The Painter

The Bomber War, Book 2

By: James Philip

Narrated by: Lesley Parkin

The Painter is one woman’s remembrance of the days of her youth, spent in Bielefeld under the bombs of the Allied Air Forces in the final months of the war in Europe.

After writing Until the Night, I had been looking for a way to start telling the other stories of the Bombing War in Europe. Until the Night was about the men in the bombers over Germany in the winter of 1943 to '44; The Painter is about the experience of ordinary Germans under the bombs in the last winter of the war.

The Painter is the first of a series of companion audiobooks to Until the Night in the Bomber War series. Future audiobooks will include prequels or sequels to Until the Night, but The Painter stands alone, unconnected other than in time and theme by the tragedy of that, thankfully, past age.

History is history, but for it to "live", it needs to be experienced through the eyes and ears of "people", and it was not until I heard "The Painter", a beautifully elegiac song penned by Hannah Martin and performed in a concert by the duo Phillip Henry and Hannah Martin, that I discovered a way to speak to the nightmare of the closing months of the war in Europe. In her song, Hannah Martin encapsulates the stories told to her by her grandmother about her life as a young woman growing up in Bielefeld.

In the terrible "big picture" of the bombing war, Bielefeld suffered less than many places in Germany. In the UK, we recall the trial by fire of Coventry in 1940; that city has become a leitmotif of the British experience of the blitz even though other towns and cities were as badly hit by the Luftwaffe. Bielefeld, a much smaller city than Coventry, its population swollen by slave labourers, suffered at least as many civilian casualties between September 1944 and VE-Day in April 1945.

Although it was never subjected to a major "area bombing" raid by the RAF, the US Army Air Force repeatedly attacked railway and other targets in and around Bielefeld, and in the final battles of the European conflagration, both Bomber Command and the Eighth Air Force bombed and eventually knocked down the massive four-track Schildesche Railway Viaduct, most of the northern suburbs of Bielefeld, and practically all the farmsteads and small communities around it, in March 1945.

Bielefeld was not - quite - wrecked from end to end; for Hannah Martin’s grandmother, that was no consolation because everything with which she had grown up was destroyed, and her father, the painter, was lost in the fire.

Lest we forget - remember the painter.

©2017 James P. Coldham (P)2018 James P. Coldham

An unusual perspective

I thoroughly enjoyed this book! The main character is Christa, a 14 year old girl living in the shadow of one of Germany's great viaducts during the second world war. The viaduct, and thus, surrounding area where Christa lived was heavily bombed by allied forces during the war in an effort to destroy the rail line taking fuel to the Ruhr valley which was the heart of the industrial area in Germany during the war. The story is told by Christa in first person. She is older and looking back at the time when she went through the horrors of the bombing and the disintegration of the life she had. Of course, British cities suffered untold damage during the war, but this is an unusual perspective of a German girl caught up in the bombing. The book is really well written and Lesley does a fantastic job with the narration. I highly recommend this book!

WWII in Germany

Lesley Parkin did an excellent job of narrating this book. The story tells in detail of when everything was going well for the painter and his family to bombings in Europe especially in Bielefeld where they lived. Well written and I definitely recommend this book.