大象传媒

To write about my war years! I was on the other side, yet experiences were very much alike in some ways. I grew up in Berlin, the capital of Germany. My first memory of the start of the war was the blackout. All the men were called up and most of the women had to go to work. We were told that we had to defend our country because Poland had attacked us, and most other countries had sided with them.

We were trained to use gas masks, but were not issued with any, so I did not have to carry one around with me. Food and clothes were rationed right from the start.

Evacuation of children took place but I don't know if it was done in the same way as in England. I was sent to stay with relatives in Saxony in 1940 and in 1944. Each time, after several months, my mother came to fetch me home as she had missed me. In 1942 I was evacuated from school to an island in the Baltic Sea, off the northern coast of Germany. We travelled by ship and three seaside resorts were used entirely by us school children. We stayed in the Grand Hotel. It was run by the 'Hitler Youth'. We had to march everywhere, to the dining room, to the classrooms, to the beach. Our bedrooms were inspected daily. On Sundays all of the children marched to a huge field. There we had to stand with our right arm raised doing the Nazi salute, singing and listening to speeches for two hours in the blazing sun. All of our mail, both incoming and outgoing was censored. I was not well. It was a beautiful island, but spoiled for us by the marching and the dreadful food. When autumn came we were all due to go to the mountains in Bavaria, but I was allowed to go home.

I think it was worst for the women. They worried about their husbands and sons at the front, had a hard time feeding the family, were up most nights because of the air raids, but still had to go to work the following morning.

After Christmas 1944, I did not go back to school at all. Being 14 I did war work. This included helping in soup kitchens, feeding air raid victims in cinemas and other public places, and helping to recover valuables from bombsites. As refugees started arriving from the east, I helped feed them and send them on. Many had been in trains for several days without food or heat. MAny a mother held her baby, unaware that it had died. During the last fortnight of the war we never left our shelters and cellars because of the heavy gunfire from the Russian army, who then 'liberated' us.

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