Childhood experiences: nouns, past tense, conjunctions

German nouns ending '-heit' often correspond to English nouns ending '-ity', '-ness', e.g., 'die Sicherheit' (security). After WW2, Germany was split into West and East Germany. Life was very different in each country. Use the perfect tense and shorter imperfect tense forms 'war', 'waren', 'es gab', 'hatte' to narrate past events. The conjunctions 'als' or 'bevor' trigger word order three and can be used at the start of a sentence. If 'als' or 'bevor' begin a clause, the following clause uses word order two, creating a verb-comma-verb pattern.