London – John Goldsmith was too young to fight in World War II, but recalls the rationing, blackouts and pumps That devastated his neighborhood in eastern London. And remember the party when La Paz returned to Europe.
The church bells sounded in the city, the bonfires were lit and the conga lines winding through Piccadilly Circus while people filled the streets to celebrate the Allied Victoria over Nazi Germany. For a 14 -year -old boy, on May 8, 1945, he also brought something else: the end of the tedium of the rules and restrictions in times of war.
“Well, it was a great contrast. Suddenly, freedom! Mocking. Doing all kinds of things that were missed such as not being the right thing,” Goldsmith said, now 94 years old.
“But now, for example, all these wonderful photos of Piccadilly and places like that. Buses covered with people stopped on the roof simply became racies, not necessarily due to drinking or anything of that nature. But definitely, they released their hair,” he added with a laugh.
The victory on Europe Day was a moment of relief for a city marked by bombing and rocket attacks that killed about 30,000 civilians throughout the war and did not end until a few weeks before. But it was also a time to wait for the safe return of husbands, children, brothers and sisters, who were serving abroad, and waiting for lives to be suspended in 1939 soon to return to normal.
While D-Day were the troops that landed on the beaches of northern France to begin the release of Europe, VE Day was a time for the public, for all those who sacrificed for the common good.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Who had inspired Britain during his darker days, caught the mood of the nation when he announced the victory at 3 pm on May 8.
“My dear friends, this is your time,” he said. “This is not the victory of a match or any kind. It is a victory of the great British nation as a whole.”
That is a message that Goldsmith wants people to remember before the generation of World War II fades from the scene. A retired architect and amateur artist, has given his family with stories of his childhood in the Bow neighborhood of East London. After a little puncture of his wife, Margaret, recently began drawing the scenes so that others could see what he lived.
“The soldiers, the aviators, the sailors cannot operate without people supporting and supporting them,” Goldsmith said. “Then, if people do not contribute, the armored elements will collapse. Therefore, it is so important that the day is … the day of the people.”
While the Londoners had been anticipating the end of the fight in Europe for weeks, the announcement was like the cork leaving a giant champagne bottle in a city that had lived in the shadow of the war for six years.
Nowhere, relief was felt more deep than in the East End, where thousands of houses, schools and companies were reduced to debris when the Nazis bombers hit docks and warehouses along the Thames river during the attack that was known as the blitz. When Buckingham Palace was bombarded on September 13, 1940, Queen Elizabeth told a policeman who was happy, because “it makes me feel that I can look at the end is in my face.”
Goldsmith’s drawings capture the day the bombardment began, with Nazi bombers filling the air and fires turning the night sky a volcanic red cast behind the docks. There is also the time when a Cricket match was suspended as one of the flying bombs known as “Doodlebugs” shot over, and the ghostly image of a rental collector emerges from a cloud of dust after a V-2 rocket, a type of long-range ballistic missile, obliged a block of houses.
The last V-2 to arrive in London destroyed an apartment building less than two miles from his house on March 27, 1945.
Eighty years later, Goldsmith contains tears when he remembers the moment he heard that the Nazis had surrendered.
He and his friends were playing street football using a tennis ball, scarce football balls after six years of war, when a child ran out of the nearby dairy and shouted simply: “It’s over!”
“I have to be very careful now, because it could break,” Goldsmith said, stopping to collect. “But that was the point where you realized: ‘I didn’t have to worry anymore.”
People had seen the end arrive, but did not dare to believe that it could be true.
In a time before television, the Londoners went into mass to the cinema to watch the weekly news that traced the allied advance towards Berlin. Goldsmith, who was only 8 years old when the war broke out, tracked the progress of the troops through the newspaper, carefully cutting the headlines and maps. At the beginning of 1945, he realized that the surrender of the third Reich was close.
When the news finally arrived, he unleashed a wave of joy that lasted days.
Goldsmith remembers having climbed the steps of the church of San Juan in Bethnal Green to see about the crowds that aligned the streets while King Jorge VI and Queen Elizabeth led to eastern London to celebrate with the locals.
There were street and bonfire parties. Everyone contributed to what they could still with food still.
“The favorite table in the hall was taken in the center of the street and linked to all other personal possessions covered with fabric and that kind of thing,” Goldsmith recalled. “The food was a magistrate of somewhere, and the children were atiberate in all types of cakes.”
But the celebrations were bittersweet, tempered by the knowledge that VE Day was not the end of the war.
“There was a sudden realization. There was still the Japanese situation in the Far East,” Goldsmith said. “And people fashed.”
