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Walter Fast was born in Vienna not long after the First World War and as a child he lived through the political turmoil of Central Europe, which culminated with Hitler's annexation of Austria. As was common at the time, his parents came from large families, so he had 25 aunts and uncles, with their children as cousins. The families and his life were decimated by the Nazi occupation and he was first exiled alone to England at the age of fifteen, then deported to Australia, before being allowed to return and join the British Army, never again seeing his mother and more than half of his aunts, uncles and cousins. His name changed to Walter Foster, he married and had children of his own, who grew up in England hearing anecdotal stories of different episodes of young Walter's life, of his family and the tumultuous political history of mid-century Europe. When his children provided him with grandchildren, he was persuaded to re-tell these anecdotes for the benefit of the younger generation and he decided to assemble them into an autobiographical book, which gives a clear picture of survival through adversity of one of many hundreds of thousands of victims of the events following the rise of Hitler to power in Europe. It was his hope that keeping such stories alive and re-telling them to successive generations would contribute to a better awareness in society of the fundamental need for decency, respect and peaceful co-existence, preventing the likelihood of any re-occurrence of events similar to the Holocaust of 1938 to 1945.
