The night before his seventh birthday, Peter Ney and his family were awakened by the sound of yelling and of breaking glass as their home was vandalized. Kristallnacht was just the beginning of the Nazi violence against the Jews, and it shaped the rest of Peter's life. Spanning seventy years, Getting Here narrates the many twists and turns of his life. Two months after Kristallnacht, Peter's parents placed him on a train to England; he was one of 10,000 German children granted safe refuge in England via the Kindertransport. His parents joined him in London just before the start of World War II, and as a family they immigrated to the United States.
This memoir tells of Peter's journey from Germany-from his adolescence and art school training, to his fifty-six year marriage to Betty; work as a designer of consumer products, and human engineer in the space program, a twenty-year career as a trial attorney, and his tenure as a judge on the Colorado Court of Appeals.
More than seventy years ago, Peter and his family arrived penniless in the United States. Getting Here not only describes that journey, but rejoices in the fulfilling of the American dream-from a seat on a refugee train to a seat on the appellate bench.