My father was a young boy during World War II. He grew up in a small village in the Netherlands just south of the river Maas, which, parallel to two arms of the river Rhine, flows from East to West, cutting the country in the half. In 1944, while the Allied Forces were moving north, approaching the Netherlands from Belgium after having landed in Normandy, the barn behind his home served as a make-shift German army hospital, while their commanders took up headquarters in the family’s living room. When the German soldiers left, the barn filled up with wounded Allied soldiers instead, and the German commanders at his dinner table were replaced with their English speaking counterparts.