Living a Nightmare

WORLD WAR II - MARKUS

Driving along and seeing all this beautiful, familiar countryside, brings back a lot of memories...

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I start to think about the first time I ever went to Wales. When was that again? ... A very, very long time ago, that is for sure. Let me think for a moment... Oh yeah, 69 years ago. My goodness, that is an awfully long time.

I remember coming to Wales to visit James Lewis... James Lewis was an officer in the British Army, back in Germany in the 1940's.

Those were terrible times... The Second World War was going on and the British soldiers had invaded Germany.

When this terrible ... terrible war started, I was only 10 years old. I was still at school, where, amongst other subjects, I also learnt English, a language I came to love as I grew older, and still do now.

During the war, my father was a soldier and sadly died because of it in 1944. My mother stayed at home most of the time so that nothing would happen to her. My father had told her not to go out of the house unless absolutely necessary. But just a year later in 1945, when the British military invaded North Rhine-Westphalia, something terrible happened to her too. A bomb exploded right next to our old house and the whole house to crumble into a thousand pieces ... my mother buried underneath.

When this terrible incident happened ... I was on my way home from school, but was stopped immediately at the beginning of my street by my next-door neighbour.

"You can't go home, Markus. Something terrible has happened... a bomb exploded in the street... right next to your house... I'm... I'm afraid your mother didn't make it out alive," my neighbour told me, clearly not knowing how to tell me such terrible news to me without causing me too much pain.

But that was impossible. The news hit me like a lightning bolt. I just froze, unable to do or say anything. And that is when it happened. The tears just started to flow, and they kept on flowing like a waterfall for the next few hours ... And then I just ran, I just ran and kept running, not sure, where exactly I was running to.

So, I lost both my parents during the war and ended up alone at the age of 16, roaming the streets trying to find food and shelter to survive without being captured by the British, Russian, French or American army. Although, as I lived in North Rhine-Westphalia, my main concern was not to be caught by the British military, as they had invaded North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony and Hamburg at the time.