“Safe Places” and What They Meant to the German People During World War Ii.
“How did the Germans survive...devastation, and live amid endless blocks of shattered homes...?”This was the question that Earl Beck voiced after he saw the ruins that were Post World War II Germany. How could one come out, with a sense of starting over after what Germany went through? One could get through times of uncertainty and chaos with a sort of “safe place.” Usually these places were an actual city or house, the family, or retreating into their minds. Now not all the “safe places” were the same: they seem to differentiate between adults and children, and, also, Germans and Jews. This was understandable, since the circumstances were different for each type of German citizen and Jew in either Germany or German occupied areas. When it came to survival, people will do anything, and for the people in Germany that was finding a place that they would be safe. Finding a “safe place” at the time was a broad term, but finding the “place” came down to how to survive and how to keep ones humanity in a time where humanity was not commonly known. Primary sources are important when one tries to figure out what is going on in German citizens minds. In most books describing events in war, they just describe the facts and statistics of places and battles, but they leave the details in the life of the people that experience it. Each journal or autobiography says many details that secondary sources leave out. One of those is, what people consider a “safe place” in times of war. In more general terms, what the German people, whether an adult, child, or even Jewish, think was a “safe place” during the end of World War II when the state of Germany was in utter and total chaos. There are several primary accounts on German and Jewish children, as well as adults. For example, Wolfgang Samuel’s autobiography called German Boy: A Refugee’s Story, helps better understand what children consider their “safe place.” He explained