WORK IN PROGRESS

INGA SPANDAU

"I was born in a crowded Bunker under Berlin's smoldering rubble, breathing burnt cordite and inhaling the smell of putrefying flesh. As an 'Ostkinder', a child of the East, I was a bastard conceived in an orgy of rape by Russian soldiers. A bitter harvest on a continent seeded by twenty million corpses. Weaned on suffering, stained by my paternity, air raid sirens and exploding bombs were childhood's most vivid sounds. In May 1945, when the chattering guns ceased their frightening dirge, my mother and I crawled out of the rubble into the verdant beauty of a now silent Spring that mocked our misery. In Dresden,Hamburg,Cologne and Berlin, life slowly resurrected in the rubble. From the Vistula to the Rhine, from the Baltic to the Danube, shell-shocked survivors emerged from bomb shelters to chalk their names on doorways, unaware it would be ten years before their fathers, sons and husbands returned from Russian POW camps."