Pretty Heavy Stuff
Berlin, Early 1943, Age Eight
Papa was ordered back to active duty early in the year, and sent to the Russian front. We resumed the nightly ordeals without him, sleeping fully dressed now so that we could just dive into our coats and run.
School was no longer fun. Whenever a girl was absent, it was assumed that something had happened to her during the previous night's air raid. Unfortunately, most of the time that was the case. Then the teacher would try to gently break the bad news to us. I remember thinking that the next day — or the day after — my name would be mentioned as one of the dead. I was sure of that. It was so hard for me to take the news of the deaths of little friends, and I became quite depressed. When I stopped eating, Mom kept me home from school.
Berlin was being heavily bombed, and for a child which could not yet comprehend why this was happening, it was a very hostile world to live in. There were people out there who hated us so much that they were doing all those terrible things. I often wondered what they might look like. Being from other countries “far away” and being so nasty and hateful, they were sure to look like monsters with two heads, or worse. Luckily we kids did not have movies such as Planet of the Apes or Frankenstein to further stimulate our imagination. I do not think I had ever been to a movie. Mom had taken me to several children's plays when I was quite young — I remember Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as one of them.
Pretty heavy stuff for an eight-year-old.