End of Childhood Innocence
Berlin, August 25,1940
I was nearly six years old and knew nothing about war. Not until that night anyway. Peter, my little brother, was just two. It was not customary to get a baby sitter for young children. When the parents went out for an evening, the keys to the apartment were left with neighbors who would occasionally look in on the sleeping kids, or listen for anyone crying.
Mom told me she was going to accompany Papa to the railroad station. He had been drafted by the army to report for active duty and was leaving that evening. If the real reason for Papa's departure was explained to me, I did not understand the significance of it. Mom gave me instructions that if Peter started to cry and did not stop, I could give him the bottle which had been set on the kitchen table. I don't know how many hours Mom was away, but it seemed like forever because I was scared. One of those frequent violent thunderstorms had awakened me, and unlike other times I remembered, it lasted for a much longer time. I have always been afraid of thunderstorms, and that night I was alone and had to worry about the baby waking up and crying. I kept hoping he would not because I was too scared to go into the kitchen to fetch the bottle.
There seemed to be much more lightning than I had seen during other thunderstorms, and the thunder sounded different somehow. I spent a good part of the time hiding underneath my featherbed praying that the baby would not cry and that Mom would return soon. Peter was a good little boy, he slept right through it all. But why was Mom not returning? The railroad station was not that far away, even though I thought it was a long ways each time we had to walk there to catch the train when we went to Grandma's.
What I did not know was that Papa had to leave from Berlin's central railroad station Anhalter Bahnhof on a long distance train, and that the departure of that train as well as Mom's return were delayed by the first major air raid on Berlin. There had been other more minor air raids during which the people in our area mostly stayed in their apartments. We lived near the southwestern edge of the city with no targets nearby that were of importance. During this particular air raid the center of the city had been bombed, and Mom and Papa had to take cover in an air raid shelter. They were worried sick about us. Meanwhile, our good neighbors decided not to wake us after checking and hearing no crying. They spent the whole time sitting on the steps outside our apartment. When Mom returned I told her how afraid I was of the terrible thunderstorm. She comforted me and said she had heard it, too, and let it go at that.
The next day I played with a boy who was a year older than I was, and he knew. When I told him about the most terrible thunderstorm the night before, he told me that what had happened during the night was called an “air raid.” Airplanes fly over the city and drop bombs which will make our houses explode. He also told me that from an airplane the houses look as small as match boxes. I found that fascinating. After all, to a small child an apartment house in Berlin is about the biggest thing there is. For a house to look as small as a match box was unimaginable — fantastic — awesome — like magic! The wonder of that fact blocked out any fear about future air raids and the possibility that we and our house might be blown to bits.
The question as to why “somebody” was trying to do this to us, and why those somebodies hated us so much was to come up time and again during the many subsequent air raids. Reinhard, the boy who had told me about air raids did not know, and for the moment it was not as important as the wonder of an airplane that flies high up in the sky where the clouds are and makes big houses look little, like match boxes. Wouldn't it be wonderful to go up in an airplane and see those match boxes! I did not know until now as I am writing this that man's inherent dream to fly and to see what a bird sees surfaced in me at that time. I remember exactly the awe I felt at the moment the boy told me about the match boxes, and how I wished I could see them, even though that dream seemed too unreal to come true. Many years later I would pilot an airplane myself and think of that moment of awe. The impression never left me. To this day, when I see an old-fashioned match box I think of big houses seen from airplanes, and when I look out of an airplane window and see houses, I think of match boxes.