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Even in Germany there were a few among all the defeated, among all the homeless and injured, all the guilty and the frightened, who felt that joy. "I remember the sky was clear and the heavens blue, and we felt liberated," says German Author Walter Kempowski, who was then 16. "I spent May 8 drinking champagne with my mother and grandfather on the balcony. My mother, who was in the Bekennende Kirche [an anti-Nazi Protestant splinter group], said, 'It was we who won the war, the church and the powers of goodness.' "
Raymond Hallery, now a retired publisher, was in an adjunct of the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz when the official announcement that the Germans had surrendered came over the prisoners' long-secret radio. The French began singing the Marseillaise. "There was the joy of being alive, but it was mixed with much sadness," Hallery says. "Two hundred to three hundred people a day were still dying in the camp, from exhaustion and hunger. There were bodies everywhere." Hallery went to the infirmary where one of his friends lay nearing the end. "I know I'm finished," the friend said, "but I want you to tell my wife one thing. Tell her I had the joy of knowing the war is over." -- By Otto Friedrich. Reported by Michael Adler/Paris and Zona Sparks/New York