Growing up in the shadow of the Second World War, most Canadian children were well aware of tales of sacrifice and derring-do on the part of our parents’ generation in defeating Germany and the Nazi horrors it had unleashed.

Now, decades later, Karla Poewe has delivered a moving, intimate look at the other side of the story. Defeat as Childhood Experience: WWII’s Shadow Remembered, Revisiting and Researched (Vogelstein Press) is an extraordinary recollection of the life of a young German child coping with the nightmare of war. 

Poewe, a professor emerita at the University of Calgary, was born in 1941 in Germany and the first part of the book she held off writing for close to 80 years out of respect for the evils inflicted on others by her parents’ generation, deals with the fractured memories of a toddler that knew nothing but the horror of war. 

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Only those who have lived through the extreme violence of war can ever truly appreciate its terror. And yet Poewe draws the reader into the experience by employing a narrative style that refuses to demand pity while reinforcing the horror of a crumbling world bombed into oblivion.

For instance:

“For me, then, 1944 and 1945 was a year of fires. A firestorm ignited from the sky with great precision. And the storm of hate in their hearts exploded. We reaped what we had sown in many ovens.”

And:

“Until I was six years old my world consisted entirely of women. Here and there on the periphery would lurch a decrepit man — old, weak and senile or young and broken. They were ghosts haunting the periphery of our existence.”

Defeat as a Childhood Experience takes the reader through the final years of the destruction of Germany and into the confused post-war world of families ripped apart and relocated in orphanages, temporary foster homes and the desperation of women degraded by the relentless threat of rape at the hands of the Russians and, at times, their own desperate moral collapse in offering themselves as providers of pleasure to the young men now in control of their country.

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At times, it is quite terrible.

“Russians hated German women. Their wrath had wings and claws. And they stuck women into dung heaps and left them there … as if the Lord would judge them by their private parts. Or they nailed them to barn doors like Jesus to the Cross … The women’s war came afterwards when the big machines were blown to smithereens, and all was reduced to vengeance and private body parts. They, who had not born the Cross at the beginning, placing it rather with their men, now reaped a double revenge, reaped the whirlwind.”

The sense of desperation is overwhelming; Poewe portrays the unabated human tragedy of once vigourous young men returning from prisoner of war camps as little more than broken husks with a matter of factness that evokes a world in which hope no longer exists.

And yet, somehow, embers of the human spirit endure and eventually thrive.

Poewe’s faith, even as a child, provides her story, which switches from its initial stream of childhood consciousness into a more traditional autobiographical style, with its spine. Early on, for example, she writes of how, as a child, it was the Catholic Church that captured her soul:

“Omi told me lots of stories about Jesus, about His crown of thorns and how He bore it, and about how gentle and good He was. She took me to our church often, even when there was no service. And we walked up the tower stair by stair. And she made me look out across the wide open space. It was like a healing.”

Poewe then takes us on her journey as a teenaged immigrant to a Canada that, while prepared to forgive but not forget, was not necessarily an easy fit. And yet she thrives as an academic and active anthropologist in Africa and elsewhere before, later in life,  returning with her husband to Germany in an effort to gain some greater sense of understanding of its moral collapse. That journey isn’t always easy as she discovers some uncomfortable family associations.

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The author wraps up with some moving conclusions on how she waited until later in life to write it out of “respect for Jews who suffered infinitely more than we” and “for where the stern eyes of the victorious uniform met the glowing eyes of a puzzled child the doors to a new future opened. Mercy overcame hate to make way for poetry and work.”

It is a beautiful book that chronicles a story long overdue in the telling and still reveals, from a foundation of incendiary horror, the elegance of the human soul and that which inspires it.