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8 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONM The War at Home D URING THE FALL AND WINTER OF 1943 the war made itself felt I in Wolfenbiittel with ever-growing frequency and intensity. It was, as the Nazi slogan proclaimed it, a total war. It was a war that engulfed us every hour of the day and every hour of the night, a war of which we heard through our newspapers and radios as it was fought in the Arctic waters of the North Atlantic, in the heat of the Italian peninsula, and in the snowy wastelands of the Russian steppe. It was a war that we experienced firsthand when the sirens shrieked and made us jump out of bed and scurry into shelters and basements. Except for the martial strains that poured out of the radio, it was a war without regimental bands and flying flags. It was a war in which news of retreats replaced news of victories, in which telegrams arrived in our town that told of husbands and sons who had been cruelly hurt and disabled and of others whom we would never see again. It was a war that would bring death and destruction to Wolfenbiittel and confront us boy soldiers with scenes of desolation and premonitions of defeat for which we had not been prepared. It was not the war of the textbooks, the war of glory and heroic death, but the war of blood and gore, of terror and shame, and of bodies torn and mutilated. It was a war in which I, my classmates, and myzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONM Jungvolk friends, boys that we were, were expected to behave as adults and soldiers and were treated as such. The wail of air-raid sirens had become an almost daily occurrence. Hundreds of British bombers flew over Wolfenbiittel at night on their way to and from Berlin, and we listened to the distant hum of their engines as it announced their coming and passing. On other nights, when searchlights lit up the sky and the voice in the radio warned of scout planes and waves of attack bombers turning toward Hannover, our 128 The War at Home zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVU provincial capital some fifty miles away, we heard the rolling thunder of the hundreds of bombs detonating on the city and felt our house vibrate with the shock waves that traveled through the ground. The attacks on Hannover called for us boys in the Jungvolk to don our uniforms and gather the next morning at the Wolfenbuttel headquarters building of the party. We were picked up by buses and rolled to Braunschweig and then over the Autobahn to Hannover. Our usual place of disembarkation was on a beach of the Maschsee, a big lake that stretched south of the city center. There trailers of moving vans had been set up and we received shovels and pickaxes for a day's cleanup in the ruins of the devastated city. We were supervised by army engineers and received army rations for our lunch. By five o'clock we were on our way back to avoid being caught in the next night raid on the city. We received little schooling during those weeks of almost incessant air raids. Back home at night, my mother and I got up and dressed when the sirens howled and usually waited, sitting around the radio, for the all-clear sign. One night, as the rapid staccato and sharp bursts of the anti-aircraft batteries stationed around Wolfenbuttel had become particularly menacing and my mother and I had taken refuge with neighbors in our basement, the roar of a low-flying bomber returning from Berlin made it seem as though the plane was directly coming toward us and about to crash down on our house. As my mother and I pressed fearfully against each other, our boarder, an actor of the Hannover Light Opera Company whose personnel had been evacuated to Wolfenbuttel, burst out in his Viennese accent, "ahn ahngehackter, ahn ahngehackter"—meaning a plane that had been damaged by having been "picked at"—and broke the spell of fear that had caught us. He made us laugh despite the terror that had gripped us. When the sirens sounded during the day while we were in school, we were sent home or, when there was not enough time for us to get there safely, we were herded into the school's basement. We hated to be confined in the air-tight shelter where we sat on uncomfortable wooden benches, stared at...

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