Growing up in West Germany
during WW2
A true story
by Gudrun M. Leicht
I was 1 1/2 years old when the war started, so I was too young to realize what was going on. I did know that my father was gone and only came home on vacations. When the bombs fell I was really scared; then, when I was about 5 we had to live in a giant bunker becausethe bombing was so bad. We lived there for over 300 days. Before my father went to war for the first time, we were going to move to a new house, and when the town was blitzed, we walked to our new place. We seemed to be walking forever, but it was only a week or so.
We had nothing, so we would ask farmers for food or we would eat it raw from the feilds. After we got to our new place, we didn't have a lot, except what we could get with food stamps, and that was less and less. Our main food was potatoes, because my mother made a lot of things for farmers. We had them in every shape and form. I hated it when we had "Heaven and Hell"; that was our name for potatoes and apples cooked together. To this day I still hate fish, because it was our main "meat", except when we had horse meat. Because we were so far from any sea, the fish was brought in barrels heaven only knows how far. It was then sold in the town square about two houses from ours. It stank horribly, and so did our house when everyone cooked it. I got spanked because I didn't eat it. The thought of fish still makes me gag! We only got about 1 quart of skimmed milk a day for six people.
When we were at our new town the air raid sirens were always going. Sometimes we had to go to the bunker 3 or 4 times a night which was terrible, because we didn't want to get up. It was also boring because the only thing to do was listen to airplanes and wait for the off siren. The town was bombed only once, but it was still scary.
Most of the time I only thought about eating and what I could do. Some times we would fight about who got a bigger potato, or piece of bread. I remember once when my aunt and cousins were there and we said grace: "Come Jesus, be our guest...", and my aunt said: "don't tell him to come, we don't have enough ourselves." I will never forget that.
I was not quite 5 the last time I saw my father. At first I just thought he didn't get vacations anymore. Later on, when I knew he was lost in the war, I would fantasize that he asked me (of all the people in town) where our family lived, and I was the first one who knew he came back.
One time, my mother had to go to jail because someone said she listened to English radio (she didn't even know English). She spent one night there, and the five of us (me, one brother, and three sisters) were alone. That was scary because we were only ages 4 to 9.
I liked school, but very often we didn't have any. Elementary school was only 1 � blocks from our house, so we walked. When the air raid sirens rang, we would run home to our bunker, then back to school. Because most of the teachers were in the war, we had combined grade school classes of 60 to 90 kids.
The clothes I had were one "Sunday" dress, one "school" dress, and one "play" dress. My mother made us coats out of old blankets and she would knit us stockings from my father's sweaters.
For fun we would hoard every little piece of paper and draw paper dolls and doll clothes. My brother and I used to draw world maps for fun. There was always someone to play with because there were eight other kids living in our house.
I didn't know a lot about the way Hitler ran things, except that "they" took our radio, and we had to keep a picture of him in our living room so that everyone could see it, and that because of him my father didn't come back and my mother had to go to jail.
I knew nothing at all about how the United States President ran things. We just waited for the Americans to come, but they never did, because the French came to our town. I was 8 � years old when World War 2 ended.
Written by Gudrun M. Leicht
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