German Boy: A Child in War

German Boy: A Child in War – Wolfgang W.E. Samuel

In early 1945, as Soviet armies advanced into eastern Germany, ten-year-old Wolfgang Samuel, his mother and his younger sister joined millions of refugees fleeing west. Their home was gone, their father was a soldier far away, and the world they had known was collapsing around them.

In German Boy: A Child in War, Wolfgang W. E. Samuel, who later emigrated to the United States and became a decorated officer in the US Air Force, tells the story of his childhood in the final months of the Second World War and the hungry years that followed. It is a rarely heard perspective: that of ordinary German civilians, especially children, who suffered the consequences of a war started by their country’s leaders.

Samuel describes the family’s desperate flight across a devastated country, the terror of air raids and the chaos of the war’s end, and life in the Soviet occupation zone. He recounts the hunger, cold and fear of the postwar years, as the family struggled to survive in refugee camps and makeshift lodgings, scavenging for food and fuel. At the center of the story is his mother, whose courage, resourcefulness and sacrifices kept her children alive through unimaginable hardship.

The memoir also follows Wolfgang’s growing sense of responsibility as he took on adult burdens at a young age, and the family’s eventual path to a new life.

Moving and powerful, German Boy is an important read for anyone interested in the Second World War, its civilian victims and stories of survival and resilience. It contains descriptions of wartime violence and hardship.