I came back to Germany from the States in the eighties on one of my regular visits to the family cemetery and ran into my first and last close friend, Adi; he came up to me and, as in a dream and out of the blue, said "Alfred, I didn't really mean it that way."

Father had been right.

Ever since that day, I've been struggling to figure out in my own guts, in what way Adi did mean it if, as he now said, he hadn't meant it "that way."

At any rate, it seemed that after this half-century, my very best friend of so long ago also carried the trauma of those events with him.

1938
Germany 1938