By Günter Lucks, with Harald Stutte as co-author
The content of this book is saddening and heart-wrenching, yet at times whimsical and amorous. The story unfolds itself right in the midst of World War II, in the year 1945, when the author, Günter, was only 12 years of age. He revealed how growing up in a socialist-oriented family had, ironically, strengthened his belief in communism, and how he trooped to the front line at the age of 16 with nothing but a patriotic divination to champion the rule of the proletariat. The five-year long journey as a child soldier and mostly as a war prisoner took him to places faraway from his fatherland – Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Russia (the Soviet Union back then) and Poland – before he was granted permission to return to Germany in 1950. It was this first-hand experience of war and the subsequent defeat of the communist rule that gradually got him critiquing his own convictions for communism.
