ABSTRACT
On Friday, 26 November 1943, Marie Vassiltchikov[a]—or "Missie", as she was universally known—walked through the foreign embassy quarter in Berlin, just to the south of the Tiergarten:
We crossed over to Kurfürstenstrasse, where friends lived in almost every house; most of them had been hit too. The Oyarzabals' huge granite apartment building was a heap of stones. The corner of Nettelbeckstrasse (including our favourite little restaurant, the "Taverna") had been literally pulverised, only small piles of rubble remaining. Wherever we looked, firemen and prisoners-of-war, most of them ... Italians', were busy pumping air into the ruins, which meant that some people were still alive in the collapsed cellars.
In front of another wrecked building a crowd was watching a young girl aged about sixteen. She was standing atop a pile of rubble, picking up bricks one by one, dusting them carefully and throwing them away again. Apparently her entire family was dead, buried underneath, and she had gone mad.
—Vassiltchikov, 1988, p. 118 174In all wars, children are victims. The Second World War differed only in the unprecedented extent to which this was true. At least one million Jewish children perished in the "final solution", and we still do not know how many of the 216,000 victims of medical killing were children. Children were shot by German soldiers and militia men in droves in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union. Starvation and disease killed the elderly and the very young throughout occupied Europe, but especially in the east. And children were incinerated with their mothers in the fire-storms of Hamburg, Dresden, Hildesheim, Darmstadt, and a host of German cities, and were killed or froze to death in the mass flight of German civilians along the snow-bound roads from Silesia and East Prussia in 1945. And still greater numbers of children suffered in the war, losing their homes and belongings, their parents or older siblings. Some were undoubtedly traumatised to the point where they were incapable of communicating with others, like the girl that "Missie" Vassiltchikova saw dusting bricks above the place where her family lay buried, or the Polish girl who had to be taught to speak again after she was liberated from a concentration camp (Sosnowski, 1962, p. 167).