There is always temptation to hide behind the third person in either the present or the past: when he was twelve, and he still loved to sit on his mother’s lap, something began—and ended. Is there an exact date for the beginning and the end? If it is a question of me, then my childhood ended on a very narrow strip of land—there where I grew up—and it happened when war flared up on several sides at once. You couldn’t fail to hear the salvoes of the battleship’s guns and the shriek of dive-bombers over the New Port opposite which stood the Polish military base of Westerplatte; in the distance, two armored personnel carriers were firing with purpose at the Polish Post in the Old Town, and from the buffet of “people’s radio”—the receiver that was in our apartment on the first floor of a three-story tenement on Labesweg Street in Langfurth—came the words that announced the end of my childhood.