Escape

by Barbie Probert-Wright

  But she wasn’t there. Now what would we do?

  12

  Back on the Road

  We walked on, numb and bewildered, to Wiedersdorf. What else could we do? We couldn’t go back. We had been walking for two weeks and although, as the crow flies, we had only covered about seventy miles, the circuitous route we followed more than doubled that, and had taken us through rough and dangerous terrain. Through our many frightening experiences, what had kept us going was the thought of being reunited with our mother. It had sustained us through the blackest times and had made the final couple of days, as we neared our goal, a journey of joyful expectation.

  We were desolate. I don’t have the words to describe the depth of our misery. For once, Eva could not conceal from me that she was devastated. She wrote in her diary:

  Nothing worse could have happened to us. All this for nothing. It was just like somebody was sticking a knife in my heart. The whole way, and now nothing. It couldn’t be true. Mutti couldn’t have gone without us. I just could not believe it. We cried and cried and cried.

  We went to the house of the headmaster and his wife, where we had last seen our mother and where she stayed until she caught the train back to Hamburg. They were surprised to see us as well but could not have been more welcoming. The first thing they did was give us a letter that Mutti had left for us in case we turned up there looking for her. It was a small comfort to know that she had thought of us. Her letter had been written in haste:

  My darling Eva and Bärbel,

  We have all taken the last train back to Hamburg. I think it is better to try to find a home there, while we still have family and friends, than to stay here as lodgers, even though our hosts are very kind to us. Go to Aunt Käte’s when you get to Hamburg: if I am not there, she will know where I am.

  Lots of love, and God’s blessing to keep you safe and well,

  Mutti

  It was wonderful to see Mutti’s handwriting, and know she was thinking of us and sending her love to us, but it is hard to express how lonely we felt. The entire family – our grandparents, Aunt Irma and Henning, Aunt Hilda and Volker – had all gone, too. It was a bleak moment.

  We were very low and our hosts set about trying to cheer us up, helping us to settle in and unload the pram. As I picked up the Metwurst I felt a surge of hatred for it. It was as if it were mocking me. We had made it in time for Mutti’s birthday, but she was not here, so her present was pointless.

  ‘I want to throw it away,’ I said miserably. I didn’t even want to look at it.

  Eva stared at it for a moment, clearly with the same opinion of our sausage as mine. She held it out to our kind hosts. ‘Would you like the Metwurst? It was going to be a present for Mutti. It’s her birthday today.’

  They politely declined. ‘You should keep it for your mother,’ they said. ‘You will most certainly see her again.’

  It was hard to recover from the massive disappointment that felt as though it had knocked us both to the ground. But our hosts did everything they could to raise our spirits, and they made sure that our creature comforts, at least, were catered for. They ran hot baths for us and we had the luxury of washing our hair with shampoo. That evening we sat down to a meal served with napkins, silver cutlery and a clean tablecloth. We were given some old clothes to wear while ours were taken from us, and washed and pressed and repaired.

  Despite their kindness, it was hard for Eva and me to muster polite conversation, or recount the stories of our adventures, when our hearts felt like breaking. That night we slept in crisp linen sheets, but we dampened our clean pillows with our tears.

  The next morning we slept late. When I awoke, Eva was already up, sitting at the lovely dressing table in our bedroom, brushing her hair. She turned towards me with her usual big smile and said, ‘Well, there’s nothing for it, Puppe, but to carry on walking. We made it this far, we can make it the rest of the way.’

  ‘Can we get a train, like Mutti?’ I asked, even though I knew the answer.

  ‘No, remember there are no more trains. Mutti and the others were on the very last one.’

  ‘So we’ll have to walk again?’

  ‘Yes, but it will be much easier now the fighting is over. And we have our lovely pram, so I can push you the whole way if you like.’

  She didn’t tell me that ‘the whole way’ was another 200 miles, further than we had already come. Even so, I had no heart for walking any more. I was so sad that Mutti was not there that I couldn’t imagine setting out again. How would we have the spirit for our walk? But as soon as I woke properly and saw how positive and cheerful Eva was, I agreed that we should press on. Eva wrote in her diary:

  I decided there and then that I’ll take my little Puppe and march on towards Hamburg.

  Her resilience was amazing. She had been unable to hide from me the acute misery of the previous day, but she was already looking on the bright side once more. Perhaps she felt there was no choice. It could take months, even years, to get a train service going again and the only thing we could do until then would be to stay in Wiedersdorf, lonely refugees far from our family and home, despite the kindness of our hosts. But even if Eva’s decision to press on was born of necessity, she made it sound like fun and a good choice for us. ‘We’ll go tomorrow,’ she said firmly. ‘So enjoy your day here, Puppe. Let’s make the most of it.’

  For that day of respite we luxuriated in the kind hospitality of our hosts, taking more baths and being looked after with solicitous attention. The headmaster and his wife had become very fond of Mutti and the rest of our family, and although their slightly formal bearing meant I was in awe of them, they were transparently good-hearted and concerned about us.

  They wanted us to rest for longer, but we were determined to get started. When the headmaster warned Eva about the dangers of a young woman and a child travelling alone, Eva reminded him of some of the situations we had already faced. ‘Nothing could be worse than we’ve endured getting this far,’ she said.

  How I wish she had been right …

  While we rested, our host made himself busy. That night we ate a feast. He’d killed and roasted one of their precious chickens especially for us, served with delicious bottled fruit from his cellar and a glass of wine for all the grown-ups.

  ‘I can see that you are determined, Fraulein Eva,’ the headmaster said as we finished off the wonderful dinner. ‘I won’t try and stop you. It says a great deal about your strength and will that you have got this far with Bärbel. It would be wrong to prevent you going to your mother when it means so much to you both. But I want you to agree to something. I know of two fellows who are setting off in the same direction as you tomorrow morning, and I’d like you to consider going along with them for as long as possible. They are sound men and I would feel better knowing you were with them, at least in the beginning. Would you do that?’

  Eva agreed and we went upstairs for our last night in the cosy beds of the headmaster’s house.

  The next morning we were introduced to our travelling companions. The first was Mr Kramer, a man in his sixties who had not had to fight but had been drafted in to run a supply depot. He was tall, slightly stooped and very short-sighted. His glasses had such thick lenses you could see circles in them, and when he looked at you directly his eyes were enormous and seemed to swim behind the lenses, like a fish’s eyes. I was fascinated by this and it was made especially bizarre by the fact that one lens was broken and held together with sticky tape, which obscured half his eye.

  The other was Dr Hagen, who was, I think, in his forties, although as a child it was hard to pinpoint people’s ages. They all seemed ‘old’ to me. I never found out what Dr Hagen had been doing during the war. He didn’t talk about it. Perhaps he told Eva, but she never mentioned it, even when we talked about our long walk in the years to come. Perhaps he had been in the army and had simply avoided being taken prisoner, and was making his own way home. He was not in uniform, but I think many people helped soldiers
by giving them civilian clothes to wear. I remember his trousers were much too big in the waist and he had a thick piece of rope holding them up. In civilian life, though, he had been a schoolteacher (in Germany, teachers often have the title Doctor) and was an old colleague of our host at Wiedersdorf. He and Mr Kramer were both making their way back to their homes to find their families.

  The four of us set off on our journey, waving goodbye to the kind headmaster and his wife. Once again we were on the road with our pram and little rucksacks. I still kept Charlotte close to me at all times and this time we at least had a good supply of food. We had bread, cheese, ham, and some of the apples and pears that the headmaster and his wife had carefully preserved in their cellar. They also gave us some lovely warm blankets to take with us.

  I remember leaving Wiedersdorf oblivious to the fact that this undertaking was going to be much harder than our first trek. We thought that now the war was almost over, life would be practically normal again. We didn’t realise that, although the walking itself was easier and the route more direct, not only were we going much further than we had previously but that life in an occupied, starving country could have its own great perils and dangers.

  On our first day we skirted Halle, going along the country lanes. Just as we had previously encountered the Panzergraben trenches, now we came across large piles of logs outside each village, makeshift roadblocks to slow down the invasion. Dr Hagen was stocky and strong, and whenever the logs blocked our way he set about clearing them off the road with remarkable ease, so we were lucky to have him with us.

  A few hours later, when we joined the main highway, fortunately the rest of the logs had been cleared for military convoys to get through, so we walked along without a problem.

  Our companions seemed pleasant enough. Despite Mr Kramer’s strange appearance with his taped-up glasses, he was very jolly, with a ready laugh and a sense of humour well matched to a seven-year-old. Eva told me years later that he was rather irritating and I can see that he would be to an adult. But to me he was a constant source of amusement, with a fund of stories. Sometimes Eva would shoot him a look and say ‘Careful’ when he was telling me a joke. I now realise that some of them must have been rather smutty stories, which she did not want me to hear.

  Dr Hagen was not as chatty as the other man and for long periods he walked in silence. What I remember most about him is that he had a stick for walking with and it had a carved handle with the face of a dog. I loved it and sometimes he would give it to me so that I could walk with it. Somehow, I felt that if the dog’s face was pointing forwards it was protecting us and no harm could come to us.

  We made really good progress, mainly because there were now three people to take turns at pushing me in the pram. There were no attacks, we could walk in daylight and we never got diverted from our route. There were more people travelling, and occasionally we fell in with others and walked a little way with them. It was a great relief not to be forced to leap into hedges or fling myself to the ground as bullets ricocheted around me.

  But it was harder to find billets for the night. We avoided stopping in towns or big villages, because they were in chaos. The administration that had worked so well, with so much provision for refugees, had in many places broken down completely. The cities had no electricity supplies, the sewers were ruptured, there were homeless people everywhere and some had become ruthless in their bid for survival. Many of the top officials who had organised refugee billets were dead, or had fled. Often they simply killed themselves, knowing that their future as ‘good’ Nazis would be difficult, or because they were genuinely deluded into thinking that life without the Nazi machine would not be worth living. Their disappearance left a vacuum. Even where there was some sort of local authority, the problems in the towns were far too great for them to worry about people like us, who were passing through.

  Looting was rife and so was robbery. The major towns, in those few sombre days between the invasion and the official end of the war when temporary governance was assumed by the Allies, were dark, dangerous, lawless places. There were even women who felt they had no choice but to resort to prostitution as the only means to obtain food for themselves and their children. As the towns became more organised, curfews were imposed, sometimes for all but three hours of the day, in a bid to keep people off the streets to allow them to be cleared. When food supplies were resumed, ration cards were issued, but there was never any excess food for travellers like us.

  On our first night we slept under the arch of a bridge crossing a small river, a tributary of the River Saale. We were still following the route of that river, but not for much longer. Eva knew that the Saale would eventually flow into the Elbe, and if we followed the Elbe north, we would reach Hamburg, but to go all the way with the Saale would have added miles to our route. The water level in this small river was low because there had been so little rain, and we were able to find two niches in the brickwork where we tried to make ourselves as comfortable as possible, Mr Kramer and Dr Hagen in one, and Eva and me in the other. Fortunately we had the blankets given to us by our hosts at Wiedersdorf, so we could wrap ourselves up and be quite snug. I loved that night, because there was a lot going on in the water. There were sounds of plopping and flopping all night. Perhaps it was fish, or maybe toads and frogs. I was half asleep and half awake, and for me it was like something from Alice in Wonderland. I could not see in the dark, but I imagined large frogs sitting on lily pads watching me. They didn’t frighten me because I pretended that they were there to protect me. I love the sound of water and there was the constant babble of the little river, soothing and reassuring. I remember too the shrill sound of crickets in the hour before I dozed off – or perhaps they, like the frogs, were part of my dream.

  The next day when we woke we called out ‘Good morning!’ to the men in the next niche, and there was a beautiful echo. So I called out ‘good morning’ several times and my echoes mingled with the echoes of the men replying to me. It made me laugh.

  After a small breakfast from our provisions, we returned to the road and continued walking on towards the town of Alsleben, where we needed to make our final crossing of the River Saale. When we got there, we found that we could not cross by the main Alsleben bridge because, like so many others, it had been destroyed by the retreating German army to halt the invasion.

  We found a makeshift ferry operating, which we hoped would be able to take all four of us across. It was nothing more than a flat raft, with no sides, and getting on was a precarious undertaking, as it swayed and rocked underneath us. Not only that, but we had our beloved pram to take with us as well. Mr Kramer and Dr Hagen helped Eva manoeuvre it aboard.

  ‘You should leave that thing behind,’ said the ferryman sourly. But Eva insisted that it was coming with us and paid the surly man in advance. Once aboard, we had to huddle together in the middle even though I wanted to sit at the edge and trail my hands in the water.

  ‘You must stay very still,’ she told me sternly. I think she was afraid that any movement would topple the raft over.

  Safely on the other side, we followed the main road on to Aschersleben. As we walked along, we came upon some parked trucks, and a group of American soldiers having a meal at the side of the road. They must have been a supply unit, following the main invasion army, because there were only lorries in the convoy, no tanks.

  They greeted us cheerfully and we went up to talk to them. We were no longer afraid of these foreign soldiers: in the space of a few short days they had gone from being our enemies to being our friends.

  ‘Why don’t you join us for some food?’ asked one, so we sat down and had some ham and crackers with them. They also had packs of instant Nescafe that came in their rations. I had no real memory of coffee, as we’d had none during the war years, but Eva and the two men were thrilled with it. Afterwards they told me how it was a poor imitation of the real thing – before the war the only coffee that was drunk in Germany was filtered, made from freshly
ground beans – but they were still glad to have it.

  After the meal, the soldiers offered us a lift, which we gratefully accepted, so they loaded the pram into the back of one of their lorries and we climbed up. It reminded me of travelling with the German soldiers. The Americans made just as much fuss of me, and one of them pulled out his wallet to show me a picture of his daughter; she was pretty with curly hair like mine. Apart from the language difference and the uniform, they were so like the others, their ‘enemy’. They were a happy bunch. I could not understand what they said, but they were laughing and joking, and were no doubt as relieved as we were that the fighting was over and we could all relax in each other’s company. Dr Hagen, having been a teacher, could speak quite good English, so he did some translating and talked to them. The soldiers also chatted to Eva, although her English was more limited than Dr Hagen’s, while Mr Kramer and I listened and tried to follow what was going on. Later, Dr Hagen told us that the soldiers were telling him which parts of America they were from and how long they had been away from home. Home was on everybody’s lips at this time: it was where we all wanted to be and where we were all heading. For those of us who no longer had a physical home, it was where our family was.

  Near Aschersleben our friends dropped us off with the extra gift of some supplies, ration packs all marked ‘breakfast’. Presumably they had more of those than they did of the lunch and dinner packs. They also handed us even more chewing gum.

  We walked into Aschersleben and went about the usual routine of locating the town hall and finding out what arrangements, if any, there were for refugees and travellers like us. Once we got there Mr Kramer, the joker with the broken glasses, left us. He had not seen his wife or his children, who had all been drafted into the army or the BDM, for many months, and now at last he was close to home, not far at all from the village where his family lived.