I'm excited to be having a conversation with someone when they have that revelation

like we're being free to make it sure that maybe looking at this case it could be an interesting process of this.

Okay.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production

of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick.

Today we're going to meet a strange and pretty remarkable character. He's a man who lost everything in a civil war.

And stuck in a refugee camp in Africa, he's become a kind of outsider artist and he's building a homemade museum. It's a very, very unusual story and we'll explain more later.

I'm also going to talk with Mikhail Berishnikov about

dancing and acting and aging and also because of course Donald Trump. But let's start off with my

friend and colleague, Burk Hart Bilger, who's been writing for the New Yorker since 2000.

Burke, you've written about absolutely everything in your writing and you've been digging into

your family history lately.

It's an unusual one.

You grew up in Oklahoma.

Your parents were from Germany and you've gotten more and more interested in their generation

of Germans, people who live through the Second World War as children and as babies.

So how did you become interested in that generation and why dig into it so deeply now?

Well, my parents are both what you call Kriegskenda, as you say.

So they were born in 1935.

What does that mean?

...