Victim of war

Now that I am a septuagenarian, the pedantic word for someone in their 70s, sometimes I tend to reminisce about my younger days. Through a friend of mine I became acquainted with a German lady, who was married to a Chinese during World War II in Germany.

Her husband arrived in Germany before the war to study engineering because Germany was famous for this field of study. When the war ended, the husband got a job as a teacher in a technical university in Taiwan, and it was there that I met her. She had a six-year-old son who was very good looking, as most children of interracial marriages are.

But I was shocked to learn that he was deaf. Consequently, he also became mute, because he could not hear since he was a baby. Then the mother told me this heartbreaking story. The baby was born when the war was in full swing.

Inasmuch as Germany was bombarded almost daily, the couple had to move from one city to another in order to escape the merciless bombing by the allied forces. The deafening noise of 500 kilogram bombs apparently ruptured the baby's eardrums and he became deaf.

Nowadays, perhaps with a hearing aid and modern technology, such a child could be helped. Is it not tragic that an innocent child's life was destroyed because the so-called civilized countries were fighting for the sake of hegemony? Yet after half a century has passed, people are still annihilating each other in many parts of the world.

A. DJUANA Jakarta