As submitted to the Cooper Union Alumni Office in 1994, requesting Memories of WW II.
To put my memories in context, I was born in Berlin, Germany, in October 1938, and eventually emigrated to the U.S. with my parents in October 1949.
We lived in one of the distant suburbs of Berlin, in Neuenhagen, on a plot of land next to a wide-open field and other well-separated houses,with no tactical or strategic targets nearby. One evening in the early 1940s, there was yet another air-raid alarm. It was likely that the planes were British, since the Americans had the popular reputation of flying bombing missions by day, and the British by night. As the planes flew over, presumably on their way to targets in Berlin, or perhaps returning, they dropped some small flare bombs in our vicinity. As we looked out, our garden had a number of these long, hexagonal "Stabbrandbomben" burning like candles; I think one even came through the house and stuck in our kitchen floor.
My father was at in Berlin that evening, at work as a metal trades teacher. My mother and I retreated to the cellar of our house, and it was there that we heard the extended shrill whistling of an approaching bomb, which then hit our house. We owe our lives to two extraordinarily fortunate circumstances, without which we would have perished: First, the cellar only extended under half of the house, and the bomb landed in the other half; second, it was an incendiary phosphorus bomb rather than an explosive one, otherwise the whole house would have been blown up, and we in it. While the house burned, my mother quickly salvaged what items she could, such as bedding. [Although I was only four or five years old at the time, all this has remained an amazingly vivid memory through the years.] Oddly enough, ours was the only house in that whole area to be bombed during the entire war.
Now being homeless, my mother and I traveled to and lived with friends of the family in the Erzgebirge, in Sachsen (Saxony) near the Czech border, while my father remained at his job in Berlin as air-raids reduced much of the city to rubble.
After the end of the war, we returned to the Berlin area to re-unite, in what would later become East Germany. It was now that we learned what hunger meant. Food was very scarce, and finding food meant scavenging potato peelings and fatty paper from garbage heaps, as well as begging from Russian soldiers. We stole cabbages from fields; once, after being caught by a Russian soldier, we were released only because he became more interested in the bicycle of a passing rider. At age seven, I became the family expert in mushrooms so that we could gather them as food. Who of you would pick and eat orange-colored mushrooms that bled green when bruised? I knew they were safe, and the family trusted me.
Later on, relatives of ours in the U.S. sent CARE packages to us. I can still recall these wonderful cartons marked #1 to #5, each with different selections of essential goods. Not too many people remember any more that there were real "care packages" at one time, from which the generic common-use phrase emanated.
To this day, these experiences have left an indelible mark on me of food as a sacred entity. It hurts me deeply to see the food that is wasted and thrown out here in the U.S. I'm the one in the family that still finishes what's left on plates, and that eats the bread ends. Only one person that I met since understood completely, and had reacted the same way: a Hungarian refugee with quite similar experiences.
When my father found out from a friend at the local city hall that his name was on a list of people likely to be picked up (being perceived as having anti-communist sympathies), we decided that we had to leave East Germany. Those picked up by the officials and occupying forces often tended not to return. My father bought train tickets for a town near the East-West German border; purposely buying single tickets in three different places so as not to arouse suspicion. On the travel day, we each took only one suitcase, leaving behind all other possessions and our piece of land, so as to look like vacationers. Arriving at the town near the border, we found a number of similar-minded travelers intent on crossing, and joined into a group. The border was not yet fortified (this was 1947), and guarded sporadically. Townspeople were afraid to tell us when the border would be unguarded, so we all proceeded cautiously along the road toward it. To our great fortune, all we found at the time was a dug-up road, without guards. Some of the group wanted to rest immediately, but the more knowledgable drove us on, explaining that there was first a no-mans-land to cross before safety in the West.
So now it's about fifty years later. I have a good life, a twenty-seven year marriage with a loving wife, and two fine children, and a career with several branches, and another to come. Last spring it was my good fortune to go back to Berlin after 47 years, to meet some relatives for the first time, and to actually visit that piece of land on which I spent my earliest years. My memories had held true, although everything was smaller than I remembered. I could even point out to the present owners why one portion of their garden plot kept settling and needing more soil - that was the house cellar in which we had survived back then.
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