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Up Keller-Maag (2) Keller-Maag (3) Keller-Maag (4) Keller-Maag (5)
 
 

- 2 -

We had seen the crazy Nazi-Germans burning a synagogue just across the Rhine. The horrible stories how they dealt with dissidents, that they had killed Jewish citizens by pumping them full of water, that they tortured parents who were denounced by their own fanatic children etc. etc. soaked deep into my mind before I even went to school. Already before the beginning of the war we heard the first rumors of the horrors in the German concentration camps. I have read "Die Moorsoldaten", the first book available on that subject, already in 1941, far too early for my age and long before the full terrible extent of the holocaust was finally known.

All those early childhood impressions, our fears of the hated Germans, flashed through my mind, when listening to those news on June 6, 1944. And I remembered so many other days of anxiousness: The days when we waited for the order to flee from the expected German attack, a bundle with a minimum of personal belongings being grip-ready near the bed.- Our soldiers filling machine-gun belts, day and night, in their barracks next door,- laying minefields across our valley, building tank-traps outside our peaceful village... Everybody was expecting in 1940 that the Germans would try to cross Switzerland when attacking France. And our Swiss army was preparing to fight them with all we had. I remember the bridges across our rivers beeing charged with explosives, the fortifications, the trenches, the tanktraps which were built across our countryside all along our border. The Germans were then our hated enemies; although our country was officially neutral it made great efforts to fight them if necessary. I remembered the home guards: Old men beyond, and young lads under army-age were issued old rifles and trained to fight possible German paratroop attacks behind the front- line the air-raid shelter which my father built,.. the black- outs at night, the rationing of food. I remembered the French, Polish and British internees, former prisoners of war, who had managed to flee from Germany to Switzerland and were happy to work on our short-handed farms. And to this day I recall the drone of the allied air-armadas, which crossed over our country almost every night, on their way to pound the German factories and cities.
 

 
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