived the war, had a satisfying career as a colonial officer and, eventually, died in February 2002, a month before his 85th birthday.
My father took me back home, back to Greenwich Village, and he thought by taking me out of the orphanage he'd be out of the World War too. But no way - they got him anyway. He went in the Navy and then I lived on the streets.