We Were Young and at War: The First-Hand Story of Young Lives Lived and Lost in WWII
We Were Young and at War: The First-Hand Story of Young Lives Lived and Lost in WWII by Sarah Wallis and Svetlana Palmer Collins, HK$270
How did teenagers fare in the second world war? Often the answer was 'very badly'; and sometimes 'not at all'. Old enough to be used as cannon fodder, as vulnerable as any other human to enemy ordnance, and - if they'd drawn the wrong ethnic card - liable for a one-way ticket to a concentration camp - survival was something of a lottery.
Apart from Anne Frank, who recorded her life and thoughts while in hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam, little is known about how teenagers got on in the 1940s. We Were Young and at War is an astonishing collection of memoirs, adroitly put together by Sarah Wallis and Svetlana Palmer. It spans several continents and switches between Allied and Axis points of view with incredible poignancy.
One of the most riveting tales follows a Japanese boy, Hachiro Sasaki. Initially, and most unusually, a pacifist, as the tides of war turn he feels he has to defend his country; 'If I don't go, who will?' he remarks after signing up for navy pilot school.
Taught how to commit suicide on his first day of training to avoid being captured alive, in April 1945 he perished in a kamikaze attack on a US warship. His father suffered a mental breakdown and Hachiro's name was never mentioned in the family until his brother published his diary in 1981. Running in parallel to Hachiro's life, 15-year-old Mikiko Yamaki befriends trainee pilots, one of whom she later married, and they lived 'happily ever after' running a pharmacy.
Few of the subjects of Young and at War have such a happy tale to tell. Most dreadful is the account by a boy in the Lodz ghetto in Poland, whose name has been lost to history but who wrote in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish and English. Only a few pages of his diary survive. 'My God ... why will you not punish, with all your wrath, these who are destroying us?' he writes in early August 1944.
