"Every visitor to the orchard that was my childhood home heard the stories of a boy and his best friend coming of age in Kuppenheim, a small town across the Rhine from Strasbourg, during the Second World War...

"The Germany they described, a world of castles, wild boars, and escaped French POWs, as well as the life of heroism and total disregard for authority they set within it, took on a great importance in our childhoods...

"My father was justly renowned as one of the great story-tellers of the Okanagan Valley. Then came the abandonment of alcohol. The stories shrank overnight to simple narratives of concrete facts, narrated like newspapers reports...

"In 1984, I recorded my father telling his stories, in a last hope of capturing their quality of continual transmutation. After we had filled eight hours of tape, my father sat back in his chair, tears running down his face, his voice cracked, and said, "Good. I don't have to remember all that anymore."; He never told the stories again. During those eight hours, however, he gave me stories he had never shared before, including the terrible stories of the gang rape and bloody death of his childhood sweetheart, Maria, the horrific retribution for her death, and the story of his abject fear while being hunted by an American in a fighter plane, just for sport...

"For the last eleven years I have lived with these stories as my own... My father and I, who have quite differing personalities, occasionally share one in this book... many passages, some long, some short, are in my father's own words. This is, however, above all, a work of fiction, and its story, of the forces unleashed in 1930's Germany and of their terrible retribution...is a story, as my father well knew, that has needed to be told for 53 years.";
0-88984-213-2

[BCBW AUTUMN 2000]