Today they are well over 80; back then, they were children. The last surviving contemporary witnesses tell their stories of flight and expulsion at the end of the Second World War.

They camped out in the open, in the ruins of big cities, or along railway lines. Some lost their parents and wandered around as orphans. Some barely escaped death themselves, through luck, chance, or an unexpected helping hand. All of them are scarred by the events for the rest of their lives. Never before have they spoken so emotionally and unsparingly in public about their experiences in 1945. It is a pain that not only they themselves, but the whole of society has repressed for decades: 500,000 children became orphans in the course of the Second World War, 14 million lost their homes in the horrors of the National Socialist reign of terror and the turmoil of war or were deliberately displaced. In light of the war in Ukraine, they all ask themselves the question: Why have people learned nothing from the experiences of the Second World War?