Child of War: A Memoir of World War Two and the Cold War

By Ingrid Maria Polonius

Child of War is not your ordinary war memoir. Told from the perspective of a child, Ingrid Polonius’ earliest memories of being alive include running for her life to bomb shelters while the sirens of Kassel, Germany, wailed their daily air-raid warnings. In 1943, the Allies stepped up their air attacks on Germany, sending bombers day and night to obliterate Ingrid’s hometown, a major producer of Panzer tanks. The Allies then breached the Edersee Dam just outside Kassel, flooding her hometown, creating massive devastation. Ingrid witnessed it all, living through events no child should ever have to endure.

Civilians were now paying the ultimate price as the Allies exacted retribution against Adolf Hitler and his war machine. Many of these civilians included true innocents, such as Ingrid, who was a blameless little girl, a child of war. Ingrid’s moving memoir recounts the very worst and best of her experiences in war-torn Germany and the Cold War aftermath.

Ingrid’s beloved mother played a crucial role in saving Ingrid and her brother and sister’s lives many times through her iron will to survive. Ironically, she also risked their lives by refusing to fly the Nazi flag and clandestinely copying out anti-Nazi sermons in her basement by candlelight.

Told with compassion and an eye for detail, Child of War: A Memoir is Ingrid’s personal testimony of the effects of war upon children. Through emotional and spiritual perseverance, Ingrid thrived as an athlete and student, making the best of the hard years following the war, now known as The Hunger Years. She was there during the rise of the Cold War, the building of the Berlin Wall, and many years later, she celebrated its eventual collapse.

Ingrid’s memoir is a study in memory, as she writes, “Memory is a fragile thing, turning powerful when triggered.” She fearlessly examines the tremendous losses, especially the family members who died, such as Uncle Lu, who commanded a U-boat and was lost at sea in the early stages of the war, leaving behind a wife and two children.

In another twist of fate, Ingrid ended up settling in the United States and becoming an American citizen. Never did she imagine she would end up a citizen of the country her family surrendered to when American tanks rolled in, and two GIs burst into their home pointing their machine guns directly at her.

Ultimately, Child of War portrays the life of a young girl growing into a woman, who, despite surviving bombardments, near starvation, and unimaginable loss, has managed to fashion a life well worth living, finding joy and optimism in service to others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Release date: Nov 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781977259936

Ingrid Maria Polonius

Ingrid Polonius’ experiences as a child of war have directly led to her lifelong work for justice: devoting thirty years to Quest for Peace, providing Nicaraguan children with an education and hot meals, and Emmaus Prison Ministry, offering spiritual support to prisoners near her longtime home in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

Book preview

Ingrid, age 3, October 1939, one month after the start of WWII

1

NO AIR TO BREATHE

The baby was dead. For hours, the boy had been held high above the heads of those of us crowded into the air-raid shelter. While hundreds of us neared suffocation, whispers of the baby’s loss made their way through the poorly dug-out bunker. We stood, defenseless, water dripping off the raw rocks onto our heads, pooling at our feet, and soaking through our worn-out shoes.

The newborn belonged to our neighbors, the Kasteleiners. Although I was too young at the time to grasp the full impact of the tragedy, the little baby’s agonizingly slow death grew to haunt me throughout my childhood.

Beginning in 1940 during the early stages of World War II in Germany, air raids began to threaten us day and night. It was common knowledge that the basements of houses or apartment buildings were unsafe places to find protection. Shelters, therefore, were hewn out of hillsides and hastily built without proper lighting or ventilation. The closest air raid shelter to our home was the one at Aschrott Park, requiring a twenty-five-minute run in order to reach it.

I slept with a child’s suitcase and my rucksack beside my bed each night. This rucksack was packed with some pieces of clothing, my teddy bear Moli, and Waldi, my stuffed animal dachshund, both of whom I desperately wanted to survive. Whenever the siren sounded, warning us of an approaching squadron of bombers, we were trained to grab our belongings and run as fast as our little feet would carry us to the shelter, Mom clasping my little brother Hanns in her arms.

Unbelievably, Nazi party officials would elbow us out of the way to get into the safety of the shelter before us, often knocking women and little children off their feet. My mother was struck by their savage lack of concern for us, the civilians who did not count in their estimation. Back home again, she often complained in private about the disrespect we had to tolerate.

Having reached the shelter, we noticed that a naked light bulb dangled from the ceiling every hundred feet or so, but with all the destruction around us, no electricity was available because the main power plant was always hit first. Fortunately, some people brought candles in their backpacks to the dangerously overcrowded shelter. Candles were among those rare treasures and necessities of war and needed to be used sparingly. However, during that worst night of all my war memories, not even a single match would light because of the lack of oxygen where hundreds of us were huddled together. During that particular night in the bomb shelter, there was no air to breathe. No one knows exactly how many civilians, young and old, died that night.

Hanging on to life in total darkness for hours, we were completely trapped, nearing suffocation. Mom never panicked. She vigorously secured some space for us close to the raw stone wall of our shelter, pressing our noses as tightly as possible against the dripping wet rock. I remember immediately feeling some relief when I smelled the freshness of cool earth carried by a little breeze-like movement of air. Even though we could never be certain if this breath of life-saving air was our imagination, my mother made sure that we, unlike so many less-fortunate souls, survived that horrible night.

2

AN ANGEL IN THE TOMB

Before air raids began to target my birthplace in western Germany, Kassel was a tranquil city known for its cultural riches and beautiful surroundings of lakes and highlands. The Henschel Werke at the periphery of town brought a drastic change to this idyllic setting. In the past, locomotives were built in this industrial complex, always used for peaceful purposes. Yet in the course of Hitler’s war plans, Kassel’s main industry was quickly converted into a production facility for building tanks and fighter planes. This ominous shift provided the justification for the Allies to declare my hometown as one of their primary targets for heavy bombardments. The Americans bombed us during the day, and the British bombed us during the night.

Not only did we have to get used to interrupted nights, but also we children were made highly aware of the danger we were in, which demanded cooperation at any cost. When playing outside, we knew all too well to stay close to home because the unpredictable air-raid alarms could intrude upon our lives at any moment. At our young age, we had to live in constant fear.

The minute the sirens sounded to warn us about another approaching air attack, we dared not waste a single second. We had to react to the threat right away by jumping out of bed at night or dropping everything else we were doing during the day, grabbing our little backpacks, and rushing out. Our frequent runs for protection often occurred during the night, which were the most feared hours for everyone. We had to pass many houses in ruins, with heaps of coal stored for the winter burning fiercely in their basements. These scary sources of light and their flickering shadows disturbed our vision, making our little legs run even faster.

Each time this happened, the adults around us must have tried hard not to show their fright to us youngsters. I do not remember that their dread ever affected us; instead, they tried to show, against all odds, a stern and steadfast demeanor during those life-threatening situations.

As Kassel was beset by intensifying bomb attacks, we were forced to spend more and more time in overcrowded shelters. Upon returning from our claustrophobic shelter, we felt immensely relieved to discover that our home had survived another night.

In particular, I remember many nights coming home tired and exhausted, when the high-explosive bombs on delayed timers almost lifted us from our beds at unpredictable intervals. Those numbing shocks released our most primal fears. In addition, never knowing where those devices had come down, near or far from home, only deepened our fright. Only a mother’s inner strength, nurtured by a strong faith, saved us from nervous breakdowns. We felt comforted by her resilience, even though we were too young to be able to identify the source of her strength.

Not too much later, nearly all schools were closed or destroyed. The few school buildings that remained intact were used as military hospitals, or their basements were set up as bomb shelters. To ease the overcrowding in the shelter at Aschrott Park nearest to our home, the huge basement of the Heinrich Schütz High School, also located within walking distance from our house, became our primary bomb shelter.

Arriving there for the very first time, we hastily followed the flood of people stumbling down several sets of broad staircases. These were, it seemed to us, never-ending steps, descending into a totally unfamiliar terrain. Mom’s watchful eyes made sure that my older sister was not trampled by the crowd of people rushing with abandon down to our right and left. We felt like blind cattle, being stampeded toward a destination we had never seen before, not knowing what to expect there, and terrified of losing the steadying hands of our mother who, of course, was only able to hold on to two of us.

Feeling vastly disoriented by the time we reached the very bottom, it became immediately clear that this was a frightful region. Not only did the dim lights start to flicker, but also a disturbing sound in the background alarmed us. The lights sputtered as the Allied bomber squadrons went after power plants, over and over. I vividly remember that, for us children, our ever-growing fear always reached its peak when the lights went out completely as hundreds of us huddled helplessly in the dark.

Too often, we found ourselves locked into this vast, pitch-black dungeon with the school’s load-bearing concrete columns all around us. We understood that, in the event of a direct hit, they would collapse and crush us.

What’s more, we wondered about that persistent gushing sound behind us in the daunting dark. The school had been built over the Drusel, a rapidly flowing stream. All of us listened in terror as it gurgled its way underneath the floor of the basement where we had come to find protection. Looking down from a sturdy concrete bridge, we could see the moving waters. Right away, every one of us was aware of what would happen if the building were smashed to ruins by those powerful bombs raining down above our heads. We would all drown here in this black and forgotten tomb. As far as I remember, not a single word was ever uttered regarding the immediate danger we all faced.

It was cold down here and only a few shabby tables and chairs offered a strange comfort. In order to keep our minds off this hellish place, a neighbor, Helga Thiele-Deutgen, came to the rescue. She taught us a completely new kind of leisure activity, offering the most needed distraction. To keep us occupied, she brought paperboard, scissors, and colored pencils to the shelter and showed us how to carefully fold the pieces of the sturdy paper in half. We watched her draw a variety of figures on the outer part of the material. After coloring them, we then cut out those silhouettes in such a way that the top parts closest to the folding line were never detached. Thus, fixed at the top, these creations were able to stand up by themselves, enchanting us children. All kinds of figures, people and animals, even trees and houses, magically took shape this way. I remember us producing many sets of farm animals so that we could play with them on a farm of our imagination.

Around Christmas time, we busied ourselves cutting out lots of angels, small ones and bigger ones, painting golden hair around their faces. These eventually rounded out our completed nativity scene with Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus. Also, these pieces of art made wonderful presents at a time when nothing could be purchased anymore. Our artistic efforts took place only during the days and nights before the flickering light from the power plant completely stopped. As the war intensified and the frequent air attacks lasted longer and longer, these creative projects managed to keep us sane as long as the light lasted. Mom kept expressing her gratefulness to Helga, who through her ingenuity, had calmed us down and shifted our focus away from this dark crypt with its rushing waters beneath our feet.

My mother saved one of those angels, and to this day it is in my possession. I found it in her nightstand after she had become too frail to live independently any longer and had to be moved into assisted living. When I came across this little piece of art more than fifty years later, I knew I had discovered a true war relic.

3

FLOODS AND FIRESTORMS

In May 1943, the night before my seventh birthday, the wider region around my hometown of Kassel became the target of one of the worst air raids we ever experienced. At first, we were unable to judge the full extent of the attack, but the devastation was soon felt everywhere. The news broke that the Edersee Talsperre, a massive dam, 150 feet high and a quarter mile long, which kept a huge reservoir in check, had been hit. To the adults, it must have been clear what that meant. The Eder is a tributary of the River Fulda, which runs through downtown Kassel. The broken dam released tons of water that rushed down into the Fulda Valley, relentlessly flooding everything in its way.

We did not live close to the river, but the immediate concern was whether my parents’ best friends, the Möllers, had survived. And if they had survived, what had happened to their house in the lower valley? Since no telephone connections were working anymore, the only solution was to take the streetcar to reach their place. This was my birthday, and the journey we took that day remains unforgettable. The chaos downtown allowed us to reach a point only halfway to our destination. Trying to get as close as possible, we had to walk a long stretch of the muddy streets. More than once our flimsy, completely outgrown shoes became mired in mud. Eventually we had to give up. We stood swallowing our tears, watching how the roadways became roaring rivers, filled with hundreds of cadavers of farm animals. Drowned horses, cows, sheep, sweet little spring lambs, chickens, and dogs were swept downstream at a rapid pace right in front of us. Our eyes helplessly followed the course of the murky stirred-up waters flowing through my drowning hometown, loaded with the debris of dead and dying animals.

Edersee Dam, breached May 17, 1943

After a few days had passed and the floodwaters were slowly receding, we started a second attempt to reconnect with our friends. Most importantly, we found out that they had survived, but they had to cope with their house having been inundated under several feet of water. That was sobering news. High water marks everywhere later gave witness to the extent of the disaster. The memory of looking at their elegant grand piano, splattered all over with dirt and sitting in the middle of the living room with its three legs entirely buried in soft mud, stands out in my mind.

It was clear there was not much we could do to alleviate their pain except to grant the one favor they asked of us. They begged us to take their little bewildered dachshund Moritz with us. We were overjoyed since we never had a dog of our own and having this little live toy on loan for a while was the best thing that could have happened to us. This unexpected turn of events helped us manage the traumas of those days.

More than four decades later, the true impact of the Allied destruction of the Edersee Dam and all the horrors that followed were relentlessly brought home to me in a highly unexpected place–Australia–to which my husband and I had traveled in 1986. While staying with friends in the Sydney area, we took an unforgettable side trip to the Great Barrier Reef, and also visited the capital, Canberra.

If the day had not been grayish and rainy, we never would have considered visiting the Australian War Museum. My immediate response to spotting the sign in front of the building was a visceral feeling of anxiety. I recall questioning in my mind the sanity of anyone desiring to spend time looking at war exhibits. Would I ever want to be confronted again with the mortal dangers I had to live through in my childhood years? However, the rain drove us inside. Here, with great hesitation, I stumbled from one sad story to the next, realizing for the first time how many young Australian lives had been lost fighting on the side of the British as a result of their government’s far-flung political alliances.

While following the path into one of the main halls, we gasped when we saw one of the original British World War II bomber planes, the Lancasters, hanging from the ceiling with its underbelly compartment doors wide open. Here was the chamber where all the bombs had been stored with its release gears in plain view. As visitors, we stood right underneath that deep, dark space with its cargo of inevitable destruction. How well we knew the human suffering that came from such a source.

We received the most distressing shock as we read the history of this particular bomber. A large information panel specified every single mission that this Lancaster, named George, had flown. Here, I plainly had to face the fact that on the tenth birthday of my sister Hiltrud, October 22, 1943, George had executed mission number 66. I already knew that on that day in only two hours 440 bombers of the British Royal Air Force dropped a thousand high-explosive bombs and 400,000 incendiary phosphorus bombs, setting ablaze a terrible firestorm, destroying 75 percent of my hometown, Kassel. At least ten thousand people burned to death in a single night. Many more suffocated in their basement shelters. The bombing that night pulverized Kassel’s entire thousand-year-old downtown. I still wonder if this was the same night when, due to the lack of oxygen, not a single match would light for us in the bomb shelter and the Kasteliners’ baby suffocated to death. Only because we were living on the outskirts of town, the so-called Green West End, my family had survived one of the war’s most destructive bombardments. This very plane had flown with that squadron of death.

The next date mentioned on the panel was mission number 70, flown on November 23, 1943. We could barely believe our eyes. My husband’s maternal grandparents were killed during that air raid attack on Berlin. A high-explosive bomb, possibly carried by this very plane above our heads, had fallen into the inner courtyard of a huge apartment complex. The explosion was so powerful that all four apartment blocks surrounding the square were lifted up and then came down, imploding mercilessly. Not one of the two hundred people in those basements survived. The next morning all that my husband’s father, Herbert, was able to find was one of their ripped family photo albums and some silverware thrown into the street.

Arriving at the site, he immediately noticed that teams of Russian prisoners were being used to extract human remains from the rubble. As he conducted his own search through the wreckage, he stumbled upon an arm and hand sticking out. Upon closer inspection, he recognized a familiar ring on the hand in front of him. His mother-in-law always wore such a ring, adorned with a precious stone. Distracted by yet another gruesome sight, he turned back after the POWs brought all the bodies up to the surface, only to discover that the ring was gone.

Furthermore, since the bomber planes from England always came at night, it must have been one of these Lancaster bombers, hanging here over our heads in the museum, that flew the mission that destroyed the dam of the Edersee Talsperre, triggering the devastating flood. What a painful reminder of the past–to find myself standing almost in reach of the very instrument that delivered the bombs, resulting in the catastrophe that devastated my hometown, by both fire and flood, and killed my husband’s grandparents.

Who could have anticipated this faraway exhibit would confront us with the very instrument of destruction that had flown invisibly and anonymously over our heads four decades earlier, causing so much tragedy and death?

4

APPLES AND PEARLS

It is in the DNA of human beings to give the absolute best to their offspring, but in times of war, everything changes. The conditions of daily life are reduced to a bare minimum. After having raised my own family, many times I have pondered my mother’s ability to bring us three children through those years. How could she have coped with the daily menace, and how did she, at times, outsmart the immediate dangers threatening our lives? The more I consider these questions, the more I fully grasp that she was actually powerless. Total War had invaded every facet of our lives.

I will always remember Mom’s bitter remarks about the fact that war provisions had been directed only to military operations, and next to none to the civilian population, particularly those in the cities. One major propaganda message, drummed into everyone’s head, declared that substantial sacrifices needed to be made for the victorious times to come. Yes, limitless sacrifices on a daily basis were demanded from every citizen during those years of war, except for those in power.

One of the Nazi Party’s last desperate moves to save mothers with small children was to evacuate them to the countryside. At the time of our evacuation, which occurred during the last four months of the war, three-quarters of Kassel lay in ruins, but the propagandists did not want to admit how close Germany was to its final defeat.

To get to safety, we were ordered to leave everything behind and move to Vierbach, a small farm village in the county of Eschwege, a distance of thirty-four miles from home.

Was this order Hitler’s compassionate attempt to spare at least some of the younger generation from extinction? Decades later, my mother told me that this was the question she was brooding over with my grandparents, who came to visit us in Kassel for the last wartime Christmas in 1944. Carrying just one suitcase between them, Oma and Opa arrived at our doorstep from East Prussia. I remember Oma telling us the story that at their departure from Allenstein, she had to reassure the maid back home of their intended return by advising her to go ahead and change the bed sheets in order to be ready for their homecoming. But even the misleading Nazi propaganda could not erase their serious doubts about ever being able to go back again.

The day after their arrival, heavy bombardments destroyed the entire railroad system around my hometown, which left my grandparents no other choice than to unexpectedly stay with us in Kassel. Their journey west turned out to be a trip with no return.

Had they tried to return home, they would have come back to the final blow of the war in the East, the actual cruel confrontation with the Red Army on January 13, 1945, when Germany’s East Front completely collapsed. Moreover, they would have been exposed to the atrocities the Russian army committed during its invasion at Germany’s Eastern border. Although my grandparents’ lives were spared, they lost their life’s work and everything they owned. In spite of all that, we were grateful that they were relatively safe with us for the time being.

Toward the last stretches of the war, my Aunt Cilly was still waiting to hear from her husband, whose whereabouts had been unknown for years. Fearing the looming Russian invasion, she, along with her two daughters Marlies and Astrid, was forced to leave East Prussia. Since we were the only family members who lived in the western part of Germany, they also moved in with us in Kassel. We three youngsters welcomed our cousins as new playmates, given how close we were in age. From the adults’ point of view, however, life in such ever-tightening quarters became more and more difficult.

As a result, under this new evacuation order, our family of three adults with five young children had to leave town. My grandmother was the only one who opted to stay behind to defend our home, no matter what came to pass. She was a fearless woman, who became known as the angel of the neighborhood. Every time the bombs were dropping and droves of people were trying to find an imaginary safer place to survive, she refused to leave our apartment building. Neighbors entrusted her with bundles of keys to their main doors. More than once, she saved our building by singlehandedly throwing out into the street mattresses, draperies, carpets, and other movable objects that were on fire. The Nazi order to empty our attics actually made her fire-watch much easier. While she stayed back home, Grandpa journeyed with us to our new destination.

Farmers were ordered to give up some living space to accommodate us refugees from the city. Our farmer, Herr Boley, let us have one empty room in his house, while my aunt with her children found shelter in another farmhouse. The only luxury our new accommodation offered was a wood stove for heating and cooking. Its makeshift flue ran across the ceiling to reach the outdoors through a section of an upper window where the glass had been taken out. Somehow my mother was able to hire a hauler in Kassel who brought my parents’ bedroom set to our country hovel, the only comfortable piece in our one-room existence. At least Grandpa, Mom, and we three youngsters had a bed to share.

Resigned to a life where our basic needs were scarcely met, we quickly learned a new routine of using the cowshed as our bathroom, where the animal excrement was collected in a groove running behind the row of cows. This was the place, we were told by Farmer Boley, to also discharge our feces. Entering our uncommon country bathroom, we had to pinch our noses to get over the intense stench. More importantly, while trying to squat down, we had to pay close attention to the unpredictable wagging of the cows’ dirt-encrusted tails, so we would not be thrown off balance. During the night, a chamber pot placed underneath our bed helped us out. The only way for us to wash up was in the outdoor sink near the entrance to the stable, which the farmer used for cleaning his milking equipment. Making these adjustments required utmost fortitude from all of us, especially when chilly temperatures of the early spring days denied us any comfort.

In addition, we could not assume anyone in the village would welcome us, since we were probably seen as intruders who had nothing to offer. We were just eight more hungry mouths joining that little community. Bartering kept us alive. As a matter of fact, bartering became the only means to get our hands on some food. It was called organisieren, meaning we had to be inventive in our efforts to organize something fit to be eaten. Mom’s jewelry and saved linens from her dowry were gladly accepted by the village people in exchange for eggs, milk, butter, and bread. It was better not to think about how long our supplies would last.

One day, my grandfather managed to get ahold of a salami, a real wurst, something we had not been able to acquire for years. After we had tasted just a few slices, Mom hung up the largest portion of that rarity in a cold spot outside our living space, close to the attic staircase, because no refrigerator was available. The next morning, tragedy struck. The wurst was gone! No doubt one of Farmer Boley’s cats must have had a feast without us.

This unfortunate episode put a real damper on the otherwise happy encounters we children were seeking out, for example when the cats had litters. To us, this meant a great deal, as these adorable kittens became our living toys to carry around and play with incessantly.

Living in the countryside was a vast improvement for us. In feeling safer,