DONA NOBIS PACEM

BLOG FOR PEACE A WORLDWIDE PEACE MOVEMENT




This story is not that long ago ! Only 63 years.

Today is OUR day to all claim "Give us Peace" Donna Nobis Pacem, and I thought about my childhood. I was born during world war II in 1943. My mother gave birth to me in a bunker in the heavily bombarded Frankfurt (Germany) and apparently I spent my first night in a drawer because there were no baby beds.

From the war itself I personally don't remember anything of course. My souvenirs start when the war was over and we (the germans) were occupied by the liberators. I was lucky I lived in an area which was occupied by American soldiers. The once in Eastern Germany had less luck they were occupied by russians who as I had been told, molested the population by raping, tortures plundering etc.

I only remember my mothers fear which made me anxious. She used to take me and look out of a window in the roof to watch drunken american soldiers trying to get into houses especially into the neighbor house where a pretty young girl lived. I only remember the banging and bawling.

I also remember my mother and her sister running home hysterically (that's probably why I remember something) crying and screaming that they had tried to collect some potatoes on the field which farmers had forgotten and a tank had persecuted them with laughing american soldiers on it who tried to catch them.

I am convinced they found it very funny and just wanted to amuse themselves a bit. They had to participate in this war, they just did what they had been told, fighting the enemy.

Sometimes tanks were crossing the little city where my grandparents lived and it's strange I don't remember the tanks but I remember the asphalt of the street braking into large gaps due to their weight and the noise it made.

I didn't realize the daily fight for something to eat. Food was an omnibulant problem there was nothing to eat. Of course I always had enough food and it was normal to me that I had, but I didn't know how difficult it was for the people to get some. The "rich" people at that time were farmers. They had a paradise in the eyes of the hungry population. They even had milk and eggs.

One of my favourite occupations when I was a little older, was to listen to the Red Cross broadcasting where thousands of names were mentioned, each person looking for a missing brother, sister, father or mother. I found it very interesting and would have liked my name to be mentioned just as if I had disappeared too.

For me as a child it was completely normal that all fathers (except mine) had something missing. A leg, an arm, an eye, sometimes both legs and I only realized that it was not so normal when for the first time I went to the Belgian coast and saw men there at the beach. It seemed very strange to me that they had all their body parts.

Once, spending a night at my friend's I entered the bathroom in the morning and saw an eye starring at me in a glass. It was her fathers glass eye. (you can laugh, I laughed too) or at another's place where I opened the wardrobe to look for something and found myself with a leg prostheses in my arms.

All this was so normal ! That a lot of girls in my class had not fathers anymore, that a lot of them were still expecting them because they were war prisonners, that my uncle the youngest brother of my father came home from Siberia, looking fat and grey and was only 25 years old !

Thanks to this foolish mad man named Hitler he had spent ten years there. He was 15 when they forced him to "fight for the country".

Our blogworld proves that people don't need wars and that we are all for peace ! We realize that we are all the same over the world with the same problems, the same happiness and the same feelings. We don't have any colors or any borders, we all have our ideas, we don't need any war, nowhere on this planet !