Eric Braeden - Ill Be Damned: How My Young and Restless Life Led Me to Americas #1 Daytime Drama

I cant imagine my mothers fear on the night I was born.

It was April 3, 1941. She and two hundred other women, all waiting to give birth, were gathered in the dark, airless basement of a hospital in Kiel, Germany. Bombs from the Allied forces of World War II thundered around them, sirens screamed, the ground shook with one explosion after another, and she must have felt so alone and so terrified as she lay there praying for the safe delivery of her child.

I arrived just in time. A few days later, another swarm of bombs destroyed the hospital where I took my first breath.

I was named Hans Jrg Gudegast, the third of four boys born to remarkable parents who did their best to give us as normal a childhood as possible in the midst of that wars unspeakable obscenities. Kiel was a port city, and because submarines and warships were built there, it was a popular target for the Allies, as was Hamburg, seventy miles away. In fact, by the time the war was over, some five hundred thousand bombs had been dropped day and night in Kiel alone, five hundred thousand bombs that destroyed 96 percent of a city where good people and innocent children lived.

I was four years old when World War II ended. My memories of it come in brief flashes that still haunt medeafening explosions and massive fires that lit up the countryside... our parents frantically carrying us to the basement at the first roar of approaching Allied bomber squadrons... burning farms and helpless screaming animals in flames... my teenage brother hoisting me onto his shoulders to see the city of Hamburg transformed into an inferno by firebombs that killed tens of thousands of civilians in one night... thousands of homeless, hungry people descending desperately on the farmlands around our village to dig for potatoes and kernels of wheat...

As a little boy, with nothing to compare them to, I wonder if I thought those horrors were normal, that they were simply part of what everyday life was like in this world.

I was among the lucky ones for whom everyday life was happy for many years after the war ended. That nightmare had left plenty of devastation in its wakemany neighboring farms lay decimated, and some of our teachers had returned from the Russian front with no legs or one arm and great bitterness. But my brothers and I quickly discovered that those farms and the rest of the countryside were wonderful places for four strong, healthy boys to work and play, that we happened to live in a big, beautiful house with three maids and two drivers, and that we were blessed with two extraordinary parents who loved us very much.