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Sugata was born in 1911 in Germany. His long life has been an odyssey through his own and the last century's dark ages. He railed against his time and place, a protest that culminated in his war-time betrayal of Nazi Germany, when he risked his life and effectively ensured his rootlessness.

January 1943, he met up with an old school acquaintance in Berlin, who had become one of Hitler's chief scientists. Through an extraordinary dance of words, piqued by danger, they established their mutual antipathy to the war and equal burning desire to do what they could to hamper their countries efforts. Sugata, then Karl Hendrick, took back with him to Norway the co-ordinates of Pennemunde, the place where the V2 bombs were being constructed. Three months after relaying the information to London through his Norwegian radio operator, Pennemunde was bombed.

After the war came the dark years.
Sugata's search for root as well as freedom took him to the East, first to India and then Nepal where he became a Buddhist monk. Returning to live in his adopted country, Norway, he gave lectures evangelising Buddhism, and at the same time he slowly began the process of unravelling the suffering of his past life, an unravelling that continues to this day.

Alive and kicking at 93, he still travels east, and is fully engaged with this world. I've just come back from India with him (April 2005)

The book is called Bird of Passage, a loose translation of Wanderwogel, a German word for a pilgrim at the time.

The story of the book, Bird of Passage, and pictures are up on
www.sugata.info

Rachel Kellett
Suffolk, UK, May 8th 2005

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