Helmut Lemke was born February 3, 1926 in a village in East Prussia.  His father was a Great War veteran who had served as a medic on the eastern front, and he never recovered from the shellshock and horrors of that war, taking his life when Helmut was just 13.  Helmut grew up alongside his sisters, and as a young boy he witnessed the dawn of the Nazi era firsthand, and he recalls the Brown Shirts and monumental events like Kristallnacht.  He also took part in the Hitler Youth program, which was mandatory in the prewar period.  Helmut was drafted into the army when he was 17; he hoped to join the Luftwaffe but was assigned to the Hermann Goering Panzer Division.  Training took place in Holland, and from there he was sent to the Russian Front for the last year of the war, where the Germans were in retreat.  Helmut was wounded while on the front, and he ended up in a military hospital, and that is where he was when the war came to an end.  He returned to a Germany in chaos, and he looked to get his family back together:  one of his sisters had gone missing, and his mother was in the Soviet zone of occupation.  After much difficulty in Poland, where authorities and train stations were a constant source of difficulty, he did succeed in that, and the family started to put the pieces of their lives back together again.  Michael recommenced his education and won a scholarship to go to an American university, and while in the United States he embarked on a hitchhiking trip full of interesting adventures and encounters, to be followed by a return to Germany and an engineering degree.  Along the way Helmut met a young woman, and they ended up together in Vancouver, where they found their own way in the postwar world.