We could, as they put it, “go home to Mama.” And, each time, my joy at the thought of the visit was tempered by my pain at the thought of our cramped quarters-a two-room flat adjoining the small grocery store that my parents ran, where the only space that I could call my own was a low niche under the sill of the right-hand living-room window.Īt home, I kept bumping into things and into the lack of things: a bathroom and a toilet, for instance. We were especially turned off by nightly guard duty and ballistics classes, which dragged on forever in the musty classroom barracks. As a rule, however, service in the Luftwaffe auxiliary was dreary, though dreary in a different way from school. We were proud to have shot down a four-engined Lancaster bomber the “rather charred” crew members were said to have been Canadians. No damage worthy of the name, few casualties. Massive raids-the kind that Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, and the Ruhr Basin cities suffered-we did not experience. guns only two or three times, when a few enemy bombers were sighted in our airspace in the beam of the searchlights. At first there were attempts to keep school going, but, as classes were too often interrupted by field exercises, the mostly frail, elderly teachers refused to travel the wearisome dirt road to our battery. The Kaiserhafen battery became our second home. Rabidly pubescent, we considered ourselves the mainstays of the home front. The service was not voluntary but compulsory then for boys of my age, though we experienced it as a liberation from our school routine and accepted its not very taxing drills. It happened while I was serving in the Luftwaffe auxiliary-a force made up of boys too young to be conscripts, who were deployed to defend Germany in its air war. Nor did I feel the need to assuage a sense of guilt, at, say, doubting the Führer’s infallibility, with my zeal to volunteer. What I did cannot be put down to youthful folly. When? Why? Since I do not know the exact date and cannot recall the by then unstable climate of the war, or list its hot spots from the Arctic to the Caucasus, all I can do for now is string together the circumstances that probably triggered and nourished my decision to enlist. In 1943, when I was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy in Danzig, I volunteered for active duty. Grass, right, in 1944, at sixteen, when he was drafted into the Labor Service.
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