Our 767 has just taken off from Newark into the coming darkness and is now out over the ocean. Been up since before 5 this morning, doing final chores, preparing for this long European trip to the source of the mystery of Nazi flying saucers and the infamous Glocke, the Nazi Bell. And now the lack of sleep is catching up to me and I begin to doze.

Drifting off, I hear the voices of the flight attendants, all speaking German. German, my first language spoken to me by my grandmother, but forgotten over sixty years. German, although one of my languages in graduate school, it was only the language of scholarly journals and not spoken German. Yet here it is, playing back a tape recorder deep in a memory stored as a bunch of cells buried in a convolutional swirl somewhere. The words resonate, the announcements sound like orders. They are orders, orders to do things right. "Alles is im ordnung." 

UFO Hunters is smack in the middle of its long march across Eastern Europe for our middle episodes. Winter gear all packed, waterproof trekking boots all packed, World War II B-17 bomber jacket all wrapped around me in the ice-cold cabin. This isn't just another location shoot. It's a trip back to the beginnings of my own family. 

My cousin, Norman Davis, then a young B-17 bombardier over Schweinfort, crouched in the tiny cabin under the  navigator and pilot cockpit. A burst of flak from an AAA shell blows up he cabin above him and pieces of the pilot and co-pilot rain down upon him. His own cabin is wet with blood, but he is flying the plane now, staying in rigid formation as Luftwaffe fighters knife through the squadron. But the B-17s are rigid as they head over the target with rounds tearing into the planes' midsections, shredding the waist gunners like so much meat. 

Over the target, my cousin calls "bombs away," retribution for the war and the terrible camps, and he and the rest of the squadron wing their way back to England and the protection of the Mustangs that will escort them home. With the pilot and co-pilot bleeding out their last, my cousin Norman manages to bring the crippled plane in for a landing, He will get a hero's welcome and a medal from General Eisenhower. And he will go down in family history. But he is dead now, just like so many of the very young men who faced almost certain death in the skies over Germany more than 65 years ago. 

Memories well up inside of me as the announcements in German continue. Now just sinking into sleep, I can hear the voices of great uncles and great aunts, those who made it out just in time, and remember the faces of those who didn't. And I am going there now to the very spot where concentration camp inmates were forced into stacking the ceramic bricks to protect the Nazi scientists from Red Mercury contamination. And then those very same Nazi scientists came here with full immunity from war crimes because we needed their technology and their brain power. 

But we are flying back there now, German announcements  ringing in my ears, memories flooding into dreams, and the sound of a German lullaby from long ago and far away soothing it all. My first language is coming back to me, absent all these years, alive in the darkness of dreams, and taking me back to where I was. 

Over the sea into the endless night,

Bitte, kinde, langsam schlaff, schoenheit.