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War children tell: memories and stories from Frankfurt!
A documentary examines the life stories of war children from Offenbach and Frankfurt - an important contemporary witness documentation.
War children tell: memories and stories from Frankfurt!
In a moving documentary entitled “Children 1945 – Contemporary Witnesses 2025,” filmmaker Rebekka Waitz sheds light on the memories of contemporary witnesses from Frankfurt and the surrounding region who were born during or after the Second World War. The film gives the protagonists, including Bruni Freyeisen, born 1940, and Rolf Heinemann, born 1941, a voice to share their profound and often painful experiences. The documentary combines personal anecdotes with impressive images of a destroyed city center, which is a moving experience not only for the viewers but also for the contemporary witnesses. Financing is provided by Nassauische Sparkasse and the city of Frankfurt, reports the Frankfurter Neue Presse.
The stories are diverse: Freyeisen describes her birth during an air raid alarm, while Heinemann refers to the current war atrocities in Ukraine and Gaza. Their perspectives are not only reviews of personal experiences, but also calls for peace. Heinemann and Freyeisen support the SPD manifesto against armament efforts and advocate negotiations with those responsible for the war. In this regard, the documentary takes a clear political stance, as explained by Christa Führer-Rößmann, who points out that the film is being produced on the 80th anniversary of the German surrender in order to illustrate the lessons of the past.
Childhood in war
What did children actually experience during World War II? This question is important not only for historians but also for the present generation. Many children initially experienced the first bomb scare as an adventure, but as the air raids progressed, the fear of death grew. These children saw houses burning and experienced the loss of friends and loved ones. The documentary “The War and I”, which deals with childhoods from different countries, was created specifically for students from the fourth grade onwards and manages to explain the difficult topics in easy-to-understand language, reports Planet Schule.
Many children suffered from the horrors of war. Around 2.5 million children were sent to rural areas to protect them from the bombing. These children spent months or years in school camps or tent camps, often separated from their parents. These experiences were often traumatic for them. While some children processed these experiences better, others still suffered from them decades later, as the Planet Wissen portal describes.
Memories and their consequences
The accounts of contemporary witnesses show that the war not only shaped the present, but also the future of the survivors. Many war children remained silent about their experiences for decades and only found a way to talk about their traumatic experiences late in life. An aspect that the documentary takes up impressively. He makes it clear that memories of the nights of bombing and escapes often also included happy moments, such as Carnival in Offenbach. This duality makes life during and after the war a double struggle for survival.
How can these stories be processed today? It is important that children are not left alone when dealing with history. The emotional stress and lack of understanding of what was happening required adults to accompany the conversations. The variety of experiences that children had during the war cannot be summed up in a single denominator, but the documentary “Children 1945 – Contemporary Witnesses 2025” helps to link these stories together and record them for posterity.
The challenge for today's generations is to learn from these narratives and engage in respectful dialogue about conflict and peace. Rebekka Waitz's film is not only an impressive testimony to the past, but also a call for reflection in our present time. You can find out more about the moving stories here, here and here.