Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany; by Hans J. Massaquoi

There is generally little heard about how "other" people fared in pre-war Germany, in the darkness that enveloped the nation. Here is one window, with an astonishing tale of a boy who was born and raised German, with his father a member of the diplomatic core of an African nation with a distinct class structure of its own.

This boy grew up taking the difference of skin colour as casually as that of colours of clothes, and his mates as well as his teachers did nothing to break that either, until such time as the distiction was no longer invisible so to speak. He gives a moving description of how he was a sudden hero himself by association when an African American won the gold medal at an Olympic event in Munich, and he felt proud of his other race, and his classmates asked him questions about the Olympic hero as distant from him as from them.

Survived through the war he went in serach of his other roots in Africa, and tried to find a life - and eventually migrated to US. He compares the two nations, his first and his last, and no surprises there, the last does not come off much better than the first.

His mother staunchly tells him to not allow anyone to tell him he is less than anyone, ever - and not on the basis of his being half German, either. He is a child born in love, and that is a strength never lost. This keeps him from sinking in a morass that many cannot help drowning in.