AFTER THE WAR WITH HANNELORE - Citations
A Berliner War Child’s Testimony from 1945 to 1989 A film by G. Scott MacLeod
Intro :
The scale of human tragedy by the end of the war is beyond the imagination of everyone who did not live through it, but especially of those who have grown up in the demilitarized society of the post-Cold War age. Yet this moment of fate for millions of people still has much to teach us.
Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945
Vignette 1 :
The Hospital 1945
But pray ye that your flight be not in winter, neither on the Sabbath day.And woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days!
Saint Matthew
24 :19-20
Vigette 2 :
The Russian Occupation and the Apple Cellar 1946
The Red Army is the most advanced moral army in the world… Our soldiers attack only an armed enemy. No matter where we are, we always set an example of humanity towards the local population and any displays of violence and looting are totally foreign to us.
Senior Russian Lieutenant
Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945 p.412
frontline troops of the Red Army entered the town. They came into the cellar where we were hiding and pointed their weapons at me and the other two women and ordered us into the yard. In the yard twelve soldiers in turn raped me.
Emma Korn
Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945
Vignette 3 :
My Home, Father and the Railways 1947
We journey all on the same old train
Through time on our spinning star.
We look outside. It’s too much pain.
We journey all on the same old train and no one knows how far.
Erich Kästner
Das Eisenbahngleichniss
Vignette 4 :
The Blockade and Airlift 1948 – 1949
First comes food, then morals
The Three Penny Opera,
Bertolt Brecht
As I looked down below I wondered to myself how we were bitter enemies, these Germans and ourselves, such a short time ago, trying to exterminate each other. Now through the greatest air transportation effort in history, we were risking whatever it took to keep the Berliners alive.
Gail S. Halvorsen
The Berlin Candy Bomber
Vignette 5 :
School Years 1951 to 1967
Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
B.F. Skinner
Vignette 6 :
The Wall - 13th of August, 1961
I like it. It pleases me tremendously. The working class of Germany has erected a wall so that no wolf can break into the German Democratic Republic again. Is that bad?
Nikita Khrushchev
1961 in East Berlin
Vignette 7 :
Checkpoint Charlie
How are things up there?
We have ten tanks at Checkpoint Charlie… the Russians have ten tanks there too. So now we are equal. Mr. President I’ll have to rectify that statement. The Russians have brought up twenty more tanks.
President Kennedy in conversation with General Clay October 28th, 1961
