Postwar Germany, according to the writer Manfred Jurgensen, who grew up there, was “a period which often posed much more danger than the war itself. Severe deprivation, starvation and death were everywhere. This generation grew up without any real parental guidance and direction, and living through the years where all norms of society were virtually …
Growing up as a bomb baby in Germany, as I did, it was common not to have a living father. About 2.5 million German children lost their fathers in World War II. Source. In my case, my father lost his life two months before I was born, so we never knew one another. From my …
On V-E Day (May 8 1945) I was three and a half years old. Since the Allied bombing had stopped, my mother pulled up stakes in Fürstenhagen and in the fall of that year we moved to Frankfurt/Main. To this day I am quite comfortable in small spaces. Very likely this stems from our first …
In the fall of 2010, my wife Sheila and I visited Berlin, and my son Fred joined us there. On Fred’s initiative, he and I took a trip to Fürstenhagen, the village where I spent most of the war years. (See my mother’s “The Village” and my ”Memories of ‘The Village‘”) He had read about Fürstenhagen …
My mother writes in her memoirs that a piece of a bomb came through the roof in Essen one summer day in 1943 and took off a corner of the kitchen table. She decided it was time to get out of Dodge. With the help of her church connections she found a room in a …
