My family moved from Rangoon to Rawalpindi during World War II. My father was born in Lahore in 1946. Those were difficult times.

My own family and thousands of other Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. It took our nation over 40 years to apologize.

A lot of my father's family in Canada volunteered in the First World War because they saw it as a war that was defending the mother country.

I was born in Yangzhou, China, two years after World War II ended. I was 5 when my family escaped to Taiwan. Eight years later, we moved to Japan.

My mother's family was among the 120,000 people of Japanese descent on the West Coast who were dispatched to internment camps during World War II.

I was born in 1923 into a middle class Jewish family in Vienna, a few years after the end of World War I, which was disastrous from the Austrian point of view.

But I'm a daughter of the American revolution, my grandpa fought in World War II, I have lots of family members who were in the military, and it really just was part of growing up for me.

I'd say my mother made more of a difference to me than anyone else did. I know that's a conventional and perhaps mundane answer, but my family was blown apart at the start of World War II.

Born in 1936, I experienced the Second World War as a child in the city of Gelsenkirchen-Buer. This area was heavily bombed, but fortunately, all members of my family survived the war and post-war period.

My father had been in the German Diplomatic Service, and although he had been in the United States since World War II and out of diplomacy, it was something that was very much talked about in the family. So when I went to college, it was always my intention to try to get into the Foreign Service.

When I was a kid, my mum had a lot of Dumas books in the house, and she's from France originally. My mother had one particular Dumas book that was a family heirloom - this old, beat-up 1938 edition of 'The Count of Monte Cristo' in French. She came to America after losing her parents in World War II as a little kid.

My favourite book as a child was an old 'Newne's Children's Encyclopaedia' which my grandfather had bought just before World War II and donated to our family after seeing how interested we were in it. Each volume had special chapters called 'Things Boys can Do.' My brothers and I would pick out interesting projects.

A few years ago, I was trying to buy a piece of land next to a house I had in Newfoundland. I discovered that the plot had been owned by a family, and the son had gone off to World War I and been killed. It began to interest me: What would have happened on that land if the son had lived, had brought up his own family there?

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