George Hahn

The Lottery George Hahn

These memoirs cover the life ofthe author from his youth in pre-World War II Vienna, his escape from theGermans, a coming-of-age period in Sacramento Californiato his return to Europe, first in the American army andlater as an internationally known scientist.¿After the German take-over of Austria,life for Viennese Jews deteriorated rapidly.¿Personal betrayals, arrest of his father by the Gestapo, the pogrom of Kristallnacht and repeated beatings by young Nazi hoodlumswas the progression of events that led the boy to leave Viennafor Holland on what has becomeknown as a Kindertransport.¿ There he spent almost a year in a camp forrefugee children.¿ Just after the beginning of WWIIan almost unbelievable bureaucratic fluke allowed the author and his immediatefamily to emigrate to the United States.¿They settled in Sacramento, California,then a small, provincial town with a tightly knit society concerned almostexclusively with its immediate environment.¿The author, an outsider, became a juvenile delinquent who rebelledagainst all authority, father, school, police.¿ After a brush with the localMafia, followed by employment as a crane operator in the local railroad yards,he entered the US Army.¿ A short stint asan infantry replacement in Italywas followed by training as a paratrooper and transfer to the CounterIntelligence Corps, where he became involved in the arrest and interrogation ofSS and Gestapo personnel.¿ He returned to Americawhere he became a biophysicist.¿ Shortlyafter his appointment to the Stanford faculty, he was invited to spend a summerat a Dutch scientific laboratory.¿ Hefound the camp where he had spent a year as a child.¿ There he was told that probably all the otherchildren, those who had been his friends and those who were only acquaintances,were killed by the Germans.¿ Why is itthat he survived?¿ What made himspecial?¿ The author tries to deal with thisconundrum that occupies every survivor of cataclysms such as war or genocide.