I was born as Werner Rindsberg in 1924 and raised in Mainstockheim, a village near Wuerzburg, Bavaria. My father Siegfried was a second-generation winemaker and wine merchant. Until 1933, our 900-population community provided a peaceful and pleasant life for the well-integrated 25-30 Jewish families. My father was a founder of the local soccer club, and I was on the boys' team.

All this changed quickly after the Nazis came to power. On Kristallnacht in 1938 all Jewish men and older boys were arrested and put into the county jail, I for 3 days at age 14, while my father and other men were sent to Dachau for 4-6 weeks. Even before, Jewish businesses were harassed, and I was kicked out of the local school.

The events of Kristallnacht and my father's incarceration in Dachau made it very clear that our worst fears were becoming reality. My father would never talk about his experiences in Dachau as he was warned that he would be brought right back there if he ever told about it. I was too young and do not remember the details but, somehow, my parents became aware that Belgium was then accepting Jewish children from Germany as refugees.

In June 1939 they put me on a train to Brussels after equipping me with the necessary clothing and personal items. It must have been heart-wrenching for them because in those days 15-year-olds did not travel alone and certainly not to foreign countries to live with strangers. This is probably why my two younger brothers Herbert and Kurt, then 13 and 11 years old, were kept at home. I found out later that I had been part of a children’s refugee rescue program under which Belgium accepted nearly 1000 German and Austrian Jewish refugee children. Many were even younger than my brothers, so sending them could have saved their lives, too.

When I arrived in Brussels, I was brought to Home Speyer in the suburb of Anderlecht, a refugee center of about 50 boys aged 6 to 16. It was sponsored by a Jewish women's group who regularly took us on outings in their fancy cars and also took care of special needs, such as medical and dental care. The director of our home and staff took care of us, and I was enrolled in a Belgian vocational school to prepare to learn a trade.

For a young boy from a small Bavarian farm village, Brussels was an exciting city with large buildings, department stores, beautiful parks, interesting museums, and excursions to the beautiful Belgian countryside. And there was no more anti-Semitic persecution. By September 1939 as the Germans invaded Poland, war erupted in Europe, and I remember a feeling of tension and foreboding in spite of the boastful songs and radio broadcasts by the Western allies, promising to stop further Nazi conquests.

I will always remember May 10, 1940, when, suddenly, German planes flew over Brussels and radio news reported that the Wehrmacht had invaded Belgium. Two or three days later Mme. Elka Frank, the director of a Jewish girls' refugee home in one of Brussels’ northern suburbs and Mr. Gaspard DeWaay, our home's director, learned that space had been secured on a southbound refugee freight train for their young residents. We packed what we could carry and took the streetcar to the train station. Late that night two of the freight cars were filled by the 100 boys and girls from our two children's homes as the train began its journey to France. The German army arrived in Brussels just two days later.

Our train meandered in a wide and seemingly endless arc through northwestern, western, and central France for days. Five days later we arrived in a small station near Toulouse and were unloaded. On the way, our train was bombed, and we encountered other trains filled with wounded soldiers who had been evacuated from the fast-moving battlefronts. Somehow we obtained food and water from generous French people wherever the train stopped.

From the small train station, trucks took us to a tiny village, named Seyre, about 40 miles south of Toulouse. There we were lodged in a huge barn which belonged to an agricultural property, owned by the de Capele family. On a visit with the aging Mr. de Capele at his nearby chateau a few years ago, I asked him how this site was selected as our camp. He informed me that as war was declared in 1939, the French government was researching and designating properties and locations for refugees, in case the Germans invaded France. This is how he got on the list and we became the occupants of his barn.

It lacked everything as a place to live or sleep. No beds, no mattresses, no running water, no sanitary facilities, no cooking equipment. Yet here we were, almost 100 children with only what we could carry in clothing and personal belongings. Our refugee home directors and staff members had come with us from Belgium and did their best to organize and feed their charges. The older boys and girls (I among them) became the caretakers and teachers for the younger ones. Food was rationed and scarce. At first, we received meager financial support which the Vichy French government paid to all refugees. A few months later our Belgian camp director and his wife returned to Brussels and Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Frank (she had directed the Brussels girls' home) took charge.

With the Germans in control of northern France and the Vichy regime of Marechal Petain in southern France known to be anti-Semitic, we were again in constant danger of denunciation and possible arrest. Everyone knew about the Gurs detention camp not too many miles away. Thus it was forbidden to speak German, not an easy rule because many of the children did not speak French very well.

As life got a little organized, Mr. Frank, who had previously worked as an agricultural specialist in Palestine, got the older boys part-time work helping local farmers, the older teenagers taught and supervised the younger ones in more or less organized classes, and rudimentary amenities were built or purchased for the kitchen and for doing the laundry. The summer of 1940 was not nearly as difficult as the harsh winter to follow, since we lacked heat and adequate clothing. With inadequate food and primitive sanitary conditions, disease, skin lesions, lice, and other consequences affected nearly everyone.

By the fall of 1940 Mme. Marguerite Goldschmidt-Brodsky, the President of the Belgian Committee who had also fled to Vichy France, managed to get the assistance of the Secours Suisse aux Enfants  (the Swiss Children's Aid Society, which was part of the Swiss Red Cross). Their Toulouse-based director, Maurice Dubois and his American-born wife Elinor, assumed responsibility for the camp, supplied better bedding, furniture, and Swiss powdered milk and cheese. The Dubois also decided to move our camp to another location.

They found and rented an abandoned 15th century chateau, the Chateau de La Hille near Foix, about 60 miles south of Seyre. It lacked running water and sanitary facilities. In February-March 1941 the older boys were moved to La Hille and dug wells and latrines and otherwise put the falling-down property in shape for the move of the colony by early spring.

La Hille also was in a remote farm area where a colony of Jewish refugee children was less likely to be detected. A few months into 1941 the Secours Suisse sent Mlle. Roesli Naef, one of its own staff, as administrator to replace Mr. Frank. We had managed to survive a year under very minimal circumstances and all of us learned a lot about survival, self-reliance, and cooperation for the common good. There is no doubt that we all profited from the experience in later life, although there surely are better and more pleasant ways of growing up and learning about life.

Through the efforts of my mother's siblings (all of whom had emigrated to New York City) and the New York-based HIAS organization, I was able to leave France in August 1941 for New York, where I arrived via Spain and Portugal in September of 1941. USA visas were almost impossible to get, as was passage on the few available transatlantic ships. I've never learned how I became one of the lucky few. Certainly my relatives, themselves refugees from Germany, had no contacts or connections with US government officials.

In New York I worked as a tool-and-diemaker's apprentice and attended high school at night. Bernard Malamud, later a famous novelist, was my English teacher. Two years later, in 1943, I was drafted into the US Army and was offered US citizenship. During naturalization, I changed my name to Walter Reed, wishing to be American in name as well as in fact. My Army unit arrived in England some months before the invasion of Normandy and my battalion went ashore about a week after the first landings.

In France I was transferred to the Military Intelligence Service and served in the 95th infantry division under General Patton. Our MIS team's main task was to interrogate German prisoners and civilians near the front lines. After the Armistice, I served with the US Military Government’s counter-intelligence section (among my assignments was to identify and remove University of Marburg faculty who had been active Nazi Party Members--I was then 21 years old and barely had a high school diploma).

Out of the service in 1946, I pursued my education at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and a career in public relations. My determined aim was to build a new life and to definitely not be a continuing captive of my past. From 1958 until retirement in 1989, I was director of public relations for the National Automatic Merchandising Association, based in Chicago. I knew that my parents and brothers had been deported and murdered, although not yet how and where. Because of my interest and focus in becoming an American, not a refugee, I lost all contact with my companions from Brussels and France for the next 50 years.

As a result of the interest generated when I was interviewed for the Spielberg Shoah project in 1996 and some discoveries about the fate of my family (and my advancing age, I am 86 now), my wife and I decided to revisit Seyre and LaHille in 1997 with two of our three sons during a 3-week vacation in France. To my surprise, I learned that my wartime companions had held two reunions in the previous 10 years, in Israel and near La Hille, and that they had been actively, but unsuccessfully, looking for me.

Two days after we visited La Hille, two of my former companions (one from Detroit, the other from England) arrived there to commemorate one of our comrades who was killed as a member of the Maquis at age 16, and they found my business card. Ever since, I have been reunited with dozens of my old friends and learned a compelling series of tales of their escapes in World War II and their lives afterward. Currently I am researching archives here and in Europe to write a comprehensive book about the history of the Children of La Hille.

Of the 100 or so youngsters, then aged 4 to 18, nearly 90 survived the war but 14 were deported, a number to Auschwitz. In the last 7 years I have learned their stories, and they are as dramatic and gripping as any others that have been published.

For example, in 1942, a year after I left, the French militia arrested all the boys and girls over 16 and imprisoned them at the nearby Le Vernet internment camp. Soon thereafter, all the inmates of Le Vernet were transported to Drancy and from there to the extermination camps. Yet the intervention of our Swiss Camp Director via Mr. Maurice Dubois in Toulouse (the Swiss official who was in charge of all the Swiss-managed refugee camps in southern France) procured the release of all my camp companions before the train left. Mr. Dubois had gone to Vichy and, with help from the Swiss ambassador, threatened the French Interior Minister with withdrawal of all Swiss aid to French children if he didn't order the release of my camp mates from Le Vernet. The official gave in and my friends were released. All other Jewish Le Vernet prisoners were deported and murdered.

After this rescue, our Swiss camp director encouraged the 16-year-olds to hide or flee across the Swiss and Spanish borders. With the help of our Swiss camp counselors many succeeded, but some failed.

Their stories, their courageous attempts to escape, and some of the failures are documented in several books and films about "The Children of La Hille." In 1998, my wife and I arranged a reunion of the La Hille survivors in Chicago, with over 30 persons attending. In September 2000, we organized a larger one at the original sites in France. Thirty of 55 known survivors and more than 70 persons, including family members and friends from 7 countries, participated, as did hundreds of French citizens, school children, and government officials.

It is interesting to note that nearly all of our surviving companions feel a strong bond with each other, even though our lives have taken many different paths. And many have strong ties to the places and the population where we found temporary refuge during these dangerous and turbulent years of our youth.