Refugee in search of a homeland

one squadron after another, all trying to drop their bombs within the square that the markers indicated.

"There is a plane caught by the beams of two search lights!" "We can't see the other planes, but we can hear them. It's a terrific noise they make."

No sooner had he spoken, when a deafening detonation shattered our casual observations. One of those mega bombs had hit a block of flats about 300 meters from our position, sending us all scuttling. Bits and pieces were falling all around us.

"Come and stand inside this rampart," the Sergeant called out to us, "you are not supposed to stand there unprotected."

We quickly followed his instruction. It was dangerous, and the way the air raid developed was quite strange to us. After all, this was Berlin, the capital of Germany.

As we were peeping over the wall, we could see more and more bombs exploding and setting fire to a large part of the city. The raid took over an hour.

"How terrible for the poor people out there." "They should all be in cellars or shelters." "Still, it's frightening when the bombs keep crashing all around you." Then suddenly it was calm, a terrifying calm. We could imagine, that a lot of people would have died again during this raid, and we seemed to be watching helplessly. When the 'all clear' signal came, we went back to bed again, still exhausted, and now terrified, with the new experience of a full scale air raid on Berlin, with all its force.

Next day we were divided into groups of eight and allocated to units where we would become the instructors for new FLAK helper recruits.

"The eight of you will stay here in the search light unit," the sergeant we had talked to last night announced.

"But we don't know anything about search lights. We never even saw one before last night."

"What did you use at home then?" "Radar."

"Oh, you can't use that here. The enemy path finders usually scatter what looks like lametta, those fine silver metal strips, and they put radar out of action."

"So, how do you operate one of those search lights?" "Do you know the radius of a circle?"

"Oh, I know now, the same principle as we use for the guns, isn't it?" "Precisely. You will find no difficulties teaching the new boys, once you have familiarised yourselves with these machines. They have to learn to follow accurately the commands of the Sergeant."

"That shouldn't be a problem." We all gave a sigh of relief. "Once you catch a plane in the beam, you hold on to it. Usually, another search light will try to follow you. With two beams holding it, the

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