MyEuropeanTouch and My Life In War Torn Germany - Part 2

Here's is part 2 of Monika's childhood story...

Here is part two of my early childhood. We lived for quite some time in Berlin (East) until the Allied gave up the sectors with the exception of Russia. Now before that happened my parent made the decision to move to Kiel on the Baltic Sea where my Dad’s family was. 

Again, we found 2 rooms and kitchen, or what you could call a former kitchen in the wreckage of the after War, barely inhabitable, but others did not have it any different. So my very talented and creative parents made the best of it. 

Newspaper in front of the cracked Window glass and blankets in addition at Winter time. It was an old building in a former affluent neighborhood but had nothing to show for it now. The left side of the apartment home was livable and Mom and Dad started scrunching some furniture from the rubble and ruins around us, Dad fixed them as best as he could. Mom went to look for 

dishes and silverware in the rubble that were usable and I remember eating my food from plates with a Haken Kreuz on them.

Discarded Soldiers Canteens were our soup bowls and Dad hammered the Soldiers helmets as flat as he could at the top so Mom could use them as pots. WE had a big pot belly stove in the former kitchen and heated with wood from the rubble around us. Dad heated up a brick for everyone of us to take to bed under the covers for warmth.

We were in Kiel and escaped before the Russian closed the borders and refused to get out like the French, American’s and Brits did.

So that was good. During World War II, Kiel’s importance grew. The town was where Germany’s deadly “Wolf Pack” of submarines was born, and the city became a major U-boat base and production center. The U-boat menace made Kiel a high-priority target for Allied bombers.

By the end of the war, the town had been pummeled so many times—there were almost 100 heavy raids on Kiel between 1940 and 1944—that 80 percent of the town’s buildings were destroyed and 167,000 people were homeless.was also bombed to shreds as this was the city containing the largest U-boat Ships building yard for Hitler's Regime.

Can you imagine?  Your whole world being changed in an instant.  Could you survive?

Be blessed,

Debbi