The children of Ukraine are on my mind. Those innocent, beautiful little ones, sacrificed on the altar of war.

       Those children, experiencing wanton killing and destruction. Those children, who wonder if they will wake up tomorrow morning. Those children who realize that they may never see their daddies again, because they are fighting in the war. Those children who don’t understand why their lives are suddenly disrupted like this.

     I ache for them because I know that the war will now always be a part of them. If they survive they will hide the pain they are suffering. Why? Because they are not important? Just like, when I was a child, my part of the Netherlands was not of strategic importance, and so we starved? War is evil and it destroys people–also the survivors.

     Being 87 years old, I am one of the last survivors of World War 2. I was one of the lucky ones because, unlike my Jewish friends and neighbors and my husband’s relatives, I was not marked for extermination. I was just an ordinary little girl caught up in a war I did not understand. When foreigners had to leave Germany that fateful day in September 1939, my family could not catch a train to the Netherlands. As a 4-year old I watched as trainload after trainload of soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders went to occupy Poland. They called it Blitzkrieg.

     As a 5-year old I woke up in the middle of the night while bombs rained down on our neighborhood. It was time for the Netherlands to be conquered. I watched in horror when soldiers shot and killed a man on his bicycle with wooden wheels and then mistreated the bleeding corpse lying on the street. A 6-year old should never see things like that. And it was only the beginning.

     Those children in Ukraine will see and experience things they will never talk about. It will hurt too much. The deep sorrow will be firmly locked away, like it was in me until I co-wrote my memoir, Brave Face: Overcoming the Jackboot. But it will not go away. I wrote my own war experiences because I was hoping to remind those in charge to please not start a war. It deeply harms innocent children. Yours and mine. Even the children of the warmongers. By the time Brave Face is published (the end of this year), God willing, this present war will be long past. Let’s pray that there won’t be any more. For the sake of the children.