Preface

My mother, Margot Nicolaus, wrote this manuscript at my urging for the benefit of her two grandsons, Fred and Jack Nicolaus.  A small portion, Mosaic 46, having to do with liberation in 1945, was previously published in a local newspaper.  I found the manuscript among her effects after her death in 1997.

I am grateful to Prof. Hartmut Ludwig of the Humboldt University in Berlin for his inquiry about my parents in connection with a history he is writing about the Bekennende Kirche, the anti-Nazi underground section of the Protestant Church in Germany, to which my parents belonged. Ludwig's inquiry stimulated me to gather together my mother's papers and photographs and to put them up on the web, where not only my parents' grandsons -- my sons -- but also other interested readers can see them. The Appendix contains a selection of letters from my father that somehow survived, including one that was intercepted by the censorship and led to my father's arrest and imprisonment by the Gestapo.   -- Martin Nicolaus