Chapter 2: The Prisoner

Frederick Albert had never wanted to be a soldier.

Born in 1925 in Oppeln, Germany, raised in the cultural richness of Vienna by an upper-middle-class family, Frederick was an artist at heart. He painted. He loved jazz—that forbidden American music that Hitler had banned as degenerate. Late at night, he would sneak his record player under his covers and lose himself in the improvisations of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, imagining a world bigger and freer than the one closing in around him.

His father was a different story—a veteran of World War I, an engineer, cold and distant, more interested in German nationalism than in his sensitive son who would rather paint than march. Frederick had joined the paratroopers for one reason only: maybe, just maybe, if he proved himself brave enough, his father would finally look at him with something other than disappointment.