Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson the past brought to life by those who were there

Coming up this week the rubble women who cleared up post-war Berlin

The house had been hit by a bomb and the whole inside had collapsed.

And I was there to clear it all up with just one other woman.

We had no tools.

I brought some metal buckets from home.

Also, Armenia's 1988 earthquake.

Suddenly we heard a sound like thunder and then we saw the blackboard and the wall behind the

teacher collapsing in front of our eyes.

When the second tremor struck, everything went dark.

Plus how Bokasa became emperor of the and from Normandy. There was a huge wooden triumphal arch and plaster Roman pillars, a green

and gold coach topped with golden eagles, all this sport and made in France.

And we'll look at Angela Merkel's rise to power that's all coming up later in the

podcast but before that we're going to hear a remarkable story from

Guatemala a story which has continued to echo down the years.

Just last month, a court in Guatemala sentenced a soldier to more than 5,000 years in jail

for his part in the massacre of more than 200 civilians during the country's civil war.

Mike Lanchin has been speaking to one of the few survivors of the killings,

who was a child at the time and astonishingly was later adopted by one of the killers and I must warn you

that his story is very distressing.

It's the early hours of December 6th, 1982.

And in northern Guatemala, soldiers from an elite anti-Gorilla unit

...