THE WAR AND DIETRICH

The world might have forgotten the fact, but Berlin was something more than international military-government headquarters. People still lived there. This week TIME'S Berlin Correspondent John Scott cabled:

One afternoon about a fortnight ago, I was taking leave of a German acquaintance on Limastrasse in front of my Zehlendorf house while a spry, blond boy about three and a half feet high stood gaping at me, as his kind in Berlin will. When I had said goodbye and turned to walk toward the mess, he came up, grinned, took my hand and said, "Du sprichst doch Deutsch. Hast du kein Kaugummi fuer mich?"

I gave him some of the American chewing gum he asked for and asked him why he wasn't in school. "School? Oh, I'm on the morning shift now, and besides, the Americans took our school and I have to go to another one very far away, and anyhow I am busy." At that point we came to the mess and as I had to go in if I were going to get anything to eat, I left him with an invitation to come and see me.

He came next morning; I gave him a chocolate bar and we had a long talk. His name was Dietrich. He was eight. He wore clean but patched clothes, was lean as a wolf and just about as quick. He spent a lot of time around the press camp, particularly in front of the enlisted men's mess, picking up butts. "My mother smokes the long ones and we exchange the others for potatoes," he explained seriously.

Dietrich lived in a small, neat, almost undamaged house. He, his six-year-old sister Heidi and his mother had two rooms; the four others were occupied by a grey, staring-eyed woman of 40-odd with six children, one of whom, a boy of 16, had just returned from a British P.O.W. camp.

Dietrich didn't like school. "Teacher doesn't know as much as we do. She used to tell us the British and Americans were very bad and the Russians were barbarians. Now she tells us Hitler was barbarian, and the British and Americans are saving us and she doesn't say anything about the Russians at all. We know, don't we [here he appealed to Heidi for support], that's all Quatsch. War is barbarian. People are all the same. What we did to other people they do to us and now everything is all smashed up. How many chocolate bars do you get every day?"

After some persuasion Dietrich agreed to take me to see his school, and we set out one afternoon. It was a good 40-minute walk. Boys went mornings one week and afternoons the next week, alternating with girls. Even with shifts and poor attendance the building was very crowded. Dietrich told me about how a bomb once fell near him when he was going to school. Since then, he said seriously, he never liked to go to school even if the bombings were over.

"What I liked to do was walk in the woods at Krumme Lanke," he said, laughing. "We used to have a fine time there. Weisst du, in the woods were still lying many corpses--some Wehrmacht and a few Volkssturm and many Russians.

"We used to play there every day. I looked at all the Wehrmacht corpses. One never knows, I might find my father. I wouldn't know him, I guess, but I have his dog-tag number here, you see."

He grinned and told of how they got into burnt-out tanks and pretended to be fighting. Then he got serious again. "But then we had an accident. One little girl from the Kleiststrasse was playing with a hand grenade and she blew herself up and since then we don't go into that part of the woods."

We became fast friends, Dietrich and I. He would wait for me outside the mess at dinner time, take my hand, and tell me how one enlisted man gave him a whole chocolate bar at one time. He started out to take it home to Heidi, who was in bed with dysentery. "Nun aber, weisst du--by the time I got there it was half gone and I didn't want to give her half a bar so I ate the rest of it."

When Dietrich didn't come around for several days, I wondered what had happened to him. But I was busy, and it was ten days before I walked down one afternoon to his house. Little Heidi was playing in the front yard with a battered little toy tank which had the swastikas scratched out but still seemed battleworthy. She jumped up and ran to me with a laugh.

"Wie geht's dir? You know my mother won't let me go to gather butts any more since Dietrich left, so I play here."

I asked where Dietrich was. Her face fell for a moment. "He got sick and cried very much. First they thought it was typhus and made us stay in the yard all the time but then they found it was something else, but anyhow they took him away to the hospital and he died." Then she brightened up and took me off to see their new litter of kittens under the porch.

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