The War of Our Childhood
The War of Our Childhood
Memories of World War II
One survivor tells of the fire-bombing of Dresden. Another survivor 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.”
The strength of The War of Our Childhood is that it is a reminder, if one is needed, that the effects of conflict on the next generation are deeply and permanently felt. For that reason it should be read, lest we forget.
All these years later the stories of the twenty-seven children, now in their senior years, ring with a truth and simplicity that contrast with the horror of what they say—seeing fathers for the last time; watching the fire-bombing of Dresden; dodging marauding Russian and Czech bandits robbing, raping, and killing; being strafed during air raids and endless relocations.
These poignant memories by twenty-seven German survivors of World War II relate how as children—ages 3 to 12—they endured air raids, hunger, terror, invading armies, and deprivation. Samuel tells of their resilience under the most trying circumstances and the critical role their mothers played in their lives. Samuel, a survivor himself and author of German Boy: A Refugee’s Story, relates that during the course of his interviews he encountered no one wanting revenge, and no one expressing a hate or dislike of people of other nations or ethnic groups because of events that happened long ago. He found that many of them are still troubled by the sounds, sights, or smells that remind them of war, bringing back the dark moments of childhood, and that few have shared completely their memories with their children.
Wolfgang Samuel deserves our thanks for bringing to us the childhood memories of these twenty-seven survivors of World War II, touching stories of little girls and boys who had the misfortune to grow up during that most infamous period in the history of mankind. As successful adults, these German and German American men and women recall, at times reluctantly, the horrors of war, and the heroism, perseverance, and ingenuity of those who risked all to save their children. Their stories are unique and unforgettable.
Wolfgang W. E. Samuel, Colonel, US Air Force (Ret.), was born in Germany in 1935 and immigrated to the United States in 1951 at age sixteen with an eighth-grade education and no English-language skills. Upon graduation from the University of Colorado, he was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant in the US Air Force, then flew over one hundred strategic reconnaissance missions against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. His first book German Boy: A Refugee’s Story garnered favorable reviews from the New York Times and numerous other outlets. He is author of eight books published by University Press of Mississippi.
