Having lived through the 12 nightmare years of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, being aware as a child and teenager that something horrible was happening to the Jewish people in Germany and Europe during the Holocaust; being liberated by Gen. William Simpson’s Ninth U.S. Army in April 1945; then another 12 years of life under Stalinist communist rule in East Germany; experiencing in 1948-49, under President Harry S. Truman, the Berlin airlift – “America’s Finest Hour,” as Andrei Cherny called it in his recent book “The Candy Bombers;” arriving in the new world in 1958; experiencing America -a “shining city on a hill” – under President Ronald Reagan, the fall of the Berlin Wall; the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism; and now, Barack Obama, our 44th president and leader of the free world …

America. What a country!

Klaus D. Kuck, Lewiston