Love Among The Ruins: A Memoir of Life and Love in Hamburg, 1945 by Harry Leslie Smith (Icon Books, £8.99)

HAMBURG made a formal surrender to the British on May 3 1945. The occupying soldiers commented on the smell as they entered the city, with the stench of death seeping up through mile upon mile of streets buried in rubble.

After six years of wartime deprivation and allied air raids — the saturation bombing of 1943 ignited massive firestorms — half the city was rubble.

50,000 civilians died, a million were homeless and more than the same number had fled. There was nothing to eat and people were reduced to bartering and scavenging.

Into these ruins appeared 22-year-old Harry Smith, son of a Barnsley miner. He’d spent the war as an RAF wireless operator and was looking forward to the adventures that peacetime would bring.

He soon found love with a young German woman Friede and his book, the second he has written on the British occupation of Hamburg, recounts the progress of their relationship to their marriage and arrival in England.

It is a story of two young people who lived through, and dealt with, extraordinary times.

Life worsened dramatically under the Allies, who sacked the majority of the German administrators and were then unable to run the city properly themselves.

German civilians have generally kept quiet about their wartime suffering, feeling no-one would want to listen, let alone sympathise. Yet Smith becomes increasingly aware of the reality of life for civilians through his friendship with Friede and his lively prose and direct style in describing the daily struggles of the Hamburg people create an understanding of the aftermath of defeat.

His account of the death of a horse and the starving people falling upon its warm carcass with knives, starkly visual, stays in the mind.

In the immediate post-war period fraternisation with Germans was banned, although by October 1945 the ban was lifted as it was unenforceable. But it was not until July 1946 that marriage was permitted.

The writer describes the lengthy and humiliating process that Friede was forced to undergo before she could marry him. Her character, her politics and her sexual morals were all delved into, as well as her motives for marriage.

His straight-from-the-heart delivery makes these events seem as clear and immediate as if they happened yesterday and the memoir ranges from the international situation to unsentimental yet compassionate descriptions of daily life and his relationship with Friede.

He gives a street-level view of a city where dispossessed people, orphans, the old and refugees rub shoulders with black marketeers and the forces of occupation.

Although this is a personal and unique testimony, Smith’s account of Hamburg at the war’s end and Friede’s experiences under occupation almost exactly mirror the lives of my parents — a starving young woman meeting and marrying an RAF sergeant.

Highly recommended.