I was born in 1946 at l'Hôtel Dieu in Lyon, France shortly after the end of World War II. My parents had married in summer 1941 at the beginning of the war. They both came from very modest families. My father's parents owned a bakery in a 300-inhabitant village, Parcieux. My mother's parents owned a small family farm in another village, Saint-Denis les Bourg. My father came back from his last assignment with the American Army in Marseilles and started a family among the devastation of the war. How could they have anticipated that their child would move to America, marry a German woman (the arch-enemy at the time), and become a successful high-tech executive in California?My father liked serving with the American military. He always spoke very positively about America. As a result, I grew up with this notion that America was great, and Americans were terrific people. Although the path from Lyon to California would be hard to predict, it is at least conceivable based upon the admiration of everything American after the end of the war. But how could they have predicted that eventually I would marry a German woman and become an engineering executive in California?The first few years of my life, I remember the smell and the glow of the oil lamp during the frequent power failures. We would sit around the kitchen table, and my parents would recount endless anecdotes about their many narrow escapes during the war. My father was drafted in January 1940 at the age of twenty in the French army. A few months later, in May 1940, Germany attacked France and after six weeks of intense battling France lost the war against Germany. My father spent the rest of his national obligation clearing new roads in the French Alps. At the end of his draft, the war was still raging. My parent's main preoccupations in Lyon were finding food, running to underground shelters whenever an allied air strike bombed the nearby railroad station and dodging the German raids that took place anytime the resistance killed a German officer. My father used all kinds of tricks, with the help of his doctor, to pretend that he was too sick to go to Zwangsarbeit (forced labor) in Germany.My parents told me that one evening, upon exiting a movie theater, everyone was rounded up by the German SS. My father grabbed my mother's arm as she was about to run away and would surely have been shot. They told me about my grandfather smuggling a big sack of potatoes and some pork meat from his farm. Like many farmers, he raised a few pigs, that provided inexpensive meat and gave him the satisfaction of killing Adolf every year. He named his pigs during WWII after Adolf Hitler.