Pearl of Great Price

The theme of the retreat this year was most intriguing for my wife Beverly and myself. We were, first of all, very honored to be asked to come, but it was at a very tight time of year because of GCE and travel to Eastern Europe. But the subject, the pearl of great price, caught our attention. Because my mother, before she died, and she died of acute leukemia, and she knew she was going to die, and I'll explain more about my mother's background, left a community of Ukrainians in Minnesota.

And when they left their church to become part of the Church of God, it was not like just simply changing religions. It was leaving their friends. It was leaving their culture. It was leaving the people that stuck together after coming to this country after World War II. And the people looked upon that as a great betrayal. And many of them shunned us for years, even though my mother attempted to maintain relationships with some of her best friends. But before she died, she wanted them to know that she had not loved them less by coming into another way of belief. She wanted them to know that she had found the pearl of great price, the parable in Matthew 13. That she didn't consider them any less. It's just that she had found something so valuable and so marvelous as far as eternity, the kingdom of God, that she chose the pearl of great price. This was an article in the United News back in the year 2001. One of the ministers who was at the funeral was John Bald, and he was so touched by hearing that that he wrote an article about that for the United News. And so when we were asked to come to these women's retreats, to come here, and the subject was a pearl of great price, it just brought back a lot of thoughts about my mother and about her beliefs and about the way she presented her beliefs to people from another culture that she had been a part of. Let's take a look first at the pearl of great price in Matthew 13. Matthew 13 is a series of parables about the kingdom of God. In fact, most parables of Jesus have to do with the kingdom of God in one form or another.

The pearl of great price is the kingdom of God. When we talk about the gospel of the kingdom of God, we could almost say it's the gospel of the pearl of great price. It's about something so valuable, so beyond any measure of value of anything on this earth, that it's the most important thing that you could possibly have. Well, Jesus, in this section of parables, which start with the sower and the seed about how the word goes out, the tears in the wheat about how some people won't really be what they appear to be.

He talks about how the kingdom of God will expand as leaven. But when you get down to chapter 13 and verse 44, you have two parables. They're all shorties, just two verses each. You have two parables that deal with value, with how much something is worth, and it compares the value of the kingdom of God to two illustrations. One is the treasure hid in the field. Verse 44 of Matthew 13, again, the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid, and for a joy over it, he goes themselves all that he has and buys the field.

He's a person who stumbles across the kingdom of God and then does whatever it takes to acquire it. This is not really talking about buying your salvation. It just talks about reacting to the value of the kingdom of God. So here's somebody that sees it. I've come across something that is so phenomenal. Eternity, the kingdom of God, and understanding, putting together of everything that the Bible has to say of what's important to me in a way that I understand.

It is so important. It's the aha moment in salvation that came into your life as well as my life, where, if I knew it, I'd look no further. I found it. And this person in this particular parable is a person who stumbles across it, as many of us have, whether we stumbled across a radio dial or a piece of literature or somebody we knew would work, or who knows what the circumstances were to your stumbling across the kingdom of God, and then scheming and organizing your thoughts and your life plan to obtain what was in it a kingdom of God.

The next parable is the one about which the seminar is about. Verse 45. Again, the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God, is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls. Here we have an entrepreneur, a person who knows value, I mean, who knows that this is a good one, this is not so good, hey, this is one that's really consider, this has great resale value, I can make money in this one, this is junk.

So here's a merchant seeking beautiful pearls. He is shopping, he's shopping and comparing, but he knows kind of what he wants. Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it.

Here's a person who owns a business, who owns offices, who know, who owns, that has people working for him, and he finds something that is so valuable that it's worth more than anything possible that he has all put together.

There's value there. It is the more than the sum value of all the assets and equity that he has. And so he sells it all so that he can obtain that pearl of great price. The New Testament is filled with examples of actual examples about those who were searching for the pearl of great price. There's a number of examples, and we'll go quickly through a number of them, but I really wanted to focus on the last example, which is a story about my mother. And the reason that I use hers in this example is because that is exactly how she saw what she had found in the church.

And that is the way that she passed on her impressions of the value of the kingdom of God to those who were her friends, who I'm sure that for the most part don't even know the value of the kingdom of God, or the pearl of great price, because they can't tell. They're not prepared. They're not even shopping for it. But my mother was looking, as many of us either stumbled or were searching, but we found something that was extremely valuable, that we were willing to sell everything we had.

Trade relationships, trade associations, trade a culture for what we found in the kingdom of God. Let's begin with the story about the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 and verse 26. There are four instances of searchers for the truth, and all of them happen to be Gentiles who came across the truth of God and who made commitments. The Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 and verse 26. Now an angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, saying, Arise, and go towards the south of the road, which goes down to Jerusalem to Gaza. An angel sent Philip, a deacon, on a mission down south towards Gaza. So he arose and went, and went ahead with his mission.

And behold, a man of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great authority. This was not just any old person. This was a person of political stature. Under Candace, the queen of the Ethiopians, who had charge of all her treasury, he was the head of, he was the secretary of the treasury.

And he had come to Jerusalem to worship. Now, when you take a look at a map, you see where Ethiopia is in the Palestine. It's relatively close, but for those times, that was a long distance. It was quite a route up the Nile River, across over to Jerusalem. Or he could have gone by boat up through the Red Sea and up that way through Aqaba. But nonetheless, it was a major trip. But he found something in writings that was so valuable that he wanted to find out for himself. He was searching. He went all the way to Jerusalem to worship. And he's actually on his way back from that mission.

In returning, verse 28, sitting in his chariot, he was reading Isaiah the prophet. Then the spirit said to Philip, go near and overtake this chariot. Hey, get ahead of this motorcade here and go and talk to this fellow. So Philip ran to him and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah and said, do you understand what you are reading?

Pretty gutsy. And he said, the eunuchs replied, how can I unless someone guides me?

And he asked Philip to come up and sit with him. He says, come here. Maybe you can help me with... I'm kind of stuck with this passage. He was led, verse 32, the place in the scripture which he read was this from Isaiah 52, 53. And he was led as a sheep to this slaughter and as a lamb before its shear is silent. He opened not his mouth. In his humiliation, his justice was taken away. And who will declare his generation for his life is taken from the earth. So the eunuch answered Philip and said, I ask you, of whom does the prophet say this? Of himself? Is Isaiah talking about himself? Or some other man? Then Philip opened his mouth and beginning at this scripture, preached Jesus to him. Now as he went down the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, see, here is water. What hinders me from being baptized? And Philip said, if you believe with your heart, you may. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.

So he commanded the cherry to stand still. Both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and he baptized him. This is a tremendous story of evangelism. This is a tremendous story of a person searching. This is a tremendous story of a person who found it, just like we did. There's a point at which we, under consultation with the minister, said, this is it. I want to be baptized.

Those of you who are baptized, you know what I'm talking about. There's a point that said, this is it. And there was a point at which you were probably way beyond, that you traded Christmas, traded Sunday keeping. You traded all the trappings and all the conveniences of a community church or a traditional church and all that for what you had found as biblical. That's one example. Another one is Cornelius in Acts 10, two chapters later. Now Cornelius also was a man of a great respect in the gentile world. He was a Roman leader, military leader, of a hundred men. To the Jews, he was the enemy. He was the occupying forces. But take a look at this man, Cornelius. There was a certain man in Caesarea called Cornelius. This was the garrison where he was posted. A centurion of what is called the Italian regiment. It even names the particular military group, the infantry division. The first infantry division was called the Italian regiment. A devout man and one who feared God with all his household. This is an exceptional case. Here he is. He's not a Jew. He's a Roman. He's from Italy. And he is one who is fearing God. He's praying to God. He and his household, his... Who knows who the household we're talking about? His wife, children. I mean, all the people that are there. He's obviously conducting Bible studies. They're searching and they are devout for God. Who gave alms generously to the people. He was a generous person who cared for others and prayed to God always. About the ninth hour of the day, he was clearly in the vision, an angel of God came down to him, said, Cornelius. And he... When he observed him, he was afraid and said, what is it, Lord?

He said, your prayers and your alms have come up for a memorial to God.

The things that you have been asking, the things that you've been praying for. And sometimes we learn about what was being prayed for by the answer that's given. We don't have maybe Cornelius' specific questions, but judging by the way the answer came, the questions were, God, who are you? Where are you? Reveal yourself to me. And God was now giving him the pearl of great price. Now send men to Joppa and send for Simon, whose name is Peter. This is the instructions from Cornelius, instructions to Cornelius from the angel. And he lived in Caesarea, which was north of Joppa, quite a ways. I'm not sure how many miles right now, but to send for somebody to walk the distance, it was like 20, 25 miles, to come down to see him. But he says, you send for Simon Peter. Now at this same time, this is a different part of the story here, Simon saw the vision of the unclean animals coming down in a sheet, and God was showing Peter at the same time that God is going to preach the gospel and to bring Gentiles into the Church of God. Cornelius was the very first of those Gentiles. Among the first.

He is lodging with Simon, a tanner, whose name is by the sea. He will tell you what you must do. And when the angel who spoke to him had departed Cornelius called to this household servant and devoured soldier from among those who waited, and continually. So when he explained all these things, he sent them down to Joppa. And Peter was already prepared because he saw the vision. God actually worked, you know, we talked today about having internet and, you know, modern communications through optical fibers. Well, if we look upon communications back in ancient times as being pretty clunky and verbal and so forth, there actually were many ways in which God worked that really transcended even internet, you know, through visions, through dreams, through angels talking to people. In a way, they had a pretty compelling communication system, you know, that was able to get through to people. If we had an angel come here talk to us, you know, we'd feel compelled to do something. We don't have to search it on Google, you know, the angel finds us. The next day, see here in verse 30, Peter then starts his journey up to Caesarea in verse 33. 30, I should say. Cornelius said, this is after Peter comes, four days ago, I was fasting until this hour, and obviously Cornelius was intent on finding answers. He was intent on finding answers. He was fasting and praying. And at the ninth hour, I prayed in my house, and behold, a man stood before me in bright clothing, and said, Cornelius, your prayer has been heard and your alms are remembered in the sight of God. Send therefore to Joppa and call Simon here, whose surname is Peter. He's lodging in the houses. That's the problem. I won't care.

When he comes, he will speak to you. So I sent to you immediately, as you have done, but therefore we all present before God to hear all the things commanded to you by God. And we see Cornelius and his household being baptized here. An amazing story of salvation, evangelism, in the Pearl of Great Price. Another story, Acts 16. Another Gentile converted, and this is where the work geographically leaves Asia and moves to a new continent to Europe.

The story is about the Macedonian call. Macedonia was the first landfall from Asia, which is not really too far. I mean, the two continents are only separated by the Bosphorus and Dardanelles canals, but that was Europe, and Asia Minor was Asia. This was a big step even in those times. Europe and Asia were separate domains and viewed as different zones of the world. And going from one zone to another was a big deal. And here's a call from a Macedonian to come and help us in Europe, because the Gospel had not yet gone to this part of the world. In Acts 16, verse 11, Therefore sailing from Troas, and that's where Paul was on the Isle of Troy, or Troas, and the story of Helen of Troy is about that island. It was a kingdom on that island hundreds of years before that in the Greek period. We ran a straight course to Samothrace, and the next day came to Neapolis.

Once they got this message about coming to help us, they they beeline right for Macedonia.

And they came to these port cities, and from there to Philippi, which was the bigger city, which is the foremost city in that part of Macedonia, a colony. And we were staying in that city for some days. And on the Samoth day, we went out to the city, to the riverside, where prayer was customarily made, and we sat down and spoke to the woman, to the women who met there. So we see here women were meeting at this place where prayer was done. Obviously, it was prayer, it was discussion, it was fellowship of some sort. Now a certain woman named Lydia heard us. She had heard about Paul coming to that area, and a connection is now being made. She was a seller of purple from the city of Thyatira. She was a business lady who sold purple cloth from the city of Thyatira.

Actually, from Asia Minor, that obviously had migrated over to Europe, who worshipped God. The Lord opened her heart to heed the things spoken by Paul.

She was a person also searching and looking for truth. And when she and her household were baptized, she begged the saying, if you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay, so she persuaded us. This is where the church started in Europe. The first church in Europe was Philippi, and the leader, or the foremost instrument that God used in the starting of that church, was Lydia and her household, a woman. A woman who was searching for truth, whose searching was rewarded and answered by God, as he opened her heart to listen to what Paul had to say, and she too was baptized. And the example that's used so many times about being open-minded in searching is the story of the Bereans in Acts 17. Paul moves further down Greece, the peninsula, and he's gone through Thessalonica, where he had so-so success. But in verse 10 of chapter 17, he comes to the city of Berea and has these comments about the population there. The brethren immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea. When they arrived, they went to the synagogue of the Jews. These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica. So these people were more fair-minded. These people were more balanced in the way that they looked at things.

The psalonica, you know, the problem there was, is that people became very excited about the truth and were very excited about the return of Jesus Christ to the point where they quit their jobs and just sat around and waited for Jesus to return. Paul said, hey, if you don't work, you don't eat. I mean, they really were not fair or balanced. But the people in Berea were more fair-minded. And why? Verse 11, in that they received the Word with all readiness. I mean, they were on the edge of their seats in receiving the Word that was being spoken or that they read. And searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so. They checked it out. They searched the shop. They compared. They, as John, in 1 John 4, 1 says, try the spirits. Don't just take anything that comes your way without checking it out. They searched the Scriptures to find out whether these things were so. Therefore, many of them believed, and also not a few weeks, prominent women as well as men. Here are people who had found also the Pearl of Great Price. As I mentioned, my mother, in her last letter, which was right at her funeral, had a message for her friends saying, I love you, but I have found the Pearl of Great Price. That's not why I'm not worshiping with you. That's not, that's why I'm not with you. This was to explain it. But my mother's story is amazing in how God had begun to work with her as a little girl in Ukraine, which was part of the USSR until 1991.

She lived 70 miles south of Kharkov in eastern Ukraine in a city called Likhachev, about 70,000 people. At age six, she endured and survived a famine that was artificially imposed by Stalin. It's a famine in which five million Ukrainians died in one year, and an additional two to three million people died on the Volga River. It was genocided, artificially induced. Food was taken away from the population, used by Stalin to buy industrial equipment from countries like Canada. But the people starved. My mother recalls when she was six years old. They survived the famine because they were able to hide grain in the walls of the house. Because the food police combined, they would take all the food away that they could find. That was a directive from Stalin, who hated Ukrainians. He hated, absolutely hated Ukrainians. There's just too many of them to kill, but I'll kill all I can. And my mother still recalls how neighbors, one after another, died. They had, like, garbage pickup, but it was instead of garbage, it was bodies. They were just whoever died was kind of put out to the street, and a wagon came by, picked them up, and it was carts them off. She still remembers that very, very well. But at the age of 15 was the year that Germany attacked the USSR. Operation Barbarossa started on June 22, 1941. Three million German soldiers crossed the USSR border with 3,300 tanks. The Blitzkrieg smashed one city after another.

Minsk and Belarus, Kiev, evolved. Many cities fell immediately under the German Blitzkrieg. My uncle said they thought there's no way we could ever, ever recover from the devastation that the Germans first imposed on us with the Blitzkrieg. The Germans then had a plan to relocate, to methodically deport, millions of people from Ukraine to work in German factories, because German men were involved in a two-front war against Great Britain, against in Africa, and also this huge front in the east that stretched from Leningrad in the north all the way down to the Caspian Sea. An amazing line that just moved across and became stalled in Stalingrad, and eventually that's where the turning point of World War II occurred. In a horrible nine-month battle called the Battle of Stalingrad, I had the opportunity of visiting Stalingrad on a few occasions and walking through all the major parts of that horrific battle.

My mother, in 1941, remembered when the Germans made their initial assault on her city. German bombers came over and bombed Likachev. 700 people died initially, and my mother was walking a cow home from the field and saw the bombing around her and hid under the cow for protection. She was so terrified of what had happened that her hand shook, and even to the last day of her life, her hand still shook from the terror of the bombing. But that's not the first bombing that she had to endure. A year later, in 1942, the Germans deported her. She was 16 at that time, and she was able to have a friend with her. But generally the policy was that one teenager from every family goes to Germany, and they loaded up on boxcars and shipped them across Poland's rights to the German factories. It was not concentration camps, it was work camps. These workers from the east were given a yellow patch to wear that had the letters O-S-T, meaning saying Ost or East, and they were called the Ost Arbeiter, or the East Workers. They were not allowed to walk on sidewalks, they had to walk in the street. They were treated like subhumans. The Germans had a pecking order and how they viewed people. They always viewed Americans and the British with the greatest respect. British and American war prisoners were treated with a gun, like they were black. My father remembered when a black paratrooper came down, he immediately shot. They had no time or no reason to mess with the blacks. We know what they felt about the Jews. The Russians were looked like beasts of burden, and the Russian prisoners of war were treated a lot worse than the American or the British. So goes the story and the unfairness and horror of war.

When my mother first went, the Germans told her that told all the teenagers, and these were all teens, these were kids, these were young children, you know. I look upon somebody 16, you know, as being young. Now, so who's somebody who's 16? Now, it's old because they could have a driver's license, but at that, you know, these were just young people. They were told it was only for three months. The war will be over, you'll be back, but it wasn't for another 27 years before my mother was able to come back and visit her parents. The Germans took her to the city of Magdeburg, which is 50 miles east of Berlin, and 50 miles west of Berlin, and 50 miles east of what was the old East German-West German border.

One cannot appreciate the inferno that she came out of. Surprisingly, during World War II, one of the safest places to be in the war was Germany itself. Not until the carpet bombing from the British and the Americans at the very end of the war. But Germany actually was basically not a relatively safe place. Of course, it was bombing to many of the cities, but it wasn't anywhere near like the devastation that took place in Russia or other places in Europe. Soviet casualties were unbelievable. 15 million soldiers died in World War II of the Russians. Of those who came into the service aged 19, only one in 100 returned. 15 million civilians died. So a total of 30 million people died in World War II who were just the Russians or the people from the Soviet republics. Battle deaths were in the hundreds of thousands. When we take a look at, by comparison, American casualties, for that matter, even the German 2 million men who died, they were small in comparison to the savagery that was inflicted upon the Russians. Even the Germans in World War II were confounded by how little value the Russians had for their own people, for their own soldiers, and their use of men in World War II. I traveled to the USSR for the first time in 1967 with Dr. Hay on a trip that lasted six and a half weeks. It was an amazing trip. Dr. Hay was 38 years old at that time, and he told me, you know something, one thing I really noticed is there's hardly anybody my age. It's hard to anybody who's about the 38 to 40 age group. I see a lot of women. I see a lot of old people, but I don't see people my age. At the end of World War II, there were 100 women for every 60 men. That's what the ratio was for the population. It was a horrible, horrible carnage for that part of the world.

The 30 million people who perished in World War II was in addition to the 30 million people that Stalin killed through the gulags in Siberia. I have taken WYOU groups back when I was in the worldwide Church of God on three different occasions to the Soviet Union. One thing that the people always wanted to show us off was their cemeteries, which were monumental. We went to a cemetery in Kharkov that we looked at the stones, and we looked closer on the stones, and it says, each stone represented 14,000 killed. I mean, the numbers are just staggering to us as to the horrible number of people who died in World War II. We were amazed as to how the Soviets honored their people in death, probably just unlike any country in the world, with huge monuments and memorials, and how little they honored them in life.

My mother, when she died, I found among her personal effects a number of letters.

Here was one. It was from her brother, my uncle Victor, in Ukraine, who somehow was able to mail letters from Ukraine to Germany during World War II. They had some abbreviated mail service. But nonetheless, here's a letter dated June 7, 1943. He writes to my mother, Greetings, dear Nina. In the first lines of our short letter, our family greets you, Nina. Are you all right? You write that you are getting lonely living on foreign soil, but you're not the only one separated from their family. Many people are finding themselves in this condition. Nina, we are not receiving your letters. In 1943, we have received only two postcards from you, one dated January 20th and the other dated February 8th, which we received in June.

You are writing and asking about your brother Alex, who got heard about from him in two years. Now, surprisingly, in my mother's side of the family with the four brothers, everyone came back from the war alive. On my father's side, two of his brothers were killed. If we live, we will meet again. The weather has been good for growing. The gardens look good and we'll have things to eat in the winter. Two winters they spent living in root cellars because their homes were destroyed, in subsequent bombings by the Germans. The Russians came in February, but the Germans returned in March. On the front, where we are, there has been no shooting, but in May, many people in other neighboring villages died. The land is covered with blood and the end of the war is not in sight. We're tired of the war. I went for a family reunion in eastern Ukraine in 1988, where my uncle from Siberia came down and I was right in that city of Likhacaya, which was changed to Pervanysk, and saw where my mother's house had been. My uncle showed me where the bombs first hit the city, where my mother crawled under the cow for protection. He showed me all this area.

My uncle continues to write, you said that you'd like to see the flowers in homeland again. That'll be good, but now the land has been ravaged by the war. I think often of your cheerful smile and your kind words to us, my loving sister. Mom and dad and your sister Tanya worked on the collective farm, but I work on the railroad. And long after, shortly after that, he was put into the Russian army and was in the artillery and actually was in the final assault on Berlin. He survived.

Please write to us about how you're eating and how are the Germans, are the Germans good to you? We have not been receiving letters from you. Please give greetings to your friends with whom you are working.

Then I received a letter from my aunt Tanya a few years ago. She said, my dear nephews and nieces, your mother had a hard life. In the years of the war, our village changed hands six times between the Russians and the Germans.

The oldest and the youngest were evacuated. You can understand, when my parents came into the church and they were reading about the tribulation from the booklets in the church, they said, hey kids, we've been there. We've gone through the tribulation. We've seen it all, all things that are in these booklets. We have gone through that already. My aunt continued, she said, Nina stayed behind where all the fighting took place. I still remember one moment when your mother was leaving a cow home and had a frightened look on her face after the Germans bombed our town. Then the Germans took our village and took Nina to Germany. My father has a whole story of his own, but I don't have time to tell it here. The end of the war began to creep up in 1945, and the Russians were coming in from the east, and the American bombers were carpet bombing all day long. The British bombers came by night. It was a firestorm war that went on for weeks over all that part of Germany. Mount de Bourgh was a strategic city with a lot of fuel was stored. My mother recalls going to the bomb shelters over and over again, and she said there was a pecking order. The Germans were to go first into the bomb shelters and then anybody else who could get in. So sometimes you could get in, sometimes you couldn't, and actually after a while there was like, you know, who cares? We die, we die. It was like watching the fireworks at night, you know, just watching all the bombing going on around them. The bunkers, the bomb shelters, were built in zigzag fashion, zigzag design, so that if a bomb made a direct hit on one of the pieces, only the people in that area would be killed, but not people in adjoining areas. My mother remembers many times that a friend or a worker at the factory that she was at, where a number of them would die in the bombing runs by the British and the Americans. That was something that was very standard, but they became quite inure to it, and again, they just sat sometimes outside and just watched all this happening around them. If they would get hit, then I guess that they would get hit. The Germans, when they saw the immense thing towards Magdeburg and the Elbe River runs through Magdeburg, north-south, or I guess it flows north to the North Sea, was a major strategic location with a number of bridges. The Americans were bombing the bridges, and what they did, what the Germans did, was to put these austar fighters, these kids, onto the bridges as human shields. So when the Americans came, you know, it was like, if you want to kill these people, just to bomb our bridges. My mother was in a line to go walk onto one of these bridges, and my dad at that time was able to sneak her out of the line and take her out of that and take her to a farm where he was at. He was an escapee, and that's a whole different story that I don't have time to tell here, and kept her until the war was over. The Americans finally rolled in. There was finally a huge relief. Germany was in chaos. The Germans themselves, the German population, was waiting for the war to end, and there was just confusion.

And when the Americans came, they were passing out chocolate, they were passing out hams, you know, the Americans rolling in. It was a whole different American spirit than anything that they had experienced. There was great joy for a couple of days. They wake up a few mornings later, and all of a sudden they don't hear the English language. They're hearing Russian. What's going on?

All of a sudden the whole spirit changes. What happened was this. As the war came to an end, Roosevelt and Stalin, in the Potsdam agreement, agreed to what the boundaries would be of Eastern Europe or Europe after the war. So no matter how far the Americans moved to the east, or how far the Russians moved to the west, the boundaries were predetermined. Under patent, American tanks rolled way into Czechoslovakia, but they had to pull all the way back. Well, the same was true in Namad-de-Burgh. They, the Americans, rolled into Namad-de-Burgh and actually went all the way on into Berlin. What the agreement was is that East Germans' boundaries would be 100 miles west of Berlin. So now my parents, who were not married at that time, they just knew each other, find themselves with Russians who are hostile towards them. They're treating them as collaborators with the Germans. They're treating them as traitors. All these were were 15-16 year old kids when the war started three years before, who were taken forcibly to work in the German factories.

My mother, my dad, were interrogated incessantly, and they were put into what they were called transition camps, low-security transition camps, as they were being interrogated.