Having read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski I wondered how to follow up these amazing works of literature. My grand father had been recruited into the German army under threat of death to himself and his wife and children. As a soldier on the Eastern front he was one of 5,000 survivors from a group of 100,000 to return to Germany five years after WWII had ended. In the mid 1980s I read a memoir about a group of POWs who returned by foot to Germany. In the end of the book the author dropped off the last member of his group in my home town of Trier. The odds are high that this soldier was my grand father. Despite numerous searches for that book I've never been able to rediscover its title.

In part, the failure to find that book fuels my interest in WWII. I am an American born to an American father and a German mother. By fortune and an opposition for violence towards my fellow man I avoided military service and focused my life on liberal arts.

My recent follow up to McCarthy and Kosinski starts with Guy Sajer's WWII German soldier memoir The Forgotten Soldier. Sajer kicked off a study of German 6th Army soldier memoirs, Russian gulag literature and memoirs, and an English first hand account from the fire bombing of Dresden. Everyone of these authors produced masterpieces for depicting war, human nature and history; Guy Sajer, Gunter K. Koschorrek, Wolfgang Faust, William Craig, Hans von Luck, Gottlob Herbert Bidermann, Fyodor Doestoevsky, Victor Serge, Vasily Grossman and Victor Gregg.

Victor Gregg, born in London 1919, was a POW awaiting a sentence of death in Dresden when the British and Americans fire bombed the city. At the age of 92 Gregg felt the need to finally report his experience in hope of relaying the horror of war to younger generations that we may avoid it. His depictions are too graphic to be fiction. Voids of oxygen within the heart of the fires sucking in air with such ferocity that it can't be described as gale force, but as something solid. People being swept into the forces and hurled into flames hundreds of feet above the earth and exploding into flame.

Gregg is not exceptional amongst these writers. They are his peers. They wrench my heart.