Atlantic Times Feature Jan. 2009

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Bliss before they Blitzed us Kids

An Anglo-German couple's childhood memories of the last balmy moments of peace – and of the war that followed

 By Uwe Siemon-Netto

(From the January 2009 issue of The Atlantic Times)

 Threescore plus ten years ago, World War II broke out in Europe. Our correspondent, a German, and his English wife have retained memories of the start of this cataclysmic event that destroyed their homes and brought turmoil to their childhoods. Some of their experiences were amazingly similar.

  On the balmy day the war began, I was barely three years old, a toddler dressed in a white suit and shirt with a frilly collar, the "Sunday best" of some bourgeois kids in Leipzig at that time. Our summer holidays at Swinemünde on the Baltic coast (now Świnoujście in Poland) lay behind us. I remember riding along the beach on the shoulders of a Baptist minister from London, Revd. William A. Ashby, who had befriended my family while on a last-minute goodwill mission through Germany.

 In the afternoon of September 3, 1939, coffee and cheesecake were served on the loggia of our apartment in the center of Leipzig. Grimfaced, my father emerged from his study announcing, "We are at war -- I just heard it on the BBC." My mother, 18 years younger than he, pointed to the vase in front of her and chirped, "Ach, Karl-Heinz, as long as we still have such beautiful flowers…"

 My father shook his head gravely. He could not see the flowers. He was blind. As an 18-year old officer cadet he had lost his eyesight in combat during World War I in France but managed to study law and earn his doctorate after his release from military hospital.

  I was sent off to change into street clothes and go downstairs with my nanny to play with my pedal car. It was as red as a fire engine. Honking my horn, I stared at the sky wondering when the British airplanes might show up. They came four years later.

 At about the same time, Gillian Mary Ackers, a brown-haired English girl, honked the horn of her burgundy-red pedal car on the sidewalks of Brownell Avenue in Southampton, 750 miles to the west of Leipzig. Much later we found out that we had more in common than our favorite toys. My mother was a professional singer with a preference for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Gillian's mother too loved Bach; she was a piano teacher.

  Suddenly, Gillian's mother, Ethel, came storming out of the house. "War!" she shouted and yanked her weeping girl inside. Unlike my mother, the Ackers they did not take comfort at the sight of flowers. Gillian's father, Sidney, was the catering manager at the nearby Folland's Aicraft plant. He knew what was coming. His employers had long been preparing for war; they built flying ships and later "Folland's Frightful," a monoplane, for the military.

  When I went upstairs Mother had the bathtub filled to the rim with water, just in case English bombers might come that night. Over in Southampton, meanwhile, the Ackers family also prepared for the foe's arrival. Shortly after war had been declared, an air raid shelter was dug in their garden. "It was a hole in the ground, with bunk beds on a dank floor, and covered by corrugated iron," Gillian says today.

 In Leipzig's city center, we too had bunk beds waiting for us -- were in the basement, halfway between the potato and coal compartments. It was there that I spent my last hours on Sophienplatz 6, before green flames caused by phosphor bombs consumed this birthplace of mine; but that was much later.

 First, though, it was Gillian's turn to be blitzed. War to us in Leipzig meant the disappearance of neighbors for the time being. I was too young to have witnessed the flight or arrest of Jewish friends or relatives. Other than learning that the fathers and older brothers of my playmates were wounded or killed at the front, World War II still seemed at first far away.

  Not so for Gillian. In June of 1940, she and her father, by now a Territorial Army captain, walked along the hilly banks above the Solent, a stretch of sea separating Southampton from the Isle of Wight. "We watched hundreds of vessels, ranging from yachts and trawlers to large Naval craft, clogging the Solent. They brought British soldiers home after they were driven from the Continent in the Battle of Dunkirk," she recalls.

 Soon the port city of Southampton became the first target of the German blitzkrieg. In one of the first of altogether 1,500 alarms in Southampton, the Ackers' home on Brownell Avenue was hit. They decided to evacuate Gillian to relatives in the United States.

  This plan proved short-lived, according to Gillian: "Dressed in my navy blue school uniform, I stood with other kids on the platform of Southampton Station waiting for the boat train to take us to the docks. Around our necks we wore little folders containing our documents. Suddenly, my father raced up to me, grabbed my by my arm and said, 'No, I will not let you go. We'll either live together or die together.'"

  Had he not prevented her departure, Gillian and I would have never met. A German torpedo hit the steamer that was meant to take her to America. All children on board drowned.

"We'll either live together or die together" – I heard the same words later when it was my turn to be evacuated at the height of the Allied air war on Leipzig. I was sent to a parsonage in the countryside, where my host was a fanatical Nazi who beat me up daily for using "unpatriotic jargon," such as "trottoir" for sidewalk or "serviette" for napkin, as was the bourgeois custom in Leipzig, a cosmopolitan city. The Nazis had invented new, Germanic words for such things. For example, a napkin transmuted into the ludicrous "Mundtuch," meaning mouth-cloth.

"We'll live together or die together," decreed my grandmother in her outrage when, during a visit to her Leipzig apartment, I told her of my parsonage experiences. She was the family's matriarch; my parents had moved in with her after losing our home on Sophienplatz 6 during a massive British bombardment on December 4, 1943.

  I remember this attack so well as if it had happened yesterday. No sooner did the sirens stop wailing than the bombs fell. We grabbed the suitcases waiting in our corridor for this event, and sought refuge among our potatoes and coals. Next the house was in flames. My mother told me to guide my blind father to Granny's home while she herself tried to douse the fire, a futile exercise given that you can't fight phosphor with water.

 Outside, the streets were covered with puddles of burning phosphor. Many neighboring apartment houses were burning, their windows literally spitting fire up into the night sky.

  I was seven then, a kid with a warped mind perhaps, because I remember laughing dementedly as I hopped, with my eyeless father grasping my right upper arm, over phosphor-green fires that seemed everywhere. "Spring', Vati, spring' weit (jump, Daddy, jump far!)," I would instruct him as we ran past my burning school and his burning courthouse to my grandmother's safe kitchen where she fixed us potato pancakes whose taste my palate would never forget.

  That afternoon, incongruously, four Frenchmen carried my unconscious mother and our family Bible to Granny's home. They were forced laborers allowed to move freely through the city. Why did these men risk their lives running up our burning staircase to rescue an "enemy woman" -- my mother -- whom they discovered sitting under her Blüthner grand piano with the Bible in her lap? How come they knew my grandmother's address? And what made them return the following day to make sure my mother was well?

 I could speculate about the answers, but this would be a story for another day. 

Implausible things happen in times of war, including to children, as Gillian and I are here to report. We met in London and married in New York 46 years ago, long after the war began and ended. Now that we are in our seventies, we often reflect on our amazing survival, and laugh at some of our recollections, especially Sidney Ackers' first words when Gillian introduced me to him.

  "The only good German is a dead German," he jested. Then he embraced me, and from that moment on treated me like a true father. In truth, Sidney Ackers was incapable of malice. "Throughout the war," Gillian remembered, "no spiteful word was ever spoken in our family about Germans as people." In the same spirit, my father consistently praised Winston Churchill in the privacy of our home as the greatest living statesman, despite the daily allied bombing. Like Gillian, I was explicitly taught not to hate "the enemy."

  We children witnessing a fratricidal war imposed on us learned to perceive it much more subtly than many "experts" of later birth. Sidney Ackers, my father-in-law, was once a merchant mariner. Before he died, this wonderful man asked to have his ashes deposited in his favorite body of water, the North Sea, halfway between England and Germany. And this is where we scattered his remains, from the lower deck of the Harwich-Hamburg ferry.