Mr. Maier is a well-informed, quick-witted, and humorous person.

At the same time, he tends to tell the same stories over and over again every two minutes. Or he asks where he is. His short-term memory is gone.

Yesterday he told me that his father had been at war for ten years, six of them in Russian captivity.

His father would never have traded his bread for cigarettes, as other prisoners of war had done.

So he survived.

Now Mr. Maier smoked three cigarettes in a row, then lay down again to sleep.