The person that I interviewed was Martin _______. He is a friend that goes to the same church that I go to. Martin is an American citizen but during the war he was a German citizen.

            Martin and his family, mom, dad, and younger brother lived in Germany during the times of the war. Martin was nine years old when the war started. When Germany invaded Poland he wasn’t affected by the war but when they went to war with England that was when the air raids started. He said that one day he overheard that the Germans took criminals from their prisons and sent them into Poland to kill some Germans they're giving the German government a reason to go to war with Poland. During the war years martin experienced many different events. He spent nights in bomb shelters, was hungry all the time, and always was fearful. One time during an air raid in a town 25 miles away, he was eating a piece of his moms cake. The raid started when he was cutting the cake and was finished when he took the last bite of it. When the Pearl Harbor bombings happened martin was listening to the radio. When he heard the news he was excited. But in that day he said he really had no opinion on it. But when he moved to the United States later he thought that it was a terrible thing. When I asked him how the war affected his social life during the war he said, “ there was no social life during the war…” during the war he lost a couple of older buddies that he played with on the streets and he lost his cousin. He also told me that he almost lost his dad in one of the bombings. His dad had built a little hut in their front yard. It was just a hole in the ground with railroad ties over the top of it and that where his dad would go during the bombings. There was one day thought when his city got bombed and a bomb went off right where his dad’s make shift bomb shelter was. But only this time his dad wasn’t there. He was in the public bomb shelter. His opinion on the dropping of the atom bomb was that it was a terrible decision, but it was justified because it was war. He also went on to say that the end effect would have been the same weather it was just one bomb or five hundred thousand bombs.

When I asked him what his most lasting memory was he couldn't really come up with one. He said the hunger and fear.  Then he told me a story. One-day Martin was waiting for his dad to come home on a train. He and his family went to the train station to meet his dad. When they got there they saw people taking dead and wounded people off the train. The train had been shot up by enemy planes. But thankfully his dad had missed that train and was home on the next train very interesting talking to Martin and I learned a lot about his side of the war.