The Swastika Tatto is about a German U-boat crewman who is captured by the Americans during WWII and sent to a POW camp in Arizona where he labors picking cotton for a Jewish farmer and comes face-to-face with the bigotry and intolerance he learned as a Hitler Youth. Through long months of internment, his only joy is his friendship with the farmer’s son who shows him the true meaning of humanity, individualism, and democracy and just as his repatriation to Germany is in sight, his camp bunk-mate is brutally murdered and he realizes he is the next target of the hard-core Nazis who really control the Arizona prison camp.
Writing has been my passion since I sat down at my mother's old Remington typewriter at the age of ten, pecking away in the cozy kitchen nook of my grandmother’s house in Los Angeles. Since then, I’ve worked as a reporter and editor for small community newspapers in Southern California and Arizona; but my best beat was as a stringer for the Los Angeles Times Ventura County Bureau (no longer in existence) for a number of years. It was there, under the tutelage of a great editor that I really learned to write. Since then, I’ve moved into the realm of fiction with Sedona: City of Refugees and then historical fiction with The Swastika Tattoo, a book about a real German POW camp located near Phoenix during WWII. That book received an honorable mention in Reader's Favorite international book contest. My newspaper column “Gerrymandering” received a first place award from the National Newspaper Association. While awards mean one’s work is recognized and appreciated by judges, nothing thrills me more than having someone tell me they have enjoyed my books. I have recently finished my memoir, Vision of a Happy Life, and plan to bring a few chapters onto Bublish.
Rudolf hates Arizona. It is far different from the beautiful greenery of his beloved Germany. His alienation, of course, also has to do with his internal conflicts.
Book Excerpt
The Swastika Tattoo
Rudolf looked up at the darkening sky.
He loathed Camp Papago Park, not only because he was a prisoner of
war. It was more than that, so much more. The camp was incredibly
bleak for Rudolf’s German soul. His vision was accustomed to the
green of his native land that stretched as far as the eye could
see—pastures heavy with wheat, rapeseed, rye or barley, and forests
laced with wide flowing rivers. Rudolf psyche ached desperately for
home, for his beautiful Bremen located on the picturesque Weser
River. Here, in the middle of the Arizona desert, he felt as if he
inhabited an alien world, particularly with those scarred, ugly
hills that sat adjacent to the camp. The arid landscape of sand,
cactus, and stark rubble-strewn peaks made him irritable. The only
comfort Rudolf could summon was that he was imprisoned with his own
countrymen in this strange land.
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