Escape

by Barbie Probert-Wright

  We had a radio and I know the grown-ups followed the progress of the war from the German news transmissions, which tended to emphasise German successes. But mostly the radio was tuned into music, which we all loved.

  As defeat loomed ever closer, though, the adults in our little commune obviously knew some of what was happening. They realised that the Russians were advancing through Poland towards us and that we were sitting in the path of an invading army. Nevertheless, they still hid their worries from us.

  Christmas 1944 was as cheerful as they could make it. We had a Christmas tree with home-made decorations and we gave each other little presents we had made. We had small weaving looms, which Grandfather had made for us, and we wove the fabric for pincushions and pot holders, and we made bookmarks, which we decorated with pressed flowers and pretty ribbons. Because we lived in the countryside and food was relatively plentiful, we were fortunate to be able to celebrate in traditional style. We had a typical German Christmas meal with three geese because there were so many of us. When the giblets of the geese were boiled for broth and the gravy, Volker, Henning and I were each given the cooked heart of a goose to eat, because we were told that eating the goose heart would make our own hearts stronger. We had red cabbage and all the trimmings, and afterwards Stollen (German Christmas bread) and poppy-seed cake. We children baked lots of the traditional Christmas biscuits.

  I made a special Christmas card, which I sent to Eva. I drew candles and baubles and wrote, ‘Dear Eva, I wish you a beautiful Christmas holiday, your Bärbel.’ Far away in Tabarz, Eva pasted it into her diary and wrote underneath it, ‘The little one’s first letter.’ In the BDM home, she too celebrated as best she could what she called the ‘war Christmas, 1944’.

  Eva’s diary for the first few days of the New Year is a mixture of happy times – she writes about taking the young girls in her class skating, and reading them stories about the Snow Queen and the Little Mermaid – and her deeper concerns about the world:

  My wish for the New Year is that now I will soon be reunited with my family. I hope life is going to be better for us than the last few years. Let’s hope that the long-awaited peace will be come and reunite us all in Hamburg.

  She writes about her own dreams and longings:

  All I want is to be married with children, and have a little house and garden with flowers. I will be a good wife and do everything to make my husband feel wanted and special. What in the world could be nicer than that? I can’t wait for the day when it might happen. But who knows what will happen in these hard and difficult times.

  Her dreams were the same as those of many nineteen-year-old girls. She even drew a picture of a cradle with a baby in it and copied into her diary the words of a favourite lullaby, which she sang to me many times:

  Little child of mine, go to sleep. Because the stars are in the sky, And the moon is also coming, I will rock you in your cradle. Go to sleep, my little child, go to sleep.

  Then the reality of the situation we were all in was brought home to her when, on 20 January 1945, the erratic postal service brought a letter from my mother. It asked Eva to come at once to fetch me away from the Wartegau.

  Warsaw in Poland had already been attacked, she told Eva (the Russians took it on 17 January) and the fighting was moving closer to us all the time. My mother wanted to make sure that I, at least, was well away from the Russian advance. She felt that I would be safer with Eva in Tabarz.

  Eva wrote:

  Mutti said I should come and get Puppe, as the danger from the East is growing, with big attacks. I was still wearing my ski outfit and I went immediately, dressed as I was. By 11 p.m. in the evening I got to Leipzig, but then I couldn’t go on because there was no train to Dresden. The next morning I continued and got as far as Aunt Else [near Berlin]. I saw tracks and tracks of wagons trying to get to the west. I met a woman who had just lost her twins through starvation and hunger. She was so upset, I felt so sorry for her. The attacks were so fierce from the low-flying planes, and there were grenades exploding around me, I was really lucky not to be hit. There was no way I could get to Rawitsch (in Polish Rowicz, the town in the wartegau where she could have caught a connecting train for poniec) so I had to turn round. The shooting was absolutely incredible. I was so tired I could not go on and I had to spend one night in the waiting room of a train station.

  It took her seven days altogether to get back to Tabarz. It was a harrowing and fruitless journey for her, and when I look back now my heart breaks to think that she risked so much for me. But there was one very positive outcome from her trip. When she met up with my father’s sister, Aunt Else, she was given three very precious possessions, which I now have. Everything that we ever owned of Ruth’s was destroyed in the bombing of our flat, but Aunt Else had the handwritten announcement of her death, which my mother had sent out, along with Mutti’s letter about her death and, most poignantly, a postcard that Ruth herself had written. The content is banal enough: Ruth sends her greetings, promises to come and visit soon, and asks about Aunt Else’s husband and children, Günther, Heinz, Horst and Ruth. It is addressed to Aunt Else and ‘little Ruth’. She ends with ‘A thousand kisses and greetings, Ruth’. But to see her handwriting and to have something that she touched is very precious.

  Eva wrote in her diary:

  If I read through them the tears come, but I must admit to myself that Ruth is possibly the best off out of all of us. She does not have to go through this horrible war, which has robbed us of everything. She does not have to go through what we are all experiencing. I ask myself all the time what did we do to deserve this. But we can’t change it. We have to carry on and make the best of it.

  Before Eva made it back to Tabarz, my mother, my aunts and my grandparents realised she could not get through to rescue me. The Wartegau was becoming a very dangerous place to be. The time had come to shatter the idyll: we had to flee in the path of the invading Russians.

  This was when my first big adventure of the war began. The war ceased to be a strange, abstract thing that preoccupied the grown-ups and became my reality. There was no way to shelter us from it any longer. For the next few months I was truly a child of war.

  4

  The Flight from Poland

  I never knew who took the decision that we should evacuate the Polish corridor and get back across the bridges on the Oder and Neisse rivers. Perhaps orders came from Berlin, or maybe it was a decision of the local authorities. Whoever decided, we were given no notice at all. We were told that the bridges between Poland and Germany were about to be blown up to impede the Russian progress. If we were going to leave, we had to move fast. Once those bridges were destroyed there would be no way home.

  When Mr and Mrs Boetels up at the manor house heard that everyone had to leave, they sent a Polish driver to warn us and to tell us to pack up at once. We would be picked up in six hours’ time. But rather than worry about the three German sisters and their little children, the driver decided he needed to get home to his own family, who were as much at risk as we were from the marauding Russian troops. He never came to give us the message. In the turmoil of everything that was going on, I cannot blame him.

  What I can never forgive, though, is the action of some of the other Polish workers on the large estate. As fear and panic broke out, one of them shot Mr Boetels. It was, I suppose, a reaction against the Germans who had colonised their land, some of whom had acted with horrific cruelty, although we knew nothing of that at the time. Mr Boetels was not like that at all. He was not responsible for the actions of the German High Command and he was a kind man who took great care of the Poles who worked for him. Some of the other workers knew this and they helped his wife hurriedly dig a shallow grave. She was not allowed the luxury of grieving for him – she, like us, had to start out on the trek back to Germany. There was no time to be lost.

  The very first thing we knew about the evacuation was when a cart pulled by four horses arrived to collect us, sent by Mrs Boetels. It wa
s a shock. We had spent the bitterly cold January day tucked up warm in our comfortable house, never thinking that we should have been making preparations for the flight.

  It was a big open cart, usually used to transport milk churns, with room on it for the eight of us and covered with hay for us to sit on. We had to set off immediately, so we scooped together some essentials for the journey. It was a bitingly cold winter, so we children were all dressed in several layers of clothing. I wore thick woollen stockings knitted by my grandmother and attached to buttons on a crocheted camisole I had on over my vest. On top were trousers and several jumpers, and we took loads of blankets. I had to run round to the home of the Polish family who lived near us and give my darling puppy Lumpie to Peter, their son. It was a sad parting, but there was no time to linger and, besides, I really felt I would be back soon to collect him. We children understood that we were fleeing from the Russians, and that they were our enemies and bad men we should fear, but nothing more.

  Sacks of food were thrown into the hay, but it was done so hurriedly that what we thought was a hundredweight of dried peas turned out to be a sack full of salt – a godsend, as it later turned out, for clearing the ice under the feet of the horses. Mutti had her little leather suitcase, which she took everywhere, so her cutlery survived and so did our photo album.

  We all climbed aboard to begin our journey. Grandmother refused to flop down in the hay with the rest of us, and one of the dining-room chairs was hastily brought and put on the back of the cart. She insisted on travelling backwards, so that she did not have to look at the rear end of the horses. She looked very regal, sitting up there with a beautiful, big, black straw hat on her head. The hat was another example of the resourcefulness of the womenfolk – Grandmother had made it and had lacquered it black. Unfortunately, it was not designed to be worn in the snow that was soon falling on us and the lacquer began to run. Grandmother sat perfectly still, trying to preserve her dignity, with black streaks running down her face. My mother removed the hat and tied a shawl round her, such as the rest of us were wearing. We also had umbrellas and must have looked an odd sight, all of us piled on the back of a haycart with umbrellas shielding us from the snow.

  There were four horses pulling us and one of the employees from the manor house was driving. We rapidly joined up with the rest of the convoy, which included Mrs Boetels and her family.

  It did not occur to me to wonder where Mr Boetels was – I assumed that he was staying behind to run the farm. We children were not told of his death until later and I was very sad to hear of it. I had liked him very much; he was a friendly, generous man who had taken good care of my family after Father went into the army. He certainly did not deserve his fate.

  There were eight or ten large wagons, all rumbling west towards the German border almost 200 miles away, with a contingent of spare horses so that we could change them over when they were tired. Again, another smell drifts back through my memory, the smell of the nosebags of oats and hay that the horses wore to stop them spilling any valuable food. It smelled like wet, newly mown grass.

  The milk wagon had rubber rims to its wheels, which were not good on snow, and the roads were made of large paving slabs with cracks, which could cause the wheels to lock and skid. There were many times when we all felt we were going to be pitched over into the snow.

  It was impossible to hold up the convoy for toilet breaks, and we became adept at jumping down, scurrying into the bushes and running to catch up with the carts. Progress was slow and it was possible even for my short legs to run faster than the carts were moving. Little Henning was too small to jump off. He was wearing a little leather fur-lined hat with ear flaps, like a Sherlock Holmes hat, and when he announced that he needed a wee, Grandmother told him that he would have to turn his hat inside out and wee into it. He was very indignant and refused. In the end, one of the grown-ups held him over the side of the cart. To this day, even though he is now a man in his sixties, we tease him that he is going to have to wee in his hat.

  The Boetels family had covered coaches, the smart, varnished vehicles that had ferried us to and from school, and around the countryside. They were luxurious, with lanterns outside, plush seats, and steps for mounting and dismounting. The grown-ups quickly arranged for Grandmother and Grandfather to travel under cover, and eventually we were all in the covered coaches and our milk cart was used just to transport our belongings. We had to make such good speed that we travelled day and night, sleeping huddled together in blankets. The drivers sat outside up high on the covered coaches, and they were wrapped in layers of blankets, with fur hats pulled over their heads. I cannot recall whether they were Polish or German, but I remember chattering to them when we were allowed to sit outside with them if it was sunny. Sometimes we would be permitted to hold the reins, which was very exciting.

  We rumbled onwards through the blackest of nights. Even the towns and villages were in darkness: there were no street lights and the houses were all blacked out. We seemed to be travelling endlessly under a very big, starry sky. In daylight, as we came into towns and villages, there were soup kitchens set up in schools or community halls, organised by the local mayors and welfare groups. Sometimes we would get leek and potato soup or pea and potato soup. Often it was clear broth, just made from stock. It all tasted delicious and we were very grateful. We had no time to stop and cook for ourselves. We had taken bread with us, which was getting harder and harder as the days progressed. The grown-ups told us to chew it very well before swallowing it. Best of all was to soften it with the broth, which made a good, warming meal. I can still picture the steam coming off those wonderful bowls of soup, which were served to us in metal dishes we brought with us. We would stamp our feet on the cobbles to warm them up, trying at the same time not to spill a drop of our desperately needed hot soup.

  Sometimes, when the convoy paused, we would feed the horses precious apples and carrots from our own supplies, to show them how grateful we were to them for pulling us. One of the grown-ups showed me how to hold out my hand flat with the treat on it and I can still remember the feel of the hairy wet lips of the horse as it snuffled up the food.

  There were many other convoys on the road and often we would be in a huge stream of vehicles. There were no cars or lorries, as they had been commandeered by the army and, besides, there was no fuel. Sometimes the columns of carts would grind to a halt because one up at the front had broken an axle or overturned in the snow, and all the drivers would leap down to help. The organisation was very efficient. As soon as we reached a small town or village, we would be directed to separate soup kitchens. Then, when we took to the road again, the different convoys would be given different routes, presumably so that we did not all crowd together at the same bridge. Some of the volunteers who helped feed the convoys were Polish, others were Germans who had lived in the Wartegau all their lives and did not want to move, despite the Russian threat. For us, who had only been there eighteen months, the decision to leave was easy. For others it must have been very hard. I fear that those Germans who decided to stay lived to regret that decision.

  We made steady progress and there were never any long hold-ups on the road, although we were limited by the pace of the long-suffering horses. If the adults were worried that we would not make the bridges in time, they did not show it, keeping us amused by getting us to sing songs and play word games. We must have been on the road for three days or so when we came to the bridge across the River Oder, the first of the two mighty rivers that form a natural barrier between Poland and Germany. We crossed near the town of Glogau (Glogów). Between the two rivers we stopped in the town of Sprottau (Szprotawa) and it was from there that Eva, down in Tabarz, received a postcard from Mutti to say that we were on our trek.

  Eva wrote in her diary:

  I am so happy to have finally received a message from her. So I know now that the Russians will not catch up with them. Mutti knows nothing about Father. We just hope and pray that he will get through all
right, and that soon we will have a letter from him. I am so happy that Mutti and Bärbel and all the relatives are OK.

  It was night-time when we reached the second bridge, across the Neisse at Cottbus. At last, we were almost home. The convoys had made their journey successfully and it seemed that we were safely back. There were a great many German soldiers around, urgently directing us to keep moving and get across because they were waiting to set the explosives and demolish the bridge.

  Finally we rumbled across and when we reached the other side, everyone cheered and started singing, but we could not stop as we had to clear the area as soon as possible. Before we were a mile or two down the road we heard a huge explosion, and I looked back and saw the sky lit up with an enormous orange glow. They had blown up the bridges and we had made it across only by minutes. I heard later that those who arrived too late were ferried across the rivers in boats, but that meant they had to leave their few possessions behind. Even that was far better than facing the marauding Russian army.

  On 25 January, as we were reaching German soil, there was fierce fighting in the streets of Posen, close to where we had been living. The Germans were defeated by the might and manpower of the Red Army, and the German civilians who were still there were subjected to terrible treatment, especially the women. Our escape had literally been in the nick of time and, although we children did not understand it all, we shared the huge sense of relief and celebration that swept through the long chain of carriages and carts as we travelled towards safety and away from the ruin of the two bridges that had carried us back home.