Apart from more formal research, I have also relied on memories of my own childhood to recall how it felt to be afraid and alone. Strange though it may seem, one of the strongest memories is that of fear for the safety of my mother and worrying that she might worry about me, while at the same time blindly believing that whatever my problem was she would come, irrespective of obstacles, to help. I imagine that many children in time of war went through the same agonies – just magnified many, many million times.
My own arrival in this strangely ferocious and often incomprehensible world dates back to 1947 and, as always, those first years of child-hood seemed endless: endless summers, long winters - even the hours tended to drag, especially during school time. It was only with aging that I got this very precise feel-ing for time and its brevity.
Take this little story for example. My Grandmother was born in 1886. When she was eight years old she went to her Grandmother’s 100th birthday celebrations, who was born, therefore, in 1794 when the Reign of Terror was in full swing in Revolutionary France. So, when I gave my Granny a kiss I was kissing a woman who had kissed another pres-ent in this world around the time the French Queen, Marie Antoinette, was going to the guillotine! It is this sort of consideration that has made time tangible for me and it is this tangibility that makes the child victims of WWII so much closer. But for a fraction, their fate could have been mine. It’s a very sober-ing thought.
