When hearing stories about WWII, readers hear what the war was like in other countries. Readers never hear about the affect WWII had on the U.S. civilians who stayed home. Readers can learn many things about the life of an ordinary citizen in the interview I had with my grandfather, Dan Mensch.

I started with a simple question, how old were you when the war started? He answered by telling me, “I was a small child when the war started, I don’t remember much about the start of the war. However I do remember the middle to end of it.” After doing the math, I was able to find that he was 5 years old when the war first started.

I then asked him when the war took place, how was your life changed? He told me that his life changed a lot. He had to ration food and some of his family members left for the war. Plus, his town had bombing drills that they did two times a month.

After that I asked him, did any of your family members go into the war? He gave me a very long list that consisted of, his uncles, cousins, and even his aunt help as a nurse. Some of his family members received a purple heart in this war.

I asked him, did the war make it hard on your family financially? He told me, “Well, my family and my town had tickets that we got in the mail. These tickets had items on them that we could buy at the store but we couldn’t get more than what we had on the tickets. So that made it hard.”

I did ask him, what was the school like when the war was going on? He answered, “Our schools were very different during the war than they were when the war wasn’t going on. We had a lot of drills we did during the week and our food became served in smaller portions.”

I asked my grandpa if he ever was afraid of being attacked. He told me that he would be afraid on occasion that anywhere in the U.S. was going to be attacked, but that his family would comfort him.

During the interview I asked him about what the economy was like during this time period was like? He said, “Well, as I recall we were still coming out of the great depression so I guess the economy was struggling especially since we had no time to recover from the depression to the war.”

To finish up the interview, I asked him, what did you do at the end of the war? He said that his town had a parade and everyone walked through the streets beating drums and blowing horns. He said it was a very happy day that he will never forget.