Upbringing I was born in Göttingen on December 22, 1955. At that time, the aftermaths of the Second World War were still reverberating. Mine was an anthroposophical family; my maternal grandparents had been early followers of Rudolf Steiner’s teaching, and worked for Waldorf schools when Hitler assumed power and banned the anthrophosophical movement. Waldorf schools…

Otto Fritz Meyerhof was born on April 12, 1884, in Hannover. He was the son of Felix Meyerhof, a merchant of that city and his wife Bettina May. Soon after his birth his family moved to Berlin, where he went to the Wilhelms Gymnasium (classical secondary school). Leaving school at the age of 14, he…

Shimon Peres (Labour), Minister of Foreign Affairs, was born in Poland in 1923 and immigrated with his family as a child. He studied at the Ben Shemen Agricultural School, and was one of the founders of Kibbutz Alumot in the Jordan Valley. In 1943, he was elected secretary of the Hano’ar Ha’oved youth. In Israel’s…

Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat As Qudwa al-Hussaeini was born on 24 August 1929 in Cairo, his father a textile merchant who was a Palestinian with some Egyptian ancestry, his mother from an old Palestinian family in Jerusalem. She died when Yasir, as he was called, was five years old, and he was sent to live with…

Ancestry My knowledge of my ancestry is limited. My paternal grandparents emigrated from Croatia in the late 1800s and settled in the coalfields of southern Colorado. My father Laurence Modrich was born in 1912 in Walsenburg, Colorado and spent his early years in Ludlow, which like a number of other coal camps in the area,…

The formative years – childhood in the newly born state of IsraelI was born in Haifa, a port city in the northern part of Israel, in October 1947, one month before Israel was recognized by the (UN) as an independent state. It took several additional months to establish the necessary institutions and for the British…

I was born in 1943 in Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada, a city of about 30,000 people on Cape Breton Island. My mother’s and father’s families were Scottish and French settlers who had come to Atlantic Canada in the 1700s and early 1800s. My father was a Lieutenant in the Canadian Army and left for Europe…

Svetlana Alexievich was born on May 31, 1948 in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankovsk into the family of a serviceman. Her father was Belarusian and her mother Ukrainian. After her father’s demobilization from the army the family returned to his native Belarus and settled in a village where both her parents worked as schoolteachers. (Her…

Early Years in Europe I was born in Vienna, Austria in 1930 [1]. Already before the Nazis entered Austria in 1938, our life had changed significantly, even from the viewpoint of an eight year old. Among our neighbors were two boys of ages comparable to my brother, Robert, and me. They were our “best friends,”…

I was born in Breslau on October 5th, 1930. At that time, Breslau, now called Wroclaw, belonged to Germany and only German was spoken there. After the second world war Breslau became Polish and the original German population was almost completely replaced by a Polish one. I have never visited Wroclaw after the war. Heavy…