Excerpt: The First Eleven Years

It all started on April 12th, 1950, the day that I was born to Irene and Gunter Sturmer. I was born at home in my parents’ apartment in Holzminden, Germany. It wasn’t uncommon for children to be born at home in order to save money that would otherwise have been spent on hospital care.
Looking back at it now, it seems odd that my mother was only eighteen years old when she bore me. I later understood that pregnancy and a subsequent marriage to my father was her only way out of an untenable situation from her home life. Her mother, my grandmother, who later would raise me, was a jealous, vengeful woman who solved her problems, real or imagined, with corporal punishment meted out unto her daughter and later unto me.
While my parents were together, though, they lived in a one-room apartment in a large building on a main street in Holzminden which was and still remains the equivalent to a county seat in Germany. The room was not very large but functioned well enough for a young family. The door was opposite the two windows of the apartment, under one of which my crib was positioned. To the right of the door on the adjacent wall was my parents’ bed that they could separate from the rest of the room by pulling a curtain across the front of the bed that was fastened by hooks on the ceiling. At the opposite wall to their bed, my parents had a small kitchenette that was nothing more than a double-burner hot plate and some dishes on a table. They did not own a refrigerator which, to many Germans was still a luxury in 1950.