His Story Is My Story

Elke McKee was born in 1944 during the Second World War in a small German village near Dresden. After the end of the war this area became part of Soviet occupied East Germany. At age eleven she and her mother escaped to West Germany where Elke met her father for the first time. He was one of the few prisoners of war who survived ten years of brutal Soviet labor camps and was finally released in 1955. This experience shaped her entire future as a free spirit with the strong desire for freedom.At nineteen she moved to England and later to the US where she travelled as a flight attendant all over the world. In 1994 Elke founded a Montessori preschool in California and worked there for twenty years. Elke is retired and lives with her husband of thirty years in Rocklin, California, dedicating much of her time to her lifelong painting hobby and socializing with people from various interesting backgrounds.As a retiree she also finally found the time to write down the stories her father had dictated on tape about his life in the Russian prison camps. Authentic and interwoven with episodes from her own life, her book is a testimonial of the horrific outcome of war and how the post-war generation had to deal with it.