We crossed near the Hartz Mountains south of Brunswick and Hannover. We’re going on a trip.’ That was all my mother told me the night we escaped from East Germany” …. When John was four years old, Elsbeth, John and his Aunt Ida crossed the border between East and West Germany. She was eventually able to pay two guides to get them across the border. John’s mother worked tirelessly as a seamstress to earn money for them and to save enough money to leave East Germany. (Ironically, though achromatopsia is a genetic disease, recent animals studies suggest that antioxidant vitamins may be helpful in achromatopsia.) John’s mother began to realize that fleeing to West Germany where food supplies were more plentiful might offer her son more help with his vision. His mother had long worried that the strain of loosing her husband during the pregnancy and limited food during the war may have caused his vision problems. In post-war East Germany, food supplies were scarce. His doctor suspected a nutritional cause and suggested that better nutrition might be helpful. Being a very rare condition, most eye doctors had probably never been confronted with a case. An understanding of achromatopsia in the 1940s was very limited. He was provided with prescription eyewear, but most importantly the doctor had the lenses tinted to help reduce his aversion to the light. With no local eye care available, she traveled with her infant son to the nearby town of Erfurt to seek eye care for him. Within the first year of John’s life, his mother noticed nystagmus, rhythmic shaking of the eyes, and squinting in bright lighting. John Kay from his autobiography, Magic Carpet Ride “When I was in my pram (cradle), if the sun was directly in my eyes I would cry when she put a little sheet over the canopy to keep the sun out, I would stop crying” Though initially American troops arrived to secure Arnstadt, the Potsdam Agreement between the allies, required the Americans to withdraw leaving Arnstadt in the control of the Russians in what became East Germany. Through the kindness of a local family, who opened their home to them, John and his mother would live there for the next four years. When the Russian armies began to surge towards East Prussia, Elsbeth with her infant son would flee through part of Poland to Arnstadt, Germany. Two John with his dark glasses.months before he was born, his father, Fritz Krauledat, a German soldier, had been killed in the Baltic region on the Russian front. On April 12, 1944, as World War II raged, Joachim Fritz Krauledat was born in Tilsit, East Prussia, near the Lithuanian border to Elsabeth Krauledat. It was there that he would reach international rock stardom. His path would include escaping from East Germany to West Germany, immigrating to Canada and then to the United States. John’s story is an amazing odyssey that began in East Prussia during the height of World War II when John was born months after his father had died in the war, and with a eye condition called achromatopsia that would leave him visually impaired, totally colorblind and with a severe aversion to light. However, the commanding presence of the tall figure of John in black leather, with dark glasses singing Born to be Wild, gives us little understanding of what John went through to reach this level of success in the music industry. Born to be Wild, Magic Carpet, The Pusher and a host of other works have been an important part of the soundtrack of the past several generations. The vocals of John Kay, founder and lead singer of Steppenwolf, have become a par t of our popular culture for over forty years.
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