Darkness Over Europe: First-Person Accounts of Life in Europe During the War Years 1939-1945 PDF
Preview Darkness Over Europe: First-Person Accounts of Life in Europe During the War Years 1939-1945
Darkness over Europa Darkness over Eurooa First-Person Accounts of Life in Europe During the War Years 1939-1945 Edited bY Tony March For Army Times Publishing Company Rand M9Nally & Company Chicago New York San Francisco .Copyright © 1969 by Army Times Publishing Company Copyright 1969 under International Copyright Union by Army Times Publishing Company All rights reserved Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 71-80482 Printed in the United States of America by Rand M<;:Nally & Company First printing, August, 1969 Preface Evil, as old as mankind itself, is distinguished from generation to generation and from era to era only by minor variations, al- though they are intensified by the mass possibilities of scientific methods of obliteration. The hate and oppression of World War I merely ebbed after the Armistice in 1918 to return with vastly magnified virulence as World War II. By the time of VJ Day, in September, 1945, this global conflict had claimed the lives of nearly thirty-eight million civilians and military. It was and still remains difficult to comprehend the misery and slaughter of those six terrible years. It is perhaps no easier to appreciate the conditions under which occupied Europe existed or to understand how so many people were in fact able to sur- vive. Murky in the distancing years is the chronicle of day-to-day living, the events which are a part of being under abject tyranny. The object of this book is to probe behind the front lines. It is not a history of armies and battles, but rather the life and times of the average man-drama and tragedy on a large scale, as well as in lesser vignettes. Some of the accounts are translated and published here for the first time. The authors, with few exceptions, are not professional writ- ers but people who themselves lived to tell about World War II at home. Of all the persons who made this collection possible, the editor wishes to thank in particular H. R. Baukhage; Mrs. Margarete Buber-Faust of Stockholm, Sweden; Mrs. Ruth Che- nault; Carlo Christensen, Cultural Attache of the Royal Danish Embassy in Washington; Mrs. Kate Cohn (Catherine Klein) of London; Bjoern Heimar, Washington correspondent for the Oslo Aftenposten; Georgi I. Isachenko, Counselor, Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in Washington; Lieutenant Colonel Donald B. Stewart ( United States Army, ret) of San Antonio, Texas; Emil Trinka of Lidgerwood, North Dakota; and Miss Lena A. Yovitchitch of Edinburgh, Scotland.
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