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The World — and especially Europe — was at a crossroads in mid-1939, a crossroads that were to prove “the war to end all wars” one of the most mistaken pledges of all time. My father, Arnold Rozentals, then a 17-year-old living on Latvia’s Baltic Coast not far from Ventspils, was also at a crossroads — a young man about to embark on an education that saved him from almost certain death on the back blocks of World War II and eventually propelled him to a new life in Australia. It isn’t a Boys’ Own story of VC-winning gallantry, but it is a story of how ordinary people survived the maelstrom ... a great human story, and, in many parts, a great adventure story — John Rozentals

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