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This is a story from my grandmother during the second war in Düsseldorf which is in Germany. I think this strory shows that not only the Enlish and its allies were suffering but also the Germans, mostly the civillians. This is a story of her experiences during the war:

At first when the war started nothing really happened. Sometimes when there was an alarm we would go and hide in the cellar. At first there were few alarms and most of them were false but soon they came more often. All of the attacks were by aeroplanes dropping bombs down on the town. There were two kinds of bombs; There was one that laid fire and set houses alight and there were bomb that exploded and ripped the house apart. There was not a lot of school and as the war progressed school fell out completely. When there was an alarm we would take something, a pencil or a book, and went to the cellar. It became routine after a while. WE spend long boring hours waiting in the cellar until we were called back up by a second alarm. Sometimes there was more than one alarm in one night so we couldn’t get much sleep. The fist thing when we came up was to look if our house was still standing and then see whose on the street had been bombed. Sometimes we could see our soldiers searching for planes in the sky. When that happened the planes came usually short after.
After a while the heating fell out and we had to make our own fire. We were bored. Every night it was the same thing; Go to bed, being wakened up by an alarm, go to the cellar, wait for the second alarm, go back to bed.
Sometimes some windows broke from the explosions. At first people came to fix them but then after we had to fix them ourselves. I became good at it and every time after an alarm I would go and help to fix window.
As the war went on most houses were somehow damaged on our street. Most common was that the walls between rooms just collapsed. You had to climb over them and we had to have good shoes. We used to sleep on the floor with self made beds or blankets. It was very cold as the most walls were destroyed and the windows were broken as there weren’t any spared. As we didn’t have any glass left we used to put carpets in front of the windows to keep at least some of the cold out. Everything was dirty and dusty from the explosions and from the collapsed walls. To keep warm we made a fire in our house with the food we could find. To get warm water we had to boil cold water over the fire. We had one tub full of warm water each to last for a day.
After every attack we used to have butter and bread. First there was lots of butter on the bread but there was less every time as there was not a lot of food; after a while there was only bread left with no butter. In the mornings we had to wait for the bread to arrive. Every person had a ‘food tag’. They would show it to the people that distributed the food along with money and they would give you your daily ration. This was so no one could just buy all the food with their money and everyone got equal amount. There was no meat, mostly bread and rarely vegetables. To get some vitamins and a salad we collected young stinging nettles and boiled them. That would be our salad. We would also use other plants like dandelion which we would also boil or cook. That was all we would eat for months until the War finished.

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