It was the first year of the Second World War. The German armies had occupied Holland and were already breaking through the first defences of the Maginot Line.
My friend Hermann Korn and I had already decided that this was not our war. We had seen it coming for a long time, and in fact that was the reason why we had left Europe in the first place.
We wanted no hand or part in the mass suicide of civilised peoples. But now it looked as though the war was about to catch up with us; more and more Germans were disappearing behind the barbed wire of internment camps. Any day the same fate could overtake us.
One evening, sitting on the stone steps of our house, we reviewed the situation and wondered if there was anything we could do about it. And then suddenly we remembered what we had once said half in joke: 'If war comes we'll spend it in the desert.'"
Henno Martin wrote these words to introduce his book, "The Sheltering Desert". He and his friend and colleague Hermann Korn lived for two-and-half-years in the Namib Desert in what was then South-West Africa.
I lived and worked there for six months, including Christmas 1968, and the movie and book brought back memories of what is now Namibia and the many other places I spent Christmas in until I finally settled down at "Riverbend". Memories are what we no longer want to remember.
