Escape

by Barbie Probert-Wright

  The next morning we were up early, eager to press on. With the pram, we could move much faster. I walked for as long as I could, until I was too tired to go on, then Eva could push me quite comfortably. This, coupled with the lack of fighting on the roads, meant that we made very good progress. It really felt as though we would reach Mutti soon and were on the last leg of our long journey.

  We bypassed the towns of Apolda, Bad Sulza and Naumburg, on Eva’s list of our route, which she had carefully written out in her diary in case we lost the map. By the evening, we had reached Weissenfels, and here Eva had a letter to deliver to a lady doctor from one of the other members of staff at the home in Tabarz.

  That night we stayed with a lovely lady who, like so many people, was desperate for news of her family, all of whom were caught up in the war. She made us very welcome and we had a relaxing evening in her company. She, like us, came from Hamburg, and she told us her house there was still intact and that we were welcome to stay there as long as we needed to when we finally got back to the city. It was a very generous offer because we were complete strangers and she had no idea how trustworthy we were. She insisted on Eva taking a note of her address in the city, just in case we needed it. Our hostess and Eva spent the evening nostalgically discussing the old Hamburg, remembering shops and churches and other places they had both visited. My memories, of course, were much more limited, centring as they did around our old apartment and the nursery school. But our hostess knew the Wandsbecker Chaussee, where we lived, and could even more or less pinpoint our block, because she remembered the bakery on the ground floor. We slept well and set off later than usual the next day. Our wonderful hostess gave us cheese and sugar drops to take with us on our journey.

  We walked on to Merseburg, which was only about ten miles away. Because it was a relatively short distance, I walked the whole way while Eva pushed the pram. It seems incredible now that we walked such distances and it is a testament to how well shoes were made, because we never had trouble with our feet. It was my legs that ached, sometimes so badly that it was hard to get to sleep. Eva continued to massage them, and to sing and tell me stories to relax me. Every night, unless I was so tired I fell asleep before we could do it, we said prayers, always for our mother and especially for our father, because it was so long since we had heard from him. We also prayed for our sister Ruth in heaven, our grandparents and the rest of the family, and I often found myself wondering what my cousins, Volker and little Henning, were doing. The long, perfect days of play with Volker when we lived near the brick factory seemed a lifetime ago, although in fact it was only three months since we had left. It was as if that world had come out of one of the story books we used to read. My reality was here and now, on the road, existing from day to day, never knowing what tomorrow might bring.

  Merseburg had been badly damaged by bombs. It was by far the worst we had seen, worse than Jena. The city was home to a large oil works, which produced the high-quality aviation fuel needed by the Luftwaffe to fly their planes. This made it a major target for the Allies and from May 1944 to the end of that year there were more than a dozen bombing raids on Merseburg. Sixty-five per cent of the population had been killed and there was a dispirited feeling to the whole place.

  We picked our way through rubble and debris, past blackened scars where houses and apartment blocks had stood, with Eva struggling to push our pram along roads that had not been cleared, where not a single building was left standing. The absence of buildings made the roads seem strangely wide, without definition, and they were strewn with debris, including electrical cables (which Eva made me keep well away from), broken glass and remains of furniture. Where walls had collapsed there was a view like an architectural cross-section of a building, with half-rooms on show at every floor level, furniture still intact, tables with crockery on and curtains across windows.

  Nevertheless, the city was reviving a little and we saw a few makeshift shops, nothing more than roadside stalls, and women in headscarves scurrying about their business. There was still a tremendous air of desolation and we were not able to find any central arrangements for dealing with refugees.

  We still had a little food left from the rations we had been given by the Americans, but not much. We sat on the remains of a wall and ate it. Throughout our walk we were very lucky with the weather and we watched a lovely sunset over the jagged ruins of the city.

  As dusk fell, Eva started to become anxious. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We must find somewhere sheltered to sleep. There’s no one to organise anything for us, so I think we’ll be looking after ourselves tonight.’

  She did not say anything but I could tell that she was worried about the scavengers we saw, people who were trying to eke out their survival from nothing and prowled about the ruins of the buildings looking for anything they could use. There was no doubt that we had some treasures with us, with our pram and our rucksacks, and Eva was apprehensive that we would have our things stolen if we didn’t find somewhere safe.

  A young woman approached us and introduced herself, in the formal German way, as Miss Reinhardt. She was older than Eva, probably in her mid twenties and, like us, a refugee trying to get to her home. ‘Where are you heading?’ she asked. She seemed friendly enough.

  ‘Halle,’ said Eva.

  ‘I’m off to Leipzig. Quite the other way. But it looks like we’re all going to be spending a night in Merseburg, doesn’t it? Why don’t we stick together? I’m sure we’ll all be safer that way.’

  Eva agreed, pleased to have an ally. We walked on, the two of them constantly looking for a place where we might shelter for the night. It was 20 April, twelve days after we had set off, and the nights were still chilly, so we needed to find cover if we could. After a few hundred yards one of them spotted a cellar and we explored it. The house above had been demolished but we could pick our way through piles of bricks and timber to the steps that led down into the dry cellar. This, they decided, would be our best place to stay. We hauled our precious pram down the steps, put on our extra jumpers and settled in for the night. There was nowhere to sit or lie except the hard floor, which was cold, but we had no choice. I lay with my head on my little pink rucksack and slept. Eva and Miss Reinhardt, with their backs propped against the wall, were only able to doze. They talked for a while, then slept as best they could.

  Shortly after dawn I was flung awake by Eva jerking forward and letting out a howl of pain. A piece of masonry from the derelict building above us had broken free and fallen, hitting her on the head. There was a lot of blood, which we staunched with our hankies and the towel.

  I was very worried and almost in tears to see my beloved sister injured like this; the sight of the blood pouring from her head was terrifying.

  ‘Now don’t worry,’ she kept saying. ‘It looks much worse than it is. I’m going to be all right.’

  Later she wrote in her diary, ‘I was so glad it didn’t hit Puppe.’

  The two of them immediately decided the cellar was not safe and that we should get help for Eva if we could. So between the three of us we dragged the pram up to the road and set off. Eva walked behind, holding the towel to her head. A woman in the street directed us to a medical centre and we were lucky to find a nurse on duty despite the earliness of the hour. She reassured us that it was not a deep wound and applied a neat bandage round Eva’s forehead.

  While we were in the medical centre, we were also able to use the bathroom, so we could clean ourselves up with our lavender soap, which we loved because it left its lingering fragrance on our skins. We washed our blood-soaked towel and hankies, as we knew we still needed them.

  Eva wrote in her diary that for days afterwards she had ‘terrible headaches’, but she never mentioned anything that would worry me, and whenever I asked her about her wound she just laughed and made a joke about her ‘battle scars’.

  It was 11 a.m. before we went on our way again. We said goodbye to Miss Reinhardt, who went off to Leipzig, and Eva and I headed
north-west. We were really excited because we knew we were getting close to where we had parted from our mother all that time ago. We were only about ten miles from Halle and Wiedersdorf was not much further.

  As we walked out of Merseburg, Eva told me the fairy story about the raven that stole the bishop’s ring. I’d heard it before, but it was a thrill to me to know that I had spent the night in the town where it was set. An innocent man was imprisoned and executed for stealing the ring, before it was eventually uncovered in the raven’s nest. For that reason, at the city’s castle, a raven is still to this day kept in a cage as a punishment for the sin of its ancestor. When I was smaller I would have felt a cold chill at the idea of anyone being put to death, for whatever reason. But now, death was all around me and I had seen more bodies of innocent people than I had of those whose war crimes justified their execution. Nevertheless, one man, wrongly put to death centuries ago, still moved me. I loved the story about the bird. One day I would like to recreate the journey that Eva and I made, and if I do I will visit the raven at Merseburg.

  Today, Merseburg is a satellite town of Halle and the road between the two is apparently built up. Sixty years ago there were still fields for us to walk beside, although the wooded hillsides were dropping away from us. By mid afternoon, to our great excitement, we could see Halle ahead of us. It was a city, largely undamaged by bombing, on the other bank of the River Saale, whose course we had been shadowing for many miles and many days since we first encountered it at Rudolstadt.

  But, to our frustration and despair, we could not get to it. The bridges across the river had been blown up to halt the Allied progress. We walked about for a while, feeling increasingly desperate. Then we saw a bridge, but when we got to it Eva realised that it was a railway bridge. ‘That’s no good,’ she cried. ‘We can’t cross on a railway. It’s impossible. What on earth are we going to do?’

  We would have to walk miles in either direction to find a place to get across the river. We must have looked desolate, because eventually three men approached us.

  ‘Are you trying to get over the river?’ asked one.

  ‘Yes,’ said Eva warily, holding my hand tightly. But her fears soon disappeared as they turned out to be very kind. They were not dressed in uniform even though they looked young enough to have been called up towards the end of the war. We will never know who they were or what they were doing. In those difficult days nobody asked questions that could embarrass others.

  They explained that they were going to cross the railway bridge and they would help us. We accepted their offer gratefully.

  First we had to scramble up a steep embankment to get to the railway. The men helped us up. One got to the top and stretched his arm down, while another of them literally handed me up to him. I was all skin and bones, no weight at all. Then they helped Eva to scrabble her way up the steep, scrubby ground. Finally, they dragged our pram up.

  At the top we were on the railway track and I looked nervously up and down it.

  ‘You don’t need to worry, young miss,’ said one, laughing when he saw my face. ‘There’s no danger from trains. There aren’t any running in Germany any more. Come on, let’s get going.’

  Even though I knew that there were no longer any trains steaming their way along the rails, it was nonetheless alarming to walk along a gleaming, well-used railway line, now pitched at a groggy angle because of bomb damage. The Saale is a wide river and the drop from the bridge to the water was great. Eva and I are not good with heights, and the parapets at the side of the bridge were low and distorted. Once we had left the relative safety of the bank behind and were out over the murky water far below we were terrified and almost frozen to the spot.

  One of the men coaxed us along. ‘Get down on your hands and knees and crawl,’ he said kindly. ‘That’s the way to do it.’ Putting Eva ahead of me, he said to her, ‘I am just in front of you, and you must keep your eyes on me and nothing else. Don’t look to your left or right.’

  To me he said very gently, ‘Watch your sister’s bottom.’

  I giggled when he said what seemed to me to be a rude word and he grinned, probably glad to have relieved my tension.

  ‘Don’t take your eyes off it. Crawl behind it all the way and before very long we’ll be on the other side. I promise.’

  One of the other men added, ‘And we’ll be right behind you. We won’t let anything happen to you, we promise. We’ll be following your bottom.’

  He said it deliberately, to make me smile again.

  Then we set off in our bizarre little convoy. The first man crawled and we crawled after him. It was difficult going, lifting our hands and knees from railway sleeper to railway sleeper. Behind us, the other two men stayed upright but close, and they spoke calmly and encouragingly to us. They were carrying our pram between them, as it was impossible to push it. The journey seemed to take for ever as we progressed slowly, inch by inch, but eventually we reached the other side. We had crossed the great river, crawling on our hands and knees along a railway.

  The leader of our convoy jumped down from the track and held up his arms to Eva, who fell into them. When she was safe, he and the man behind me together lifted me down the embankment to the road. Our hands were red-raw sore and we had splinters in them from the wooden sleepers. Our knees were sore, too, and our trousers were practically worn through. But we were delighted. A really difficult part of our journey was over and we were ever closer to Mutti.

  We thanked the men profusely, but they did not hang around. Whoever they were, and wherever they were going, they were again intent on their own affairs. We found ourselves in Ammendorf, an industrial town that has now been virtually absorbed into Halle. It is famous as a railway town, where rolling stock is manufactured. During the war, it was where the special carriages used to transport people to the concentration camps were made.

  As usual, we made our way to the town hall and were given an address as a billet for the night. I know exactly where we stayed because Eva made a note of it in her diary: Hallischestrasse 107 and the name of the man whose family put us up was Schneider. She even recorded that his title was Diplomingenieur, which means he was a senior engineer in one of the factories in the town.

  Once again we were in luck. It was a wonderful billet. The family were very welcoming. We had a bath – our first since we left Tabarz – and a lovely meal of curly kale with smoked sausages and potatoes, and afterwards a fresh fruit compote with vanilla sauce. When you don’t eat often, food becomes very important and I remember these wartime meals vividly. They tasted better than anything I have ever eaten since, even food served by five-star restaurants.

  Just as wonderful were the clean sheets we slept in that night. You can only appreciate fresh linen fully if you have gone for days sleeping, at best, in beds others have already slept in and, at worst, in barns and cellars. The one thing that kept me awake was my excitement at being so close to our goal. The next day was 22 April, our mother’s forty-first birthday, and it was the day we would be reunited with her. It felt as though all my birthdays and Christmases were coming at once and if I had not been so physically exhausted, I don’t think I would have slept a wink.

  Next morning we put on our clean underwear, thrilled that even though our outer clothes were very grubby, we were as clean as we could be for Mutti. We still had our Metwurst, our present for her, and we were really proud of ourselves for having a gift, despite the circumstances.

  We started walking early, anxious to get to her. We sang happy songs as we marched along, following roads that skirted the city of Halle and took us to Wiedersdorf, where we had last seen our mother and said goodbye to her before the journey to Tabarz. I was skipping with excitement and Eva had to tell me to slow down or I would be too tired for the walk.

  We got as far as the village of Kochwitz, and we could see Wiedersdorf in the distance. Then we saw two young girls, aged about fourteen, coming towards us, and as they came closer we realised that we knew them. They were
called Anke and Jutta, and they lived in Wiedersdorf, in the same street as the house where our family was staying. I knew them because I spent a couple of weeks there and even Eva had chatted to them before, during the two days she stayed when she picked me up to go to Tabarz. They recognised me straight away because of my curly blonde hair.

  We smiled and greeted them.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ asked Anke.

  ‘We’ve come to meet our mother, of course. We’re on our way to the headmaster’s house now, to see her.’

  They stared at us with wide, solemn eyes. ‘Don’t you know, then?’

  My stomach dropped with fear and I could feel Eva tense. ‘Know what?’ she asked in a frozen voice.

  ‘Your mother’s gone. She left days ago, when the last train departed for Hamburg. Lots of people got on it when they found out there would be no more trains.’ Seeing our stunned faces, the girls looked concerned. ‘We’re sorry to tell you the bad news. Are you all right?’

  We were not all right. There are no words to express what we felt. The shock was almost too great to take in. We sat down by the roadside and cried and cried and cried. It was as if everything had been taken away from us. We had been through so much to get to her and it was the thought of her that had kept us going. Whenever I was low and tired, Eva had always told me how close we were getting to Mutti and she would build a picture for me of us all living together again. For the last two or three days we had been literally counting off the miles. It was the thought of Mutti’s face that gave me the courage to crawl across the railway bridge and whenever we felt like giving up it was her voice we heard in our heads, urging us onwards.