When my parents, my sister and I finally left the refugee camp in Germany after the war, we were allowed to bring very little -- only what would fit into a steamer trunk. The problem was that we couldn't afford to buy one. Not many of the families living in the camps could, so my father did what other people did. He and a friend got together and built his own.

Someplace, somehow, they found a hammer, a saw, nails and some metal stripping, and they set to work. Getting the wood wasn’t a problem. They got it from the walls of the barracks they were living in. It was one of the old German concentration camps barracks that had been converted to living space for the refugees, the Displaced Persons, and this place didn’t have finished plaster or anything like that. If you wanted a board, you could just pull it off of the wall, and that’s what my father did.

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