Hell to Pay

You can take the princess out of the palace, but you can’t take the palace out of the princess. Running for your life is never easy. Doing it at age 16, after losing your family, your friends, and your home, with three-quarters of a priceless emerald parure sewn into the sleeves of a battered old Army greatcoat and your beloved city in flames behind you, is harder still. Why did I do it? Because I had no choice. The Red Army was knocking at Dresden’s door, and the Jewish family hiding in our cellars had been marked for transportation to...

You can take the princess out of the palace, but you can’t take the palace out of the princess. Running for your life is never easy. Doing it at age 16, after losing your family, your friends, and your home, with three-quarters of a priceless emerald parure sewn into the sleeves of a battered old Army greatcoat and your beloved city in flames behind you, is harder still. Why did I do it? Because I had no choice. The Red Army was knocking at Dresden’s door, and the Jewish family hiding in our cellars had been marked for transportation to the camps. So we stripped the yellow stars from their clothing, hid our identity documents, and struck out west through the chaos with nothing to eat, nowhere to stay, and no plan at all. I’d left Germany behind all those decades ago, so why was I back in Dresden now, at the age of 94? I was on a quest, you see. My mother’s emerald tiara might still lie hidden in those cellars, and I … wanted it back? Wanted to show my beloved granddaughter the place where I’d grown up? Wanted to remember the wounded GI I’d pulled off the street and finally married over the objections of almost everybody? Our motivations can be unclear even to ourselves. But I’d chosen to come here, so I was going to do what I’d always done. I was going to do my best.