German Boy: A Refugeeâ??s Story

Foreword

FOREWORD In early June 1998, the National Archives in Washington hosted a oneday conference on the fiftieth anniversary of the Berlin airlift, with speakers ranging from elderly men who had been in the Truman administration to young scholars just beginning their careers. The high point came at the end of the day, when eight men gathered on the podium. Seven of them had been pilots, the men who took the cargo planes into and out of Berlin on a three-minute basis, day and night, for over a year. The eighth man was listed as retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Wolfgang Samuel, but he looked to be ten years younger than the other men and surely could not have been a pilot in 1948. Each pilot spoke, telling stories that were funny, sad, and gripping, stories that left you weak with admiration. Finally it was Colonel Samuel’s turn. He told us that at the time he had been a thirteen-year-old boy living near the Fassberg airfield, which was one of four bases used by the U.S. Air Force in the airlift. He had watched the planes take off and land on an assembly-line basis (it was one of the greatest feats of flying history). He spoke of how his mother had traded her body for food for her children; when the Americans came, she didn’t have to do that anymore, and young Wolfgang and his sister had enough to eat for the first time in years. He told us that he had come to the States in 1951, had attended college, and then had joined the air force. He looked down the row of pilots with him on the podium, and said with the greatest admiration, ‘‘You guys were my heroes. I wanted to be like you when I grew up.’’ Colonel ix x Samuel told this brief story with such simplicity of language and openness of spirit that the entire audience was in tears. I sought him out at the reception at the German embassy that evening and asked for more. When he said that he had written a memoir, I asked if I could take a look. He sent it on. I was not impressed by the title or by the table of contents, which revealed that this autobiography was going to cover only the period of January 1945 to January 1951, from Samuel’s tenth birthday to his fifteenth. That didn’t seem to me a very interesting part of someone ’s life, and surely, I thought, could not be worth over five hundred singlespaced pages (the size of the original manuscript). Still, I wanted to know more about the airlift and Samuel’s unusual perspective on it, so I took the manuscript along on my next plane ride. Once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. I read in the cab going to the hotel. I read in my hotel room until it was time for the dinner and speech. I read when I got back to my room, at breakfast the next morning, in the cab going back to the airport, at the airport, during the flight, and when I got home. I read the whole thing in less than a day, and I’m writing this the following morning indulging the full flush of my enthusiasm because I can think of no reason to restrain it. A number of remarkable elements are woven into the fabric of this autobiography . Most notable is Wolfgang’s honesty about what he saw, said, felt, and thought. He is an attractive, sympathetic, and active character, full of determination and grit, with big eyes, a wonderful imagination, and a funloving spirit. A boy’s boy. But he lived in the most awful poverty, almost never adequately fed or sheltered, owning one shirt, one pair of pants, and wooden shoes. And not only was he poor and hungry; he was also being bombed at night and shelled during the day. He was a refugee caught up in one of the biggest and bloodiest mass migrations in history, the flight of the German people from the Red Army. The year 1945 was the worst in the world’s history. That year Wolfgang turned ten, and he was at the epicenter of the catastrophe. His story begins just before his birthday in early February 1945, and recounts the stages in his family’s journey, beginning with the flight from eastern Germany, near Dresden, to...