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sometimes they flew back next morning more or less diminished. I remember fleeing from a tree, where I had been picking cherries, and running home in panic because a "Flying Fortress" had just lumbered down our little valley, barely three hundred feet above the treetops. It was terribly shot up: Only two of its motors were working; a huge hole was gaping in one of its wings. I was happy to learn later, that its crew had managed to land it safely on our airfield, together with a few other victims of the German flak. The interned American pilots in their smart uniforms were our admired heroes.- I remember a "Liberator" bomber, abandoned by its crew, smashing into the tower of a castle nearby. Then the accidental bombing of a Swiss city on the Rhine by the US-Airforce. And again a large flight of bombers flying along the border in broad daylight. We were watching with horror as they dropped their loads on a powerstation on the Swiss side of the river. We knew that several soldiers from our village, one of them my brother, were on guard-duty there. Fortunately the bombs missed their main target. Still a few people were killed, some houses destroyed. My brother, then 20, came home on leave a few days later, still quite shaken by the experience. But although we were then sad that our friends had accidentally been bombing us, we did not really blame them. We knew that for those pilots and navigators, fighting thousands of miles away from home, on a strange continent, it must have been very difficult to identify the border of our small neutral country in the middle of enemy territory. We thankfully recognized that they were also fighting for us, many of them dying so early in their lives for our freedom. -As I said before, it was an overwhelming feeling of relief which I experienced on that fateful summer-morning. And to this day I feel, as I did then, immensely grateful and indebted to those brave Allied soldiers, those young Americans, English, Canadians who were fighting there on the beaches of Normandy, to save Europe from the Nazi-hordes. And I think now, as I did then, with deep compassion of those of them who had to give their lives to save us. To save us from a stupid but conceited generation of Germans, who had been supporting and were still fiercely defending the most horrible crimes against humanity.