I was born in Poland during the Nazi occupation in a small town called Konitz in July 1940 to a Polish mother and a German father, this gave me two languages to learn. Adolf Hitler was very much in charge at this time in history.
The first nine years of my life were in part due to decisions by  my Polish mother made five years before my birth.
In early 1935, my mother was engaged to the best friend of one of her six brothers and her family expected her to marry the young man she had known from early childhood. However, my mother met a young and handsome Prussian Tailors apprentice while they were both employed by her brother Jan. Within three months, she was married to this well-groomed snappy dresser who danced the Tango like Rudolf Valentino...
My father liked to party. He particularly liked to dance and sing romantic German songs to my mother at my uncle Valenti’s nightclub. His reputation did nothing for his relationship with my mother’s family who did not want to have a German intruding into the family. They never forgave her for jilting her former Polish fiancée.
My mother was completely besotted by my father and remained so for the rest of her life.
I was born ten months after the beginning of the Second World War, fifth of July 1940, in Konitz a small town six kilometers from the German border.
My parents worked tirelessly in their Tailoring business (in Chojnice ) until 1942 when the Third Reich decided my father (born 7 th August 1911) was needed to help win the war. After training my 32 year old father to shoot artillery,  he is sent  to Yugoslavia and Greece with the Horse artillery. until 1945.where he was captured. In 1946 my mother moved from Konitz to Stettin (in the annexed territories of East Germany.) This was a very successful move for her because she made enough money with her tailoring business to allow her to save enough to be able to bribe some people smugglers to get her and I across the border to East Germany. Meanwhile we received many letters from my father also gifts of figs, dates and cigarettes. He managed to avoid being killed or injured.
In 1945, he was taken prisoner in Greece by the allied forces. He was able to prove his Polish citizenship and was sent to Italy to join similar displaced citizens of Poland. My mother became very distressed by a letter she received in 1946 from my father in Italy. As an expedient, he enlisted to join the Polish free army based in England and resolved never to return to Poland. To return to Pomerania was unthinkable because the Poles were aggressively ethnically cleansing Poland of previous enemies and succumbing to the will of Joseph Stalin. My mother immediately started making plans to join him in England.
In May 1948 my mother Marta secretly escaped from Poland without visa's, smuggled across the border by a cargo river barge transporting dried potato chips along the ODRA river and various canals until we reached the outskirts of Berlin in East Germany. I felt my mothers anxiety because had we been discovered the border patrols had the reputation of shooting first and asking questions later. We disembarked from the barge after dark and then walked non stop for two days to West Berlin where we stayed for a few days with a relative of my father. From there we managed to get to Hamburg and sought accommodation and assistance from the IRO. We lived in Hamburg from August 1948 to October 1949.Unfortunately I was not allowed to attend school in Germany due to the fact my mother was classed as a Stateless person because she had escaped from Communist Poland without permission and therefore no legal documents. Although I did not go to school, I learned many skills and became very streetwise.
My first business venture started there. I used to roam the markets and docks of Hamburg looking for cigarette buts so I could break them down and remix the tobacco, then reform the dregs into normal looking cigarettes by rolling it into strips of paper obtained from the edges of the lightweight version of The Times newspaper, glued together with flower and water paste. Selling these cigarettes at half retail price was easy. I mixed wild tobacco in with the buts and doubled my output. The inmates of the camp loved them and I had a hard time keeping up with demand.
The money I earned was spent on building Kites and selling them to friends. Fourteen months of unsupervised life in Hamburg resulted in improving my German language skills and having the best time of my life so far. I learned to fight, steal, smoke, cheat, spend money and how to impress and befriend other children.

My mother kept busy every day earning money with her tailoring skills; she had to save enough money for the boat fare to England.
How she achieved this is amazing, she did not have permission to obtain full time employment in Germany because we were classed as stateless refugees and until she could obtain recognition by the IRO, the Germans would not cooperate.
Every English official she met, my mother would offer her tailoring skills and this would result in more work by recommendation. Whenever she found a new client, I was scrubbed up so I could be presented to extract the maximum sympathy. Apparently, I was a very likable child and people certainly were very kind to me. I established a reputation for my curiosity and incessant questions; in return, I received many presents and had the run of their gardens and offers of food, books and magazines.
My mother finally managed to save enough money for the boat fare to Southampton in England, to be reunited with my father after nearly six years apart.