A bright morning sun. A rust-brown train under mortar fire. Gray figures in panic scrambling to hide. Faces wrapped in swaths of white. A muddy ditch. And along a hillside, red crosses.
For the men and women who fought and won the war in Europe, V-E day meant the exultant, resounding vindication of good against evil. For me, then an eight-year-old boy and one of millions of Germans on the run, it would be a recurring nightmare. Afterward, I often dreamed of the final days of the war, of trains under fire, of soldiers being hanged for desertion, of refugees in desperate flight. In time the dreams would become more infrequent and the memories fuzzier, but never-even a lifetime later-would I forget the smell of May 1945, the strange combination of rubble and early summer, of something dying and something about to be born.
There were times when, in my child's perception, it all seemed like a great (if frightening) adventure; not until much later did I come to understand the full dimensions of the horror created by nearly six years of war. My family's experience pales into insignificance in the grim sweep of events, but it was one of millions of similar stories-a mosaic of suffering and hardship on all sides of the conflict. We were fortunate. We survived.
At the beginning of May 1945 it was clear to even the most zealous of Hitler's followers that his "Thousand Year Reich" was doomed. The Fuhrer was dead. Berlin had fallen to the Red Army, and from west and east the Allies were sweeping into the German heartland. Some 4 million refugees from the eastern regions of the country were on the move toward the west. Terrified by the tales of rape and pillage that had accompanied the advance of Soviet forces, they were trying to find safety behind American and British lines. The horror stories, told and retold and retold again, needed no Nazi propaganda to spread like wildfire. They certainly were heard in the town in which we lived: Gablonz to Germans, Jablonec nad Nisou to Czechs, in what was then known as the Sudetenland, a border territory with a mixed German-Czech population that Hitler had grabbed from Czechoslovakia in 1938.
The town was physically untouched by the war until early 1945, when we began hearing the distant thunder of artillery from the eastern front. In February, during the devastating Allied air raids against Dresden, 100 km away, we saw the night skies light up to the northwest. The big bomber streams, gatherings of silvery dots against the sky, routinely rumbled past as we watched from the backyard; air-raid sirens sounded, but the planes were not targeting a little town of no industrial or military significance. For me and my neighborhood friends, the most dramatic exposure to reality came the day a Luftwaffe Me-109 fighter slipped low over the houses, its engine silent, and crashed in a nearby meadow. We raced after it, a passel of kids looking for adventure. By the time we got to the landing site, rescuers had pulled the pilot from the cockpit-dead. The aircraft had so many bullet holes it looked like a sieve. We were stunned into silence.