One survivor tells of the fire-bombing of Dresden. Another
recounts the pervasive fear of marauding Russian and Czech bandits
raping and killing. Children recall fathers who were only
photographs and mothers who were saviors and heroes.
These are typical in the stories collected in "The War of Our
Childhood: Memories of World War II." For this book Wolfgang W. E.
Samuel, a childhood refugee himself after the fall of Nazi Germany,
interviewed twenty-seven men and women who as children--by chance
and sheer resilience--survived Allied bombs, invading armies,
hunger, and chaos.
"Our eyes carried no hate, only recognition of what was," Samuel
writes of his childhood. "Peace was an abstraction. The world we
Kinder knew nearly always had the word 'war' appended to it."
Samuel's heartfelt narratives from these innocent survivors are
invariably riveting and often terrifying. Each engrossing story has
perilous and tragic moments--school children in Leuna who are sent
home during an air raid but are strafed as moving targets; fathers
who exist only as distant figures, returning to their families long
after the war--or not at all; mothers who are raped and tortured;
families who are forced into a seemingly endless relocation that
replicates the terrors of war itself. In capturing such experiences
from nearly every region of Germany and involving people of every
socio-economic class, this is a collection of unique memories, but
each account contributes to a cumulative understanding of the war
that is more personal than strategic surveys and histories.
For Samuel and the survivors he interviewed, agony and fright
were part of everyday life, just as were play, wondrous experience,
and above all perseverance.
"My focus," Samuel writes, "is on the astounding ability of a
generation of German children to emerge from debilitating
circumstances as sane and productive human beings."
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