Comments | little_details: Life during WWII

fallapartagain in little_details

Life during WWII

Feb 24, 2009 00:06

I'm studying English Language and one of my coursework pieces is a piece of original writing. I'm trying to write a story about two kids - mid-teens - who try and run away when the war starts. To make life easier on myself, since I'm not a historian, I've stated my vague time as WWII and location as Austria - approximately. The location can be ( Read more... )

~world war ii, europe: history, austria: history

Comments 15

andromeda3116 February 24 2009, 00:41:42 UTC

Well, the time period is a bit off (WWI instead of WWII), but All Quiet on the Western Front has some really good scenes of war-torn countryside in it. You could look look into that book/movie (I haven't seen the movie, so I can't testify to its value, though I've heard it's good). I wish I had more help, but that's all that came to mind.

gwendolen February 24 2009, 01:01:18 UTC

You're very vague here. It might help if you could clarify at least the year (and the season?) your characters flee and from where exactly they are fleeing and what their original destination is.

Also what your characters background is. Depending on that their troubles might vary.

The movie Die Flucht is about Germans fleeing in 1944 from East Prussia towards Bavaria in the middle Winter. Here they are fleeing from the approaching East-front and the Red Army. That page has quotes and historical background but all in German.

You might also look up Marion Gräfin Dönhoff as she also had to flee from East Prussia and I think the biography by Alice Schwarzer also deals with that. There might be more literature.

duckodeath February 24 2009, 02:07:35 UTC

Your post is a little contradictory: you say "try to run away when the war starts" and then say fleeing war-torn country. Unless they are in Poland, there wasn't a lot of war torn country in Europe when WWII started in 1939. If you keep them in Austria, it seems to me the most sensible place for them to be fleeing to (at any point during the war years) is Switzerland. First because it would make some sense for them to try to get there on foot (rather than on a train which kept on running even when everything else had gone to hell) and second because every other country in the area was eventually involved in fighting or was being bombed by either the Germans or the allies and would be like jumping from the frying pan into the fire ( ... )

shanghai_jim February 24 2009, 02:21:33 UTC

Just want to remind you, as you've done the basic research, that Austria was quote-unquote peacefully annexed by the Third Reich, so it wasn't war-torn at the start of the war.

You could try to have them try to escape to Switzerland. Over the Alps. In winter. Now that's a two-hour feature film right there.

mmegaera February 24 2009, 03:33:56 UTC

The kids' book The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier (http://www.readingmatters.co.uk/book.php?id=81) might be of some use to you. Similar setup, only from Poland. A wonderful book, to boot.

janewilliams20 February 24 2009, 08:09:20 UTC

I was about to recommend that, too.