Lyn Smith’s ‘Young Voices’

This is a very useful book that gives many eye-witness accounts of what happened to people who were children during World War II. The narrations are from memory but are nevertheless useful.

I was particularly pleased to read about an Anglo-German family who had as many problems with saying Heil Hitler as Hans Edler and Wilhem the handyman do in my book (Rodney Giesler p7). In a slightly more serious snippet (p19-20) Giesler reports how charming and helpful the SS were to them as foreigners. They had impeccable manners. The war upset Giesler more because he was losing friends than because the Nazis were particularly terrible as far as he could see. He was shocked later to find out about the concentration camps and the death camps.

The book also gives some very exact timing for the bombing of major cities and details the damage caused also. This has been surprisingly difficult to obtain form other sources.