An excerpt from Life Before Letters by Peter Weidhaas

Chapter 6: Going Home Again

They say that life moves forward in seven-year segments.

My childhood, the period from birth to age 7, 1938 to 1945, I can call nothing other than “happy.” The war seemed to be an adventure. Thanks to my parents’ care, I didn’t suffer any need. The bomb attacks on Berlin up until 1942 were exciting events for a young boy, who several times stood alongside the shelter supervisor at the door of the air-raid shelter to get a good look at the lights from the so-called “Christmas trees,” artificial illumination that was dropped to light up the bombing targets.

Later, when my father had set up the family in a little house in Austria near the city of Braunau, I grew up in sun, garden and fresh air. Those years allowed the growth of a natural and healthy strength that I retain to the present day.

Those days held many wonders for me – the shots fired in our direction by the Americans during the last days of the war from the opposite bank of the Inn River, the nightly roaring of the American tanks, the goat that sailed through the air when a hand grenade exploded nearby, the low-flying fighter jets strafing children on their way home from school, the half-starved Russian prisoners of war who were driven in the thousands past our house into the woods nearby – as a child, I was amazed at all this, but did not take in its historical significance or human tragedy.

A friend of the family, a construction engineer and officer in the German army, visited my father often. The six-year-old boy, unconsciously infected by his parents’ conversations about the war and by the non-stop propaganda on the radio, stopped the “Uncle” dressed in civilian clothes at the garden gate with the cry, “Halt, who goes there? Password!”, all the while aiming at him with a wooden weapon, a simple club with a string attached. The “uncle” pushed the “rifle” aside, patted the boy on the head and warned him:

“Petie, never point a weapon at a person.”

With the cunning of an innocent child, I answered:

“But uncle, it’s only a piece of wood!”

“You never know,” he responded. “You never know whether such a weapon can shoot.”

He then asked me to put an empty bottle on the apple tree and rest a board behind it. I eagerly did what he requested with the clear knowledge that this experiment would be a catastrophic flop for the “uncle.” He took up a position about ten paces from the apple tree, slowly brought up my wooden rifle, and for a long time aimed at the bottle. Suddenly an ear-piercing bang broke the quiet, and the bottle exploded into a thousand pieces. Sorrowfully, he gave me my wooden rifle back. Later, after I had pulled a bullet out of the board behind the bottle, I took my rifle apart trying to discover the secret behind the shot.

Read the rest of the story in Life Before Letters.