Warrnambool's Lydia Sinclair was just five when World War II broke out and it wasn't long before the bombs started to fall on the city where she lived.
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Lydia was one of five kids who lived in an apartment on the river Spree in the centre of Berlin where her dad worked at the Reichbahn as an engineer designing railway bridges.
Right from the start of the war, Berlin was a target of attacks and night-after-night the air raid sirens would go off.
Lydia's family would shelter next door in the cellar under the chemist shop.
"For me, in the beginning, that was an adventure," she said.
"The cellar was like a living room and they had all sorts of surprises for us.
"They played with us and I learned to dance."
The chemist owner had two daughters who used to keep the children entertained and distracted from what was going on outside.
When you come out from the cellar, the streets are burning around you
- Lydia Sinclair
"We didn't take any notice and every so often you heard a noise from flack outside Berlin shooting," she said.
"It was not very loud and just in the background and the girls started to sing and get our minds off it."
The timeline of events are remembered through the eyes of a child - but it was about a year into the war when Lydia's family's apartment first got hit in one of the bombings.
It didn't cause much damage, but the next time the house was hit some time later it "was really burning".
As it burnt, Lydia's parents tried to salvage as many belongings as they could.
The first thing her mother, a talented seamstress, grabbed was the sewing machine.
She left the sewing machine on the street outside while she went back in to salvage more possessions but when she got back the machine had been stolen.
"When you come out from the cellar, the streets are burning around you," Lydia said.
"I remember one of those nights and dad had me in his hand with a very strong grip and we were walking down our street and I had to step over something.
"I looked back and it was a dead body and dad said to me in his normal strong voice: 'Lydia, don't ever look back. That's behind you, that's history and you look in front at what's coming. That's where your future will be'.
"That's a sentence in my lifetime that stuck with me and I so often think about."
She said as a child you took in all that was going on around you but you didn't think too much about it.
It's little things that stick in Lydia's mind - like her dad coming home from work and talking in a quiet voice rather than his normal "powerful" voice.
"I always wondered about that. Why all of a sudden this change?" she said.
As she got older she came to understand that you had to be quiet so neighbours couldn't listen in on what was being said at home and dob you in.
As the number of air raids each night increased, the children started to suffer.
It was then that they started to send buses at 5pm every night to collect the children in Berlin so they could sleep in the bunker beneath the Reichstag which is now home to Germany's parliament near the Brandenburg Gate.
"We didn't have to be woken up any longer for the air raids," she said.
The next morning they were returned home to their families.
In the winter of 1944, Lydia was sent away to a camp in the country with other children - her three younger siblings had stayed in Berlin with her mum and her older sister had been evacuated out of the city with her school.
"It was just beautiful out of Berlin. No air raids," she said.
Four weeks later when they were ready to return on the train to Berlin, the call came telling them not to.
"Berlin had a massive bombing and Berlin is burning. We don't know what's happened to most of the families and Berlin is flattened," she said.
It was three days before she got a call from her mum to say they were safe and had been evacuated to a small village in Germany.
"By this time dad and his whole office was evacuated to Warsaw in Poland," she said.
"Our house was totally flattened.
"There was absolutely nothing left."
The first question Lydia asked her mum was whether her favourite doll - a second-hand porcelain doll she'd received for Christmas that had a wig made from her own mother's hair- had been saved.
But it was lost in the rubble of what was left of her Berlin home.
The porcelain doll she'd received as a Christmas gift, but because it was secondhand it had no hair.
"My mum had magnificent hair. She went to her hairdresser who cut mum's hair and made a wig for my doll," she said.
Even out of Berlin, the family was not safe from the bombings.
While living in the new village they got word that her older sister's school had been bombed.
"They got all the bodies out and they were laid out on the market place and she was among the dead," Lydia said.
"The priest came to give the last prayer for the dead and she opened her eyes and her little voice said 'I'm not dead yet'.
"She had been under a big boulder and her whole leg was smashed in and she had her leg in plaster up to her groin."
For two years there was no news of her dad, and by that time every man had to be in the army.
"Mum didn't know if he was alive or got lost on the Russian front or something like that," she said.
Lydia remembers the day in about 1946 when she heard her dad was on his way home.
She had been out to pick the first berries of the season in the forest - something she loved to do - and the family was sitting down to a feast of berries, cold milk and buttered bread when someone arrived with the news.
At midnight, everyone gathered at the train station in the village to greet the train that carried home prisoners from the war in Russia - Lydia's dad was one of them.
Lydia said that after the war, you became a refugee in your own country.
"There was no access to money. The banks were closed. Everything came to a standstill after the war," she said.
Lydia would help her mum knit jumpers to sell with the wool that was sent from Norway.
To help get the teenage boys off the streets, Lydia's dad would hold free algebra and mathematics lessons in a hall.
"When the Americans heard about it...he got a job in teaching in a technical school in Bamberg."
At 32, and without a word of English, Lydia came to Australia on a two-year working visa.
She had always intended to return home, that was until she met her husband prominent Warrnambool accountant Bill Sinclair.
Bill, a WWII pilot stationed in England during the second world war, passed away earlier this year at age 100.
"Anzac Day was always important to Bill," Lydia said.
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