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Escape

Page 8

by Barbie Probert-Wright


  The enemy attacked again, so we went back into the woods. It was quite some attack and we were really not sure we would come out of it alive. I found myself thinking ‘It this it? Is this the end? will we die here?’ Afterwards, we were relieved to have escaped unhurt, but very worried about the future.

  I think Eva was beginning to realise just how dangerous our journey was and what a risk we were taking. When we emerged from sheltering in the woods, we saw a knot of soldiers talking to a man who was clearly a foreigner. He was a big man, wearing a dark overcoat. A German officer was challenging him and there was an air of hostility. ‘Where are your papers?’ the officer shouted, obviously angry. Then he pulled his pistol out of his belt.

  Eva moved at once to shield me from seeing but it was too late. I saw the officer aim and fire. I heard the loud report of the gun and saw the man’s body crumple and slump down on the ground. He lay still, with a damp patch oozing on his chest. I was shaking from head to toe as Eva took my hand and pulled me quickly onwards. ‘Don’t think about it, Puppe. Think about nice things,’ she said.

  We kept walking swiftly along the road, away from the horrible scene we had just witnessed. She started singing, and after a while I tried to forget what I had seen and joined in. She was not being heartless: I know from talking to her years later that she was as shaken as I was and as distressed. But her mission was to get me through alive and with as little trauma as possible. This was what kept her going.

  We realised we were walking through what had been, only minutes earlier, a battlefield. It was a terrible and unforgettable sight. There were the bodies of soldiers all around and field ambulances loading up the wounded. Tanks and army vehicles were dotted about in smoking pyres, some of them still in flames. Men ran about with stretchers collecting the injured, and the air was filled with the groaning sounds of soldiers in pain and occasionally a shrill cry of agony.

  Some soldiers were crouching over the bodies of others who were lying so still that they seemed dead.

  ‘What are they doing?’ I asked Eva.

  ‘They are checking whether the men are still alive or not. If they’re not, they will remove their identity discs. All soldiers wear them on chains round their necks so that they can be identified, and then their relatives can be told what has happened.’

  I watched wide-eyed. Please, please, I prayed, please don’t let Father be lying somewhere dead, with someone taking his disc to tell us, his family, that his war is over and that he is never coming home.

  I wondered then, and I still wonder today, if the soldiers buried their own dead and the enemy’s side by side in the same graves. Later in life I learned the German proverb ‘Wir betrauern die Toten – doch Sie haben ihren Frieden’. It means ‘We mourn the dead – but they have found their peace’. I say it to myself when I think back on this scene.

  We stumbled away from the area of fighting, glad to leave this sorrowful place behind us, and we were joined as we walked by two soldiers. We were very glad to meet them as they knew the way. They introduced themselves as Officer Stern and Mr Osterman.

  They took us to Grafinau, a village near Oberihm, where there was an army hospital and they managed to persuade someone at the hospital to give us a room for the night. We were shown into a room with two beds, and the soldiers shared one while Eva and I had the other. We were too tired and too pleased to have a bed after our night in the ditch to care about this, and they were decent young men. They slept with all their clothes on, including their boots, as they said it was important to be ready to run at any time if we had to. I had never slept in a room with strangers before and I thought it was funny, especially as one of them snored. I’d heard my father snore, but that seemed a long time ago.

  After sleeping for a short while, I woke up and lay awake listening to the whimpering and the cries of the wounded soldiers in the hospital wards. There was another terrible cocktail of smells to haunt my nostrils for evermore: this time the smell of blood and flesh, poor sanitation and disinfectant. The door to our room was half open, perhaps for the quick exit the soldiers had warned us we might need to make, and the dim light outside in the hall meant that sometimes I would see a nurse or a doctor go by, casting shadows that grew large until they filled the doorway and then receded to nothing. I went to sleep again, after saying a prayer to thank God that we were not injured or in pain.

  Although Eva and I were cramped together in a single bed, it was much more comfortable than sleeping in a ditch and we allowed ourselves a lie-in. It was eight o’clock the next day before we moved on, walking to Oberihm. Officer Stern and Mr Osterman continued walking with us and we enjoyed their company. We felt safer with them, although that was probably a false sense of security, as their uniforms were more likely to attract enemy fire than we would on our own. But we believed that the enemy would kill us all anyway, if they found us, so it made no difference.

  It was a long day of walking with the usual efforts to avoid the fighting and the overhead attacks, and we were very pleased when at last we saw the town in front of us.

  Mr Osterman knew the area well. ‘My sister lives in Oberihm,’ he said. ‘I’m sure she will be able to help you.’

  He was right. When we reached the town, he took us to his sister’s house and she was happy to find us accommodation for the night. The house next to where she was living had been bombed, but the wine stored in the cellar had miraculously escaped. A few bottles were given to us. We stayed in the cellar of a large villa, where the family had created a comfortable living area. There were no windows, of course, as it was below ground, but it was remarkably civilised. There were children in the family, although they were already fast asleep in bed when we arrived so I didn’t meet them, but I was allowed to play with their toys. There was a small makeshift kitchen with a stove, and there was even a downstairs washroom and toilet, and the towels had yellow ducks embroidered on them. Everyone had blow-up camping mattresses with pillows and blankets. Eva and I pushed our two ‘beds’ together in a corner, and pulled a curtain round us for more privacy. It was very cosy and I felt safe.

  Eva stayed with me until I was asleep. Every night she massaged my legs, especially if we had walked a long way, to relieve the muscles after the long hours of walking. My legs felt very heavy and I struggled to lift them by the end of each day, and I would get terrible pains in my hips. Eva would rub them and comfort me, and she always had a positive explanation for everything. ‘They are growing pains,’ she would say. ‘You are going to be so much taller from all this exercise.’

  Despite my fatigue and the pain in my legs, I always felt better after Eva had massaged me. She had the most wonderful way of soothing me and making me feel secure, even in the chaos we were living through. She was my anchor, holding me firm in these rocky seas. After she had rubbed my legs at night, I would offer to rub hers and she would let me. ‘That’s lovely,’ she would say. ‘That feels so good.’ She always told me how much better she felt afterwards, even though my little hands were just stroking the surface.

  Every night, Eva carefully combed out my hair and re-plaited it. She was very worried that I would pick up headlice, so she combed it through hard. It always made me think of Mutti, who had plaited my hair every night at home, and had grumbled at me for being such a tomboy and having so many knots in it. I longed to have Mutti brush my hair again, even if she were to scold me while she was doing it.

  After I was asleep that night, Eva and our friendly soldiers stayed up talking and drinking the wine, and she wrote in her diary that it was a pleasant evening.

  The next day we were up and, having said farewell to Officer Stern and Mr Osterman, were on the road again at 7.30 a.m., after washing and cleaning our teeth. Although we never changed our clothes for two whole weeks and kept them on even at night, Eva had soap and a towel, and she made sure I washed and cleaned my teeth. If we stayed in houses, we had the use of toilets and bathrooms, but when we were on the road we washed in streams. Of course, on the road w
e had no toilet paper, but we became expert at spotting big soft leaves that were not prickly and we would pick them as we walked along, so that we had a supply when we needed them.

  The walking wasn’t too hard, particularly as we had so many enforced rests as we crouched under hedgerows and lay flat on the ground to avoid the air attacks. When I did get tired, Eva’s trust in me and the way she treated me like a grown-up kept me going when I might otherwise have stopped.

  We still had some of our bottles of wine, which Eva was carrying in her rucksack as they were too weighty for our little handmade cart. She wrote in the diary:

  They were so heavy and they hurt my back so much that I thought about leaving them by the wayside. Luckily, just before I abandoned them, a big army truck pulled over and offered us a lift.

  Puppe was on the lap of one of the soldiers, I sat between two of them. When I looked at the man on my right, a little shiver went down my spine. He had such a lovely face, and he was so nice to the little one. The care we both were given by them was something we really needed.

  I can remember sitting in the truck. The soldiers were doing everything possible to entertain me, making me laugh by telling me funny stories and pulling faces, and asking me all about myself and my family. They asked me my doll’s name and when I told them she was Charlotte they formally introduced themselves to her. Looking back, I can see that they were starved of normal family company and all desperately missed their homes. They were so kind to me but, unwittingly, I was helping them as well, bringing a child’s laughter and innocence into their lives for a short time, so they made the most of me while they could.

  The lorry took us to a village and there we went to a meeting point for refugees, where we would be cared for and allocated beds. Our billet was a large community hall, where there was a big kitchen full of women and soldiers. We quickly made friends with another young woman called Hanna, who was eighteen, and we found three beds together, mattresses lined up against the wall.

  ‘Where are you from and where are you heading?’ asked Hanna.

  ‘We’re on our way to Wiedersdorf and we’ve come from Tabarz.’ Eva explained our circumstances. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I was also sent away to do war work – on the land. You know, working on a farm. But I told them I had to go home, now that the end of the war is coming. So the farmer and his wife let me go. I’m heading back to my family.’

  It was nice to meet someone like us, who was trying to get home.

  Before bed we had a meal. Eva wrote:

  One of the soldiers made supper for Puppe and me and Hanna. We were looked after very well. Then we shared the last four bottles of wine and everybody drank a toast to peace. Sometimes it is nice to forget about what is going on around us and just not think about what may happen the next day.

  An officer who had been on the truck that gave us a lift sat with us and talked about missing his wife and son. He had met her while they were both at school. Now, he wondered if he would ever see her and his little boy again. The boy’s name has stuck in my memory for some reason – he was called Claus Rudiger. I really hope that Claus Rudiger did get to see his father again. The officer’s devotion to his family and his love for his wife prompted Eva to write in the diary:

  I wonder if I will ever find somebody I can love as much as he loves his wife. It would be wonderful to love and be loved like that, but it must make the pain of separation very hard to bear …

  The next day, some of the soldiers in the community centre warned us that we should no longer travel in the daytime. ‘It’s getting too dangerous,’ said one. ‘There are civilians killed all the time because they stray into the path of the fighting. There’s no telling when or where it’s going to happen. If you really have to travel, then you must do it at night when you are less likely to be seen.’

  ‘It’s true,’ added another. ‘The number of people killed on the roads is rising every day.’

  Eva listened carefully, then took me to one side. ‘Did you hear that, Puppe?’ she asked. ‘I have a feeling that we need to be cautious. We’ve already used up a lot of our luck and we don’t want to be reckless with the rest. The soldiers know what they are talking about.’

  ‘So does that mean we will be walking in the dark?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes – if we have to. It’ll be very strange at first but you’ll get used to it. The only trouble is we won’t be able to travel as far as we could in the daytime. But it’s better to take longer and get to Mutti alive and well than it is never to get there at all.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, filled with that same overwhelming longing to see Mutti again. We would do whatever it took to make sure we got back to her.

  Not only that, but I was glad to have a respite from walking for a little longer. It meant a few more hours’ rest – I could sleep as long as I wanted to in the morning. Then, for a huge bonus, we had a wonderful meal of pasta and meat, cooked for us by the soldiers.

  We spent most of the afternoon sheltering in the cellar, listening to the sound of mortars tearing into the buildings around us. Everyone stayed cheerful and, because I was the only child, they made a real fuss of me. They took turns telling me stories, either fairy tales or ones they made up, which often featured a little girl like me. We played ‘I Spy with My Little Eye’, and a game where somebody said a word and the rest had to think of a song with the word in it – and sing the song, of course.

  As we were sheltering down there, we heard the whine of a shell coming right over us, extremely close, then there was the dull thud of it hitting a wall, very near by. For a few seconds there was silence, then the sound of falling bricks and masonry. It was a frightening moment as we all wondered if our building was going to collapse but thankfully it stayed intact. We saw, when we emerged later, that the house immediately next door to our building had been hit. One of the soldiers who had been eating with us at lunchtime had been killed. His comrades retrieved his body and managed to bury him. There was an empty hole in the line of houses along the street, like a mouth with a tooth missing, and we all thanked God that our building, where so many people were sheltering, had not taken the direct hit and that only one person had died.

  Before we set off, we had a magical half-hour in the main hall of the community centre. There was a piano, no doubt used for village shows and concerts in the days before the war. One of the soldiers played it for us, performing a piece of beautiful, haunting classical music.

  My favourite piece of classical music is Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. I am not quite sure if this is true, or if it is something that I have believed for so long that I think it is true, but it could be that it was here, in this village hall, in the dying embers of an appalling war, that I first heard it. Even now, whenever I feel sad I play the CD of it and it makes me feel I am being comforted. It carries me off to a different world, and I can leave all my problems and worries behind.

  The whole group of us sat around in silence, dreaming and listening to the gentle tinkle of the piano. Eva and I sat together, her arm round me holding me tight. We were both thinking about the flat in Hamburg, where we had a piano and where our whole extended family held literary and musical evenings, when everyone would read a poem or an excerpt from a book, or sing a song. It all seemed a long long time ago. We couldn’t help but wonder if we would ever see our family again, or if we would ever get home.

  As evening approached, it was time to be off once more. We collected our things, said goodbye to Hanna, who was going in a different direction, and set out. Our luck was in again, and before we had gone too far, we were offered a lift in another army lorry. They said they could take us quite a long way along the road, so we gratefully climbed aboard. The lorry took back routes and little narrow lanes to avoid the areas where the fighting had been fierce during the day. Even at night, the sky would occasionally light up with red and white flares, and the artillery would boom and a red glow in the distance would mean something was on fire. I snuggled down nex
t to Eva in the dark of the vehicle. The driver would switch off the headlights whenever we were in a village or crossing a main road and we would edge forward slowly in the dark. Finally we reached the village of Neckeroda, which is not far from the city of Teichel.

  When we got there, Eva decided we should stay. It was the early hours of the morning, but the refugee station was still manned with volunteers despite the hour and we were again billeted in a village hall, lined with camp beds. I was very tired because I had found it hard to sleep during the day, so after we had a meal, which Eva describes in her diary as a cross between supper and breakfast, I went to bed and fell asleep straight away. I did not need any bedtime story or lullaby. Eva wrote about the rest of the night:

  Someone had a bottle of liqueur, kakaonuss. (It’s made from chocolate and nuts and is very sweet, the sort of thing you drink after your dessert.) Everybody had a little. There were no glasses, so we simply passed the bottle round. There were so many people that we only had a sip each, so it had no alcoholic effect on anyone. But it was nice to share something and to savour the sweet taste. It made us all feel very companionable, and for a short time the mood was cheerful and relaxed.

  After checking that I was all right, Eva sat up for the rest of the night, chatting and flirting with one of the soldiers. His name was Hans and he was a good-looking young man, probably about the same age as Eva, tall and slim with fair hair. He was not married and he and Eva got on really well, but they did not exchange addresses because they both felt that was futile in the situation we were all in. Who could know what would happen to any of us the next day, let alone weeks from now? Besides, we had no address: we were literally homeless and it was very possible that he was, too. If he came from one of the big cities that had been bombed, his family might well have been in the same state as ours. But he gave her a talisman, a keepsake: his watch. It wasn’t a valuable watch, but it was all he had that was personal and his to give away. Eva treasured it and when she died, many years later, it was still in her jewellery box.

 

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