Tangentially related to the topic, but I've always wanted to share this on Texags somewhere.
When I first moved to the northeast in 1996, I lived in one of the many NJ suburbs for the first 2 1/2 years. My nextdoor neighbor was a WWII vet that fought in Europe.
He was of German descent, his parents migrated from Germany before he was born and he was raised in the Yorkville area of the Upper East Side in NYC, at one time a German ethnic neighborhood (this still where some of Manhattan's best German restaurants are located).
He was raised bilingual (more on that later). In the 1930s, I want to say 1935, he took a trip as a young teenager to Germany and lived with relatives for a summer. He attended a Hitler youth rally with his cousins. He talked about his complete astonishment with what was happening there and some of the lack of freedoms he took for granted in the US.
Fast forward to the war. He was a paratrooper, but his primary job was translator. He was part of the airborne operation in the Netherlands, he was the translator in interrogations of captured German soldiers, until he himself was captured by the Germans and sent to a POW camp.
It turned out one of the POW camp guards was his uncle that he had lived with that summer in Germany. He said his uncle basically risked his life to help him get a bit more food at times.
I only wish I had recorded these conversations, I am certainly leaving out some of the details.
