Sven Sonnenberg

We lived near German East Prussia 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, father a Polish Jew. Our large Jewish family having my German mother in their midst being 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 midst of the polarized Polish society under war conditions and particularly as it relates to the fate of Jews in Poland, which even today, more than half a century later causes eruptions of hostilities and debates among Jews, Poles and historians, with new and disturbing facts still coming to light today.

I survived WWII in Poland and came out of the war with the remnants of my shattered family, mother and sister only, to begin a new life under another set of bizarre circumstances of postwar Communism in Poland.

I was thirteen years old at the end of the war. After making up the lost years in education, I graduated in 1957 from the Polytechnic of Warsaw with a master’s degree. Then worked in the Polish aircraft industry as an engineer with some success until 1968 when I escaped communist Poland and came to the US. I worked in the US in mid level engineering positions and retired from the Eastman Kodak Company in 1995 as a senior Staff Engineer.

I lost my long time wife to cancer in 1998. I recently married a woman who some unfriendly people could call a youngster, but whose presence helps me to chase away memories of my turmoil past.