She is now turning 82 and part of the Kriegskinder generation. She was 6 when literally the whole world fell apart, from school suspended to first Americans then Russians invading, her seeing German soldiers walking the street whom she later found shot at some river, to refugees accommodated in her parent's house, bringing bedbugs. Then at least one winter of hunger. All parents, their Victorian upbringing aside, were far too busy to care about children. Not just that, but also at the time psycologists, if they even existed, assumed children were unaffected by the turmoil.

German post-war psychiatrists all acknowledged the damage done by the war to adults, especially bomb victims and soldiers. The war on the eastern frontier had been one of the longest and most brutal ever and practically everyone getting out alive will have had some form of PTSD. Those injured were often morphine addicts and the country handed out prescriptions and early retirement offers.

However, because of the Nazi guilt, the topic was rarely discussed, and even in modern times, with all the progress in psychology, the war generation has no one to blame but themselves assuming connection to the German variation of the N-word.

"Kriegskinder" is a book about this and the author, Hilke Lorenz, was aware she would be getting a good deal of flak for it because pointing out problems of the war generation could be seen as revanchist. Many German adults had inexplicable problems when often the reason should have been only too evident. Someone waking up from terrible nightmares born in Hamburg in 1941 would have been two years old when the city was next to annihilated in the 1943 bomb attacks. But psycholigists assumed those children were too young to understand.

Getting back to me, it looks like my mom was severely affected. Just unlike the Kriegsenkel (war grand children) generation, reading the book I felt like a Kriegskind myself. Much of the way the Kriegskinder were treated applied to me, from harsh punishment to the traumatising suicide, where my mom took me along to the morgue and what I saw was just terrible.

My mom has this quirk of having to be in the provider role, to the point where she moved the bread and other food on this silly trolley-table of hers, where only she and my dad could reach, so that we had to beg for every slice of toast to be handed to us. Food was special and not to be wasted.

So in this fight last May, where it might have dawned on my mom that this was serious, her first complaint was me not finishing some stupid tomato crisp bread, which I had left half eaten banging my fists. *** Absolutely crazy ***

No, she's not going to change, that's settled, along with the fact that harm was indeed passed from generation to generation and the whole of Germany still hasn't realized the war time trauma.