I come from an old family of Strasbourg because my ancestors have been in Alsace and in Strasbourg for more than three centuries. Some are of Strasbourg from the start. So I'm 100% Alsatian. Because of this, my ancestors have been immersed in Alsatian culture and history for more than three centuries…

I was 6 when war broke out in 1939.

Since my ancestors have been immersed in everything that had happened for a very long time, I was given a kind of Alsatian culture. When I was born, I spoke Alsatian, French and also German through force of circumstances. My playmates spoke Alsatian. At home, I spoke French - my parents spoke French… As a result I was perfectly bilingual when war broke out.

I started going to school when I was 6, it was in 1939.

And in 1939, school was still French because it was still France here, although the war had started. We were French until 1940. It was "the phoney war" and Strasbourg had been evacuated. There was no one left in Strasbourg, except of course a few soldiers and the administrative staff. Most of the inhabitants had been evacuated to Périgueux in Dordogne.

On the other hand, My father had a pied-à-terre in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, since my great-grandfather had been a minister in the area; we already knew people there and knew a place where we could go… So we weren't evacuated it Dordogne. My father's administration, which was an insurance company, also set up in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines. So I started war, if I may say so, in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines.

We lived in a flat located in a farm, and that's how I lived through the first events of the war. It wasn't an exile; we just weren't in Strasbourg anymore. And so I started going to school there; I was in the first year of primary school in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines with my sister. We went to school in winter when it was freezing: we had to walk for about half an hour to reach the village or the small town… And we heard nothing about the war.

What do you know about war when you're 6? You know, we lived one day at a time, we had no stance, we heard news only from time to time, it was said that the Germans did this and the French did that… But in the end, since it was " the phoney war", nothing really striking happened at the time.

Until the day when, in May, at school, we had been told: "Be careful, the Germans are coming, they are approaching, they're dangerous, they're mean, they kill everybody, they rape women, be careful"… A kind of terror of the Germans had been instilled to us. We even had to bring nails to school, because we had to spread nails on the roads to burst the tyres of the Germans so that they wouldn't be able to move forward… well, that kind of stupid things… they had tanks, and what could nails do to tanks?

And suddenly, they arrived. The North of France was nearly completely occupied… But the last bastion of the Resistance was in the Vosges, on the Echery hill. We lived in Echery, the village which is next to Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines. On the Echery hill there were still a few French gun batteries which, from time to time, shot a little bit in the valley. The Germans approached and we lived in a no man's land between the village of Echery and Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines. That's where the farm was.

All of a sudden, German troops arrived, a German commando unit. They entered the farm, and we were hiding in the cellar, we were scared because we wondered what would happen to us. They came… like every squaddie they had their helmet, their weapons and very kindly they asked the farmer: "Can we have something to drink, we're thirsty". The farmer gave them water from the fountain. Then we started talking to them and I said: "But these Germans seem to be normal men". Of course we were at war… But they weren't aggressive, they weren't mean, they didn't kill people, they only did their job, if I may say so, as soldiers. Meanwhile, the French were still shooting a little bit. Then at nightfall the commando unit continued on its way to Echery.

There were some firings on the farm but there were no damages. Then there was the armistice. The white flag on the neighbouring farm, the Echery hill: the French had surrendered and it was over.

That's it for the first part. In June 1940, the armistice was signed; in July, we went back to Strasbourg. The city still was totally empty. Only those who were near the city were back. But it took the true inhabitants of Strasbourg a month or more to come back.

Then there was an important change. School started again in October 1940 and the Germans were there, the Nazis, the Nazis had hanged flags with the swastika… Overnight, I went to German school. And, at German school, you had to write in gothic letters, you had to learn German, which was really not difficult for me since I knew Alsatian perfectly well. In fact, it's the same language: German is the written language of the Alsatian dialect… So there was no problem for me. Except for writing since I had to write in gothic letters!

Strasbourg reorganized itself. The inhabitants came back, at least 75% of them. The others stayed in the South of France. Very rapidly they were recruited into different paramilitary or parapolitical movements. The associations were disbanded, the youth movements did no longer exist. We were all press-ganged.

My father was a civil servant in what was to become the French national health and pensions organization, because at the time he was a civil servant in an insurance company which, in 1945, merged with the French national health and pensions organization… since he had a position of responsibility, and since Alsatian civil servants weren't trusted, we were sent elsewhere, in the Baden-Württemberg, he was sent to Karlsruhe. My father was a civil servant in a German health and pensions organization. He stayed there for a long part of the beginning of the war, and besides primary teachers too were what we call "Umgeschuld". An English equivalent for Umschulung could be: "reorientation".

So my father came back every weekend to Strasbourg. My mother brought us up as she could. One couldn't say there was food or material shortage. When war started, it was fine. There was food shortage, like everywhere, but there was no was no real problem. On the other hand, what hurt my mother was that she had to bring us up alone, except during the weekends and the holidays. That was the first part of wartime which went on like that until '43…

So, I was 10 in '43, and from the age of 10, young people were recruited by force in the Hitler Youth. We had no choice. Some didn't go, others were requisitioned, and the parents of others were harshly warned because they didn't come… Finally, mostly pupils aged 15-18 who attended secondary school were concerned: you couldn't avoid it or you got chucked out from secondary school.

Since my parents wanted me to attend secondary school, the name of the secondary school was "Lycée Kléber", but during the war its name was changed to "Bismarck school"… so I was a pupil in the first school year of the "Bismarck school"…

It's funny, but well, that's the way it is. We were given a small armband, a small dagger, a Hitlerian armband with the Swastika. At the beginning, it wasn't that bad: it looked like scouting, we ran in the fields, we looked for medicinal plants, we went on camp, but at the same time, it was already recruitment, an ideological and paramilitary recruitment. We learnt to march, etc.

The worst things were the military parades. You may have seen on the news, memories of the war that were shot in Strasbourg, the Kléber square (from which the statue of Kléber had been removed) was called Karl Roos Platz (?), he was an Alsatian separatist who became a national hero thanks to the Nazis because he was shot with other separatists in Nancy, but that's another story. So, the Kléber square was filled with flags and the requisitioned people were forced to march to the sound of German music… and, with Swastikas everywhere… and we, the Hitler Youth, enlisted by force if I may say so, because it was different for people who were enlisted by force, they were soldiers who were sent to the Russian front in 1942, we were enlisted by force, so to speak, in the Hitlerian Youth movement. We marched behind them to the Nazi music.

Personally I didn't like it at all. Nobody liked it. In the military parades, we started marching with everybody and progressively, some went to the right, some went to the left, and went into a side lane. Finally, when the parade arrived at the Kléber square, there were perhaps only a hundred persons! We found it amusing… to run away! And that's the way it went.

And one day, I no longer wanted to go to the Hitlerian Youth. At the beginning, I was on strike, I skipped: my parents believed I went there, and I didn't… so the leader, or a second-in-command of the Hitlerian Youth chased me up on each occasion: "you didn't come: why? You have to! We're going to denounce you, etc." I still refused to come. Since I didn't show up to the weekly meetings, after three or four weeks my father received a long letter, with a Swastika on it, you know that kind of official letters with Hitler etc. Little Hans Paul hasn't come to the Hitlerian Youth for one or two months, I don't know anymore"… so it was a threatening letter: if I didn't go back to the weekly meetings, my father would be punished and he would have to bear the consequences. Finally, I went back there. It was in 1944, at the beginning of May 1944. I sometimes went back there… It was already, not the rout, but… Then school was over and it was the beginning of the holiday, so I never went back there because the Hitlerian Youth movement was suppressed for "reasons of war".

Meanwhile, My father, who was fed up with being a civil servant in Germany, changed direction: he came back to Alsace. Since he'd been trained as a teacher, in fact he started working in insurance for other reasons, because my grandfather already was the director of the company. He started teaching again as a maths teacher in a secondary school in Strasbourg. So he was back in Alsace. Our family life returned to normal, since my father was home.

Then… what happened? From time to time we went on holiday in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, in the farm… There, things had changed a bit since the village of Echery, which is close to Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, was in an area called "Sperrgebiet", that is to say you needed a special Aussweiss [in German in the original]; not everybody had access to it… so, since we'd been able to prove we were on holiday in the village, we had a kind of safe-conduct to go on holiday in this village. Otherwise, apart from the villagers and the inhabitants of the area, no one had access to the zone which was 3 or 4 kilometres as the crows flies from the border, well, the new French-German border since Alsace had been annexed.

This shows how the Germans ran the country! Alsace was brought under the jurisdiction of Germany, Alsace and Moselle. Alsace in particular was brought under the jurisdiction of the Gau [in German in the original] of Baden-Württemberg and it was called the Gau of Elsass-Baden, the region. And its capital was Strasbourg. There was a dictator or a proconsul, or a representative of Nazism. He was called Gauleiter [in German in the original] Robert Wagner and had organised the area under his iron rule and had enlisted all the Alsatians by force in '42…

We had cousins who'd been enlisted by force on the Russian front, they weren't killed; they managed to flee… one stayed in Russia for a long time before coming back; the other was sent to the Ardennes once the German counteroffensive had started in 1945, and he beat it. At the risk of his life, he crossed the front and landed on the American side. This episode left marks on him because just when he wanted to cross the front, he met a German SS who threatened him and he shot faster than the other, he killed the SS; and it was quite something for him to kill a man, whether he was an SS or not… He'd shot other men anonymously, but there the man was in front of him and he shot faster than him, and killed him. It was quite something to kill a man consciously. Everything that happened during his military service and the war also left marks on him. He told us about all that, and he really hadn't got a good opinion of Germany. It was terrible for him…

But let's go back to the fact that we were annexed, we were part of the Gau of Elsass-Baden… what did I want to say? I lost the thread…

The concentration camps, that's why I was talking about Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines! Everybody knows that in Struthof there was a German concentration camp. Even if people pretended to ignore what it was, we were shown all the same, when we went there, you couldn't ignore things happened on this mountain which were not really clear: we heard explosions because the prisoners worked in a granite quarry.

And the local people were rather… I don't know, they didn't dare say what was happening: they knew, but they didn't know very well what was happening. Contrary to what was said: "The Germans and the annexed Alsatians should have known what was happening". Of course they knew something was going on, but I don't believe they really knew to what extent they were treated with cruelty up there. I don't think so.

After the war, we finally learnt what had happened. To go to Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, there was a tunnel that opened in 1936 and the Nazi regime wanted it to become a V1 factory. They needed to redevelop the tunnel. They had set up an accessory camp to the Struthof. A detachment from the Struthof was set up at the entrance to the Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines tunnel, not far from the farm where we lived…

The farm was on a hill. This former textile factory had been transformed into a camp from where you could see convicts, prisoners who were disguised in convicts, that's why I call them convicts, with striped uniforms, etc. It was something terrible for me. I saw it and said: "But why have all these people been locked in, what have they done?" So, from the Vosges I'd seen a detachment from a concentration camp, and it made us all think a lot about it.

Then, it was in Autumn '44, the great bombings on Strasbourg… About ten… But two or three were very important. The first one in August '44 and the other one in September.

School had just begun, and when we arrived at the Lycée Kléber, at the Bismark Schule [in German in the original], one day we were called together in the schoolyard and we were told: "School is over: all the teachers are requisitioned to go to the front and to defend the German Reich until the final victory". We were happy. We cried out with joy like children would do when they are allowed to leave and when school is over. The dream of each pupil is to see the school burn out and no longer to have to go to school. And for us, that was pretty much it.

So, we were in Strasbourg.

My father had been requisitioned at first to go and help peasants and then… he was too old to go to the front and he'd got 4 children, but to dig trenches near Oberhausbergen… to dig trenches…

So, we were in Strasbourg and were heard noises, planes coming, the alarm was raised at the same time: there was an infernal noise… we hurried down to the cellar. Strasbourg was being bombed and we were worried: the sound of the planes, of the bombs… Suddenly, everything started to shake in the cellar: we were caught under rubble… The stones, the bricks, the ceiling of the cellar had collapsed under the house which had collapsed itself… A quarter of the house had disappeared. We were inside with other tenants… and fortunately, no one was injured. We went out in the street by the cellar window because everything else was blocked, we couldn't see the door anymore… and we took refuge in the opposite house.

After half an hour, once the bombing was over, we went out in the street and we saw that a quarter of our house had collapsed. We were exactly where the house had been destroyed. There were casualties in the street… It was disturbing.

There was an organisation created by the Germans and called "Lufschutz" (?)[in German in the original], an aid organisation which took us into care. We were in a great restaurant in the Orangerie. We were put there: a blanket, soup, a sausage. We were given something to eat to pass the first hours of the bombing.

What had struck me, was that all of a sudden, overnight, after the Nazi flag, there were a lot of people who, all of a sudden, it's only an image, I don't judge them, wore FFI [French Resistance fighters] armbands. One would have believed 50% of the population belonged to FFI, that is to say the resistance forces operating in France… I who know the Alsatians, I know they're rather cautious. Of course I know there were resistance fighters - my wife's father was one of them; but they weren't 50%, that's really pushing it. Two days later, a decree was issued saying all those who couldn't justify they really were resistance fighters weren't allowed to wear the FFI armband, otherwise they'd be prosecuted. So, we saw a bit less armbands.