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ghetto on foot and try to find them? Because you don’t need to sneak inside in order to hear Mama’s words: “You must stay alive.”

APRIL 1945
ON THE WESTERN FRONT
    Last October, British bombers did their best to destroy Brunswick. With the Allies closing in, you were sent to the front and taught how to use an anti-tank rocket launcher. Your commanders thought you’d use it to defend the Fatherland. You knew you’d do no such thing. In your hands, that weapon was just a prop for a part you’d play while waiting for the good guys to arrive.
    They come into your camp in the earliest hours of your twentieth birthday, on April 21. You’re awoken with a whack from a rifle butt. “Up against the wall, Nazis!” the Americans bellow. If these guys are your liberators, they sure don’t know it. And for some reason, you can’t bring yourself to tell them.
    They take your weapons, confiscate your camera, and strip you of all your Nazi badges and emblems. And then, into a land turned upside down, they set your unit free. But freedom for you is not a gate, a quick passage from one state to another. Rather, it’s a long tunnel. You need time for your eyes to adjust to the light. It finally happens when you see a man in a prisoner’s uniform, shaven-headed and starving and with the word “Jew” on his shirt.
    A Jew, free, in Germany. At last.
    â€œExcuse me, sir,” you begin. “Are you really Jewish?” You ask this while still dressed in your Hitler Youth uniform. The man does not reply. To be called “sir” by a Hitler Youth must seem as unreal to him as his very presence does to you. He cannot imagine what will happen next.
    You wrap your arms around this stranger. You hug him. “I’m a Jew too,” you whisper. “My name is Solomon Perel.”
    WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
    SOLOMON PEREL’S brothers also survived the war, but their sister and parents did not. Perel moved to Israel in 1948 and later opened a zipper factory. After undergoing heart surgery when he was in his fifties, he began writing down his story of wartime survival. His book, Europa, Europa , was published in 1990, and it began a second career for him as a lecturer about the toll of his experiences as Josef Perjell. “I still hate him,” he said of Josef Perjell fifty years later, “but I still love him. He saved my life.”

CHEROKEE AUTHOR?
    FORREST CARTER

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4, 1991
    Well, Forrest, as authors of best-selling books for children go, you sure are extraordinary.
    For one thing, before The Education of Little Tree came along, you were best known for writing a novel that became a violent Clint Eastwood Western.
    For another, you’ve been dead twelve years.
    Of course, there’s something else too—but we’ll get to that in a minute.
    Today, Little Tree is number one on the best seller list for paperback nonfiction. Your Depression-era tale of life with your Cherokee grandparents in the Tennessee hills—“A True Story,” says the cover—has become a book that people love to tell other readers about, like they’re letting them in on a secret.
    Maybe they’re reacting to your neat trick of telling your story from a five-year-old’s perspective—matter-of-fact, sweetly naive, yet somehow wise beyond his years. It makes the heartbreaking parts all the more tender and the funny parts all the more laugh-out-loud.
    And though The Education of Little Tree is occasionally risqué—what with all the talk of moonshine and fornication—teachers in middle schools and high schools have taken to sharing your book with their students. They say it’s one that these kids really need to read.
    That audience may not be one that you had in mind when you wrote the book. But honestly, who could have predicted any of this?
    As an author, you seemed to come from out of nowhere around 1973, a middle-aged cowboy