I’m naked. My head is shaved. I’m running for my life between endless rows of small barracks, fierce barking dogs biting at my heels. I turn and look. Behind the dogs the same SS guards who shaved my head are chasing me. I know they want to catch me and throw me into the gas chamber. They are gaining on me. I keep running as fast as I can, but they keep gaining on me. I glance behind as one of the guards has raised his pistol and is about to strike me. I gasp for air, and find myself bolting up in my bed, a silent scream waking me from the recurring nightmare.

The barracks in the nightmare are the same ones I saw on a weekend excursion in the spring of my junior year of high school in Germany, when my father drove my family to Dachau, the infamous concentration camp in Bavaria. On the drive through the German countryside, he told us the story of how he liberated a concentration camp for Russian POWs that his reconnaissance tank battalion stumbled upon in its race across Germany during the war. The experience was horrifying for him. I could hear the emotion in his voice as he recounted the story.

What I saw at Dachau shattered my sixteen-year-old mind. Large empty rooms held the ghostly spirits of Jews standing naked while being showered with the deadly gas made in the building next to my high school. Nausea overcame me when I saw the brick ovens that were used for cremating the bodies. The little museum displayed the shoes, clothing, suitcases, pictures and other personal belongings of the murdered people. Hot tears of outrage and grief flowed down my cheeks. “Why,” I asked my father, “did the Germans want to kill the Jewish people? The Jews didn’t do anything wrong.” My father tried his best to explain to me about scapegoats and envy, jealousy and fear but it still didn’t make any sense.

I felt an inexplicable identification with Jewish people. Jewish history became my obsession. I read every book I could find on the subject of the Holocaust, such as Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, The Diary of Young Girl by Anne Frank, Night by Elie Wiesel, Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi, and many more. Even after all the reading I did and the people I talked to, I still couldn’t make sense of the hideous persecution of an entire ethnic group.

My family moved to Frankfurt, Germany in the fall of 1964 after my father received his orders to pack up and ship out. Frankfurt would be his last assignment as a brigadier general in the U.S. Army, before returning to his roots in academia.

It was a shock to leave the States right when our country was in the middle of a social revolution. The civil rights march on Washington, Martin Luther’s speech, the arrival of the Beatles, the protest songs, demonstrations against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in the escalating Vietnam War, JFK’s funeral—I was right there in the heart of the action, living with my family just outside of DC during freshman and sophomore years of high school. The words to Bob Dylan’s newly released album, The Times They Are a-Changin’ rattled around in my brain, bursting forth into song when I was alone in the shower.

That exciting world came to an abrupt end when my parents, my younger brother, John, and I boarded the ocean liner S.S. America. My four older siblings waved good-bye from land as we left port and steamed our way across the Atlantic to Germany.

We moved to a house outside of Edwards Caserne, the nearby army base located just beyond the city limits. My father was the assistant division commander of the area.

Our new home stood on a curving row of identical, square, beige buildings in an isolated enclave where the officers and their families were housed. All around us were vast, empty fields of weeds, wildflowers and wild asparagus plants that my mother dug out of the soil and added to our meals. An old, abandoned apple orchard hid me out of sight and earshot while I experimented with smoking Gauloise cigarettes and belted out with all my heart the soulful French songs I had memorized by Edith Piaf.

On the far side of the fields I could see the trolley tracks, my route to freedom into downtown Frankfurt.

Most of the city of Frankfurt had been leveled by bombs during World War II. The city was rebuilt with drab high-rise buildings devoid of architectural charm. Frankfurt became known as a banking center.

I liked to roam around the older sections of the city that had escaped the bombing, like Old Sachsenhausen with its narrow cobblestone lanes and colorful half-timbered seventeenth century houses on the southern side of the Main River. On the other side of the river in the Innenstadt I found Goethe’s house.

The weather in Frankfurt was usually overcast with frequent rain. The city looked gray and somber.

During the week, the school bus stopped in front of my house to pick up the kids on my street and take us to school. Frankfurt American High School was large, full of military brats from the surrounding army and air force bases.

The high school was located in full view of the IG Farben building, former corporate headquarters for production of the pesticide Zyklon B, used during the Holocaust in the gas chambers. Each day the school bus passed the sinister building, I felt a cold shiver run through me. I wondered why no one else on the bus seemed to notice or care.

The massive building complex sat atop a grassy knoll on the far side of a wide stretch of lawn that separated it from the high school. The ugliness of the building was mitigated by extensive trees, bushes, and flower gardens where I escaped during the lunch hour to talk about books, philosophy and the meaning of life with my friend, John O., a fellow misfit from AP English class.

While being a conscientious, hardworking high school student with top grades, I led a double life in Germany. Every chance I could get, I jumped onto the trolley near our house and left the American enclave to explore the intriguing world around me. Watching football and drinking beer with my classmates had no appeal.

My father told me about the post-war Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. A continuation of those trials for less notorious war criminals had been relocated to Frankfurt a few years earlier and were still going on in 1965, during my junior year of high school.

Now that Jewish people had become part of my psyche, there was no way I was going to miss this historic event. The trials took place during the workweek. That meant I had to skip school and just hope I wouldn’t get caught.

On my first trip to the trials, the trolley conductor pointed out the window and said, “Fräulein, that’s city hall, the building you’re looking for. But it’s being used as a courthouse for the trials. Did you know it’s forbidden to go in there without a special pass?”

The trolley stopped in front of city hall, a nondescript, modern glass and brick building.

“Yes. I know that. What time does the last trolley go back to Im Klingenfeld Strasse?” I asked as I stepped down onto the pavement. I had to make sure I got home the same time the school bus stopped in front of my house. I didn’t want my parents to know I skipped school. That would mean big trouble. The general’s daughter is supposed to be setting a good example.

I got off the trolley and headed to the courthouse. I waited until the person watching the door was distracted and then snuck into the building and quickly made my way to the gallery where the rows of seats were filled with mostly middle-aged Jews.

A few people looked over at me briefly with questioning looks on their faces. I felt self-conscious because I knew some people might mistake me for a German fräulein with my long, thick braid down my back. After all, I was half Swiss. I made a point of whispering in clearly articulated English, “Hello. Is it all right if I sit with you?” The woman near me gave me a barely perceptible smile and, with her hand, motioned me to sit down next to her. I felt a sense of solidarity with the group.

There was a long wait. No one stirred. The room was deathly silent. Eventually some men filed into the courthouse followed by guards. I could sense the collective breath-holding of the people around me. I craned my neck trying to spot the evil, monstrous SS officers but didn’t see them. I just saw some ordinary looking men standing in the front of the courtroom in white shirts and dark pants. They looked like they could have been the guys who ran the grocery store on the corner or the hardware store. One of the men was slightly chubby with red cheeks, just like the man who took my ticket on the trolley.

But, when the first of them was called to take the stand, it slowly dawned on me that these harmless looking men were the monsters who had done heinous deeds at Auschwitz, the ones I had read about. I strained to look into their faces to see if I could recognize evil.

My mind began to spin with questions. How could these ordinary-looking people turn into such monsters, capable of pure sadism and cruelty? Did their wives and children know what they had done? Surely there must be some good Germans in this country, but how can I tell who are the good ones? What were the good Germans doing during the war? What makes a good person turn into a bad person? Could I become a bad person given the right circumstances? I’d rather die than hurt somebody. But do I really know that for sure? 

Hours passed listening to witnesses describe horrific acts by the defendants. The woman next to me cried quietly into her embroidered handkerchief during much of the testimony.

The trial turned out to be mostly a visual experience for me. It was hard to hear the conversation all the way on the other side of the large courtroom. And when I was able to hear snippets of the interrogation, the legalese was beyond my comfortably conversational German.

I looked at my watch. I had to leave the courthouse so I wouldn’t get home too late and make my parents suspicious. I shook the hand of the woman next to me and said, with tears in my eyes, how sorry I was for her suffering.

I caught the next trolley in front of the courthouse. I looked at the ticket taker, the same one who looked like the SS guard on trial. I wondered if this ordinary-appearing man was capable of unspeakable cruelty, given the right circumstances. I looked deeply into his face. There was no way to tell. What was he doing during the war? Maybe he was a regular soldier, a young man just following orders.

I got off the trolley at Im Klingenfeld, and ran across the empty fields, arriving home out of breath, just in time for supper.