ABSTRACT
When my brother Andrei was seven and I was ten, we spent many a night in shallow trenches dug by our East European fellow prisoners on the grounds of a German labor camp, while Allied bombers flew overhead and dropped their cargo. Being already a grown-up girl I took political comfort from the fact that the Germans were getting theirs. Not so my brother. Emaciated, dwarfed by the rations we got, chicken-chested and bow-legged, he was already beyond comforting. Each time a bomb exploded, quaking the earth of our shelter-grave, each time the night sky lit up with flares, exposing the ghostly landscape, followed by the vicious rattling of Wermacht artillery and the roaring hiss of missiles, Andrei moaned and trembled and tried to escape from the tight body grip my mother had on him.
