Excerpt

This is the first book I wrote. I loved talking to these people and then writing up their words, because this book is a combination of my writing and the subject’s  story, in his or her own words.  Here are some examples of the stories in the book:

Hans Levy was a Jewish boy living in Hitler’s Germany.  He escaped to England but his parents were killed in a concentration camp. This is what happened to Hans on Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, which was Hitler’s first violent nationwide attack on Jews. Hans was ten years old.
“The lights went on (in my bedroom in Germany) and there stood this huge figure, in the all-too-familiar black SS [Nazi] uniform. I tried to shout for my parents, but in terror my vocal cords were completely blocked.  I just slid under my blankets as this giant walked towards me. Probably realizing my age, he told me how lucky I was and then left the room. I learned later the man screaming downstairs was my uncle. He had been beaten with a horsewhip.”

Andree-Paule joined the French Resistance, an underground group that fought against the German occupation of France, when she was sixteen.

“I wanted to do something so I made several contact friends and I helped on two networks.  Of course, nobody knew about it.  For one network, I had an invented name, but for the other, I  didn’t. I was always afraid, as I was still living with my family, that the Gestapo might come one day. I had to be very careful of this, and, of course, I didn’t tell anybody. I knew people around me who were deported fand didn’t come back. Once I arranged a meeting to take place in my brother’s flat [apartment]. Those things were rather risky, but people were risking all sorts of things. It was just a matter of luck, you could be arrested and deported…the entire family could have been in danger…But I thought it was terribly important.”

Gladys Godley was six when she was evacuated to another village where she lived with a local family until the war was over. Her parents were not told where she was.

“I was in an air-raid shelter, when suddenly the land went up and down, up and down, when the land mines were dropped. All of the windows in all of the shops and houses were out, and I went into our small backyard and picked up a large piece of shrapnel. I was quite thrilled. This was great. But we climbed out of the rubble to go to school…and at 3:00 every day, the whole of Manchester and Stockport disappeared into the caves…sometimes it would be 18 hours before we would hear the all-clear signal.”

Inno Foreman’s father was a general in Hitler’s army. She had to flee from the Russians during the war. She was 11 years old when this happened.

“We used to go to the cellar every evening to be safe from the bombs. You could hear them whistling. Then, because the bombing was very heavy and large parts of the town were destroyed, we were advised to go to the bunker…every night. You heard the siren going, but of course you did not have time to go to the bunker. I was frightened in the cellar because we had gas masks on.  We could not breathe very well. We could hear the bombs crash and you wondered whether they had nit your house…it was very nearly every night. I remember our street was burning on both sides – it was up in flames. I could see, up from the top, furniture falling, crashing down…Our house had been hit but luckily it wasn’t burned out.’

Rupert Wilkinson was six and living in Japan when he, his mother, and his sister were sent to a Japanese prisoner of war camp in the Philippines.

“The discipline was all or nothing. Basically the guards left us alone. But if you did something wrong, if you tried to escape, that was it, you would be killed…you would dig your own grave and then be shot.  And if you received a can of food over the wall, that was a capital offense.  I only learned afterwards that, with great courage, a number of people we knew were secretly bringing food in by tunnel, under the wall.”

Toshi Marks was seven when she fled to the country in Japan in order to escape the bombs in the city. She would strap her baby sister to her back, take her younger brother by the hand, and set out for the day to look for food.

“I was so hungry I went to the neighbors and asked if I could help them…they would give me some food, some I would eat and some I would take home to my family. I was always sent to the black market for food because children could escape more easily from that place. I might trade some vegetables for two cups of rice. Meat we probably ate once a year. Soon we started eating ordinary grass, leaves, anything because we were so hungry. We would boil everything and make a thin gruel soup.  We were literally skin and bones, the whole nation was starving.”

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