My Dad's Story: Lithuania to Bavaria: Part 6
I asked my dad how his family went all the way from Lithuania to Bavaria in Germany during World War II. He's telling me the story in installments. I thought that some of you might find this story interesting. Here's part 6.
We moved to new refugee housing. This time it was four multi-story buildings at the edge of the city. Each building was on the side of a square paved with gravel. One day I was out with the other kids when I realized it was close to supper time. So I ran like crazy so mom wouldn't be mad at me for being late. In the square I tripped and fell and tore up both knees. Mom ran and got the doctor, who spent about a half hour with tweezers picking out pieces of gravel from the bloody mess. Then he bandaged them up and said I would have to stay home until the healing was well under way.
As I had mentioned previously there were a lot of damaged and partially destroyed buildings. To make the city livable these had to be either repaired or torn down. There was a serious complicating factor -- unexploded bombs. There were a couple of reasons for unexploded bombs. First, some bombs were defective, where the detonator didn't do its job. Second, where the bomb didn't encounter an obstruction which triggered the detonator prior to losing its momentum, like the bomb in the Czech barrack if it hadn't encountered rocks would have eventually lost its momentum pushing dirt aside. The US Army Engineers was tasked with removing and disarming these bombs. Their approach was to first remove the bombs so reconstruction could proceed, then to work on disarming them. They used a bomb crater which covered an entire city block, created by a one ton bomb called a blockbuster, as a holding area for the bombs they removed. The kids thought this was the greatest stuff so they were all over that crater. The day after my accident some kid caused a bomb to explode, which caused a chain reaction among the other bombs in the crater. They only found out what kids were there by who didn't show up at the end of the day. The only reason I wasn't there was because I had ripped up my knees.
Life continued for some time, I'm not sure how long, perhaps to September, pretty much the same way.
The next episode will cover our move from Munich.