Weeds Like Us

Book excerpt: The uprooting of seven million civilians - women, children, and elderly men - from their homes in the German provinces of East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia following World War II is largely unknown in the United States. Weeds Like Us is a gripping true adventure story about the author's own East Prussian family. The author's earliest years were spent in relative comfort on his grandfather's farm in East Prussia during World War II. For him, life in Hitler's Germany was the natural order of things. Then, in January 1945, just after the author's seventh birthday, the Russians rolled into East Prussia. Full of unexpected twists and turns, Weeds Like Us tells the story of what happened over the next six years, as the author's family tried to make its way safely to the West.