I am, in a way, a realization of the human instinct of survival: I was conceived at the beginning of World War II and born on May 20, in Dortmund, a center of heavy industry which came under attack very early in the war.
Luckily, my father evaded the draft and was at home to protect the young family. He managed to get the materials for building the air-raid shelter behind our house; he and a small number of other men rescued the burning buildings when they were hit by bombs. This has saved many lives, including my own. Even though I recall a happy childhood, my oldest memories are those of terror: the sound of the sirens, low-flying planes, flames up to the sky, the darkness and stench in the shelter.
Fortunately we did not suffer from famine, and in all this turbulence I somehow grew up. When the war came to an end and everything around us lay in ruins, I was five years old. He knew how to find a side of pork and smuggle it through the British controls; he was in a position that enabled him to trade building materials for coal and fruits. So, unlike many people we did not starve or freeze, and although we had cardboard instead of glass in our windows and slept on straw, we felt prosperous.
There was no money for toys, but the environment was a fantastic playground: the cellars of the ruins, the wrecks of tanks and planes, the deserted industrial areas, and the frozen bombhole pools in wintertime. Of course the schools were also destroyed, and most of the teachers had been killed in action. So when my mother took me to start school in , the authorities were most happy to send me back home for a year, arguing that I wasn't mature enough see the photo. Today I consider this one of the most fortunate circumstances in my life: I got the chance to play for another year and develop my childish curiosity into a genuine one.
As a result, I later was always ahead of my classmates, and once as a third-grader I filled the place of a missing teacher by practicing arithmetic with the fourth-graders.
