By Wolfgang W.E. Samuel
I bought this book while visiting the Air & Space Museum in Washington DC. I bought it from the author. It is his story of survival as a child of 10 - 15 at the end of WWII in Germany. It is an amazing story of childhood, piecing together life amid a brutal war and the devastating aftermath of war which left German's people in starvation, poverty, displaced from their homes, and with little work available to them.
His story starts in the town right outside of the prison where downed pilots and their crew went, which was the setting of the last book I read.
"I thought about what I had read in the newspaper, about what happened to German women when they were captured by Russian soldiers. Awful things. I didn't know what rape was, but it had to be terrible the way they wrote about it in the newspaper and spoke of it on the radio. I didn't want my mother to be raped. She was all I had to hold on to, besides Ingrid, my sister. I felt a dull ache rise within me, as if a cold hand were squeezing my insides. Maybe I was hungry. That had to be it. It was my empty stomach that gave me that odd feeling. I couldn't remember when I had last eaten. Maybe it wasn't hunger I felt. Maybe I was afraid of dying." Pg. 3
Book 57
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