Many diarists have started their diary with a short autobiographical piece.

Sabine’s Hoffman’s is freely available to researchers by clicking here: BEFORE I GO

She starts her autobiographical account like this:

“I was born on 26^th January 1943 in the Trautenauklinik in Berlin’s Wilmersdorf.  Fortunately my mother Annemarie, née Eckhardt, had by then recovered from the sepsis she had had when my sister Ellen was born on 11^th May 1941, and I was a heavy and robust baby thought by many to be a boy!  I continued robust all my life, being one of those individuals who hardly ever missed a day from school/work.  –  I feel we owed our survival in the midst of all the bombing and destruction to the fact that we lived out in Berlin-Gatow, right on the western edge of the city, to the west of a belt of lakes and forest separating us from the centre (Berlin-Mitte). “