SVEN   SONNENBERG

I was a first grader living with my prosperous family in North—Eastern Poland a few miles from the German border, when WWII broke out in September 1939. The first artillery shells of the war landed on our premises.

 I was of mixed parentage; my mother’s roots in German Prussia, my father a Polish Jew. Our large Jewish family having my German mother in their midst was dragged across war torn Poland from one place of horror to another with the final destination - a concentration camp.

       I was desperately trying to survive in a brutally surreal and horrifying adult world in the polarized Polish society under war conditions. This as it particularly relates to the fate of Jews in Poland. Even today, more than half a century later, their routine Anti-Semitism causes eruptions of  hostilities and debates among Jews, Poles and historians. New and disturbing facts about that period in Polish history are still coming to light today.

         I survived Nazi ocupation in Poland and came out of WWII with the remnants of my shattered family, mother and sister only, to begin a new life under another set of bizarre circumstances. It was the postwar Communist regime in Eastern Europe. I was thirteen years old at the end of the war. After making up the lost years in education, I graduated  in 1957 from Warsaw Polytechnic with a master’s degree.  Then I successfully worked in the Polish aircraft industry as an engineer until 1968, when I escaped Communist Poland and came to the US. Here, I worked in engineering positions and retired from the Eastman Kodak Company in 1995 as a Senior Staff Engineer.