Escape

by Barbie Probert-Wright

  ‘Goodbye!’ we all said. ‘And good luck.’

  He shook our hands. ‘Good luck to you too. I hope you find your family safe and well.’

  We wished the same for him. We all hoped that we would be lucky and find our families undamaged by the ravages of the war.

  There were no arrangements for us at Aschersleben, so we decided to move on at once. Before we left, we opened the first of our American army rations. They contained fruit bars, sachets of Nescafé and sugar, crackers and a small can of ham or corned beef. I thought they were delicious and we didn’t just eat them at breakfast: they made a good meal at any time and we were very grateful for them. I also loved opening them. It was like a birthday every time, with lots of little packets to be unwrapped, and as the writing on them was in English I had no idea what goodies were inside until I’d removed the paper.

  That night we slept outside again, waking early the next day to continue walking. Gradually, our companion Dr Hagen opened up a little now that the more voluble Mr Kramer had gone. Dr Hagen had taught Classics and was able to tell me lots of ancient Greek and Roman stories. He also entertained me with his own simplified versions of Shakespeare’s plays, and he could quote Schiller and the other German romantic poets. So travelling with him helped continue my unofficial education.

  Most of the time we lacked the means to boil water to make coffee or tea, but sometimes, in the villages, we could get some hot water. Increasingly we found that people were less hospitable, more suspicious, on this leg of our journey, and doors did not open for us as readily as they had before.

  ‘You know, Puppe, I think we’re going to be sleeping outside a bit more now,’ said Eva. ‘It’s lucky that it’s so fine, isn’t it? At least the ground is dry. It will be fun, snuggling under our blankets and looking up at the stars, won’t it? Just like camping.’

  As usual, Eva looked on the bright side of everything for me. But on the next night we did find a billet, with a widow and her daughter who lived on the edge of a village. The widow saw us walking along and must have decided that we looked respectable enough, so she let Eva and me sleep in her house in armchairs. Dr Hagen was allowed to use a small barn where she had some chickens and a goat.

  The daughter, Renate, was in her forties, and mildly mentally handicapped. She talked slowly and probably was mentally younger than I was. I remember easily beating her at draughts. Eva told me quietly that I should let her win occasionally, so I did. Renate laughed a lot, a sort of embarrassed giggly laugh, which was her way of making conversation, as she found speech difficult. Her mother was very pleased that I played with her and talked to her, as she did not have any friends.

  ‘She is too old for children and too young for adults,’ she said wistfully. I thought it was an odd remark, because at the time I did not appreciate the problems she must have faced looking after her daughter. She was very relieved that it was the Americans who had invaded this area, not the Russians.

  ‘What would have happened to my poor Renate?’ she kept asking. Again, I had no idea what she meant, except that I knew we were all glad not to be in the path of the Soviet troops.

  Staying there was a pleasant interlude, despite our constant worry and anxiety about what lay ahead. Apart from her chickens and the goat, the widow had a large vegetable patch and we ate well: omelettes, potatoes, carrots and coffee made with the American packets. The widow, like us, had not tasted coffee for years. We used the goat’s milk with it and I must admit it did taste very odd to me. I still rarely drink coffee – I’d much rather have a cup of tea.

  The widow seemed to enjoy our company, and asked if we would like to stay and rest for a couple of days, but we thanked her and refused. We wanted to get on to Hamburg; that was all that mattered to us.

  We set off the next day, and after a while we came into a village where we hoped to buy some bread and other supplies. Eva still had most of the money that Mutti had given her but she was shocked and dismayed at the prices being charged for everything. We walked out of the first baker’s because Eva said it was too expensive, but in the end we found they were all charging the same amount, so we had to pay what they asked for a loaf and we bought some cheese. We were suffering from hunger much more on this second part of our trek. This close to defeat, and with all the normal systems of society breaking down, food supplies were increasingly scarce. And as Dr Hagen had no money at all, of course we shared all our food with him.

  After our expensive, but much needed, lunch the three of us, Eva pushing me in the pram and Dr Hagen walking with his doghead stick, carried on marching towards our destination.

  13

  The Boys from the Hitler Youth

  It was the fourth day after we had left Wiedersdorf. The atmosphere had changed a lot since we set out from Tabarz. Although the way was straight and easy now, and there was no gunfire to dodge, there was a different sort of menace in the air. Like the people we met in the towns and villages along the way, we too had become more suspicious and more self-reliant. In some ways we were happier keeping ourselves to ourselves and not falsely hoping for a good meal and a warm bed at the end of each day.

  As we walked on we fell into the company of two boys, Claus and Wolfgang. Much of what I know about their story and this part of the trek comes from the many reminiscences I had with Eva in later years. But I do clearly remember the first time we saw them. They were wearing shirts that were several sizes too big and when they flapped open we caught sight of the distinctive brown uniform of the Hitler Youth. They were starving, so we gave them some of the American breakfast packs, which they devoured ravenously as we walked. They were both heading for Halberstadt, which was on our route. At first they were reluctant to talk, but Dr Hagen, accustomed from his teaching years to talking easily to lads, soon had them telling their stories.

  ‘I’ve just turned sixteen,’ Claus said proudly. ‘My birthday is 20 April, the same as the Führer.’

  We all had to celebrate Hitler’s birthday, even little children like me, so we knew the date.

  ‘And what’ve you been up to?’ asked Dr Hagen. ‘How come you’re so far from home?’

  ‘We’ve been fighting,’ said Claus. ‘With the Hitler Youth, helping to defend Magdeburg. It was pretty hairy, I can tell you.’

  ‘You too, Wolfgang? Were you fighting too? How old are you?’

  Wolfgang nodded before replying, ‘Sixteen.’

  I thought to myself that these boys were about the same age as my cousin Ulrich and, as far as I was concerned, Ulrich was not a grown-up. He was a big kid, who used to lead us into mischief at the brick factory house. Yet these two boys had been fighting a war. I can still picture Claus: he was quite small for his age and he had freckles on his nose. Wolfgang was slightly older and seemed a lot more mature, even in my eyes. He had cropped fair hair and blue eyes, and was taller than his companion. Neither of them had a voice that had broken, which made the reality of them fighting with guns and seeing their friends killed in front of them all the more poignant.

  I know now that from 1942 onwards all boys over sixteen were called up to attend military training camps, a hard grind compared with their years in the Hitler Youth, which up to then had been like Scout camps with a heavy overlay of Nazi propaganda. But at the military camps they were put through intensive training to become soldiers. The propaganda was unrelenting and they had classroom lessons with titles like ‘Why We Are Fighting’. They were given phrases to learn, which included things like ‘Let me take them all on! I will prevail because I know how to believe and how to fight.’

  It was real brainwashing, so it is no surprise that these very young boys were often the last to surrender and found it harder than older soldiers to accept defeat. Boys of this age had been in the Hitler Youth, compulsorily, since they were ten and they had grown up almost all their lives in Nazi Germany, with its constant subtle drip of propaganda. Under certain circumstances it is easy to indoctrinate anybody, especially the young, who have no other experi
ence of life and nothing to make comparisons with. By the end of the war, in cities like Berlin and Munich, boys as young as ten and eleven were pressed into service, dressed in uniforms that were too big for them and carrying weapons they did not know how to fire. For those recruited in the last mad days of the war, life expectancy was less than a month. Their combination of fanaticism and youthful recklessness meant many of these boys died in futile attempts to defend a defeated Germany.

  Claus was a prime example of this kind of brainwashing, with what to us seemed overblown patriotism. As he walked along, he sang Hitler Youth songs, including one about how ‘the flag means more than death’, until Eva asked him to stop.

  ‘It’s not particularly wise, seeing there are American military convoys along this road, don’t you think?’ she asked drily.

  ‘I don’t care,’ proclaimed Claus. ‘I would have preferred to die in battle than to live under the Allies. We all know what’s going to happen now. The German people are going to be made into slaves to the enemies. We’ll be no better than animals.’

  I looked at Eva, frightened, but she instantly reassured me. ‘Now, you know that’s not true, Claus. You’re scaring Bärbel with your nonsense. All your so-called enemies have been very kind and friendly. They’ve been nothing but good to us.’

  ‘Huh,’ Claus answered scornfully. ‘You don’t know anything. You haven’t been fighting them like we have.’

  There was a lot of bravado to what he said, in his piping, unbroken voice. Deep down, he was probably as relieved as the rest of us that it was over, but he found it hard to say so.

  The other boy, Wolfgang, was more thoughtful, quieter and altogether more solemn. He perked up when Dr Hagen said that he did not believe that the occupation of Germany by the Allies would be oppressive.

  ‘Will I be allowed to go back to school?’ he wanted to know. ‘Because I plan to train as an engineer, like my father.’

  ‘I’m sure you will,’ replied the doctor. ‘This country is going to need as many qualified people as possible to help rebuild it.’

  This seemed to lighten Wolfgang’s mood and reassure him. He too was desperate for life to get back to normal; to reclaim his youth.

  ‘Tell us about the fighting you were involved in,’ said Eva.

  As we walked, their stories gradually emerged.

  It was just over a week earlier that Magdeburg had come under fierce attack from the Americans, with 300 planes dropping bombs on the city and intense artillery fire across the River Elbe. To defend the city, 800 boys from the Hitler Youth had been drafted in to join the other troops, with the idea of holding up the American advance on Berlin, which is what the German High Command assumed the Americans were doing. I read later that Magdeburg was where the Americans sustained their last casualty of the war, when one of their tanks was hit and the gunner killed. The German weapon that killed him, an anti-tank gun, was apparently fired by a woman, which shows how fiercely dedicated some people were to the cause.

  Claus and Wolfgang were deployed in foxholes, usually rooms in damaged buildings or crude fortifications they made themselves from all the rubble and wood around them. They were in the outer suburbs, with a remit to defy and delay the enemy, and they became part of the final stand in which every block and every street in Magdeburg was fought over bitterly. They had weapons, but most of them were old relics of the First World War and not what the boys had been taught to use. They were forced to retreat further and further into the city, but then the Elbe bridges at Magdeburg were blown up, trapping them in the direct line of the advancing Americans. As the Germans were still bombarding the Americans from the other side of the river, their unit, and many others, were now under fire from their own side. They saw boys from their own unit killed. Eventually they were told by their commanding officer, who himself was only eighteen, to surrender and they did, although Claus insisted he would have preferred to die killing Americans.

  They were taken prisoner by the Americans and questioned by a US sergeant, who seemed astonished when he saw that it was just young lads who had been fighting so fiercely. ‘How old are you boys?’ he asked and, when they told him he surprisingly switched to German and said, ‘Get rid of those uniforms and get yourselves home, kids. Get back to your mothers where you belong.’

  The sergeant was shocked. He did not believe in taking children as prisoners, so had let them go. Claus and Wolfgang were lucky. If they had managed to cross the river before the bridges were blown, they would have ended up in the hands of the Russians and it is unlikely that they would have had such a generous reaction from the Soviet forces.

  Many of the Hitler Youth boys were from Magdeburg and some made their way back to their homes easily. Others, including these two, found bombed-out houses to shelter in, where they lived on the remains of their rations, and food that they scavenged and begged. When Claus and Wolfgang thought it was safe to set out for home, they knocked on the door of a house and asked if the people could give them any spare clothes, which is how they came to be wearing their oversized shirts. Then they set off.

  Some of their friends, they told us, lived in the part of Magdeburg taken by the Russians and had no idea how they were going to get across the river to their homes, or whether it would be sensible to attempt it. They had left them in the ruins, living by their wits.

  It was a terrible story. These two boys had seen truly awful things. It seemed to encapsulate the madness that had engulfed our country, that finally children were being asked to sacrifice their lives so pointlessly. But Claus and Wolfgang had survived, against the odds, and hoped to see their families again.

  Claus was one of a large family and he told us how ashamed he was of his grandmother, a staunch Catholic, who always said things critical of Hitler and his regime. ‘We had to pretend she was a little bit doolally,’ he said, ‘to stop us all getting into trouble.’ His father and two older brothers were away fighting, and his mother was struggling to keep their small farm going, and look after his six little brothers and sisters. ‘That’s the only reason I’m glad to have survived, so that I can take a lot of the work from her shoulders,’ he said.

  Wolfgang was the oldest of three children. He said he was really grateful that the other two were girls, because even if the war had continued they would not have been called up. Both of them had been sent away from home as part of the Kinderlandverschickung, the evacuation of children to the countryside. (I read years later that, by order of Hitler, the word ‘evacuation’ was never permitted, because that was what the British called it. In Germany we called it the ‘despatch to the countryside’.) Wolfgang had no idea where his sisters were, but the youngest was only ten, so Eva asked for her full name to see if she had been at the home in Tabarz. Unfortunately she didn’t recognise it but she did her best to reassure Wolfgang that his sisters were probably safe.

  Before he was called up, Wolfgang had been at high school, hoping to do well and go to university. Wolfgang’s father, like my father, had not been called up until the end of the war as he was also older and, as an engineer, did an important job. But eventually he got his call-up papers and a few months later Wolfgang too was sent to fight. He was very worried about his mother, as she had been left alone when they all went and from what he said it did not sound as though she was too good at coping. We could tell that he was desperate to get back to her and I knew exactly how he felt.

  He was luckier than us, I thought at the time, because he did not have so far to go to get back to his Mutti. But when I reflect on it those boys, and all the others of their generation, were incredibly unlucky. I had had to confront the realities of war, walking through battlefields and smelling the rotting flesh of dead bodies. But they had been forced to take part, to kill others and to take pride in it. They were all forced to sacrifice their childhoods.

  Claus told us that he was sure he had shot at least two Americans. Wolfgang made no such boasts. If he did have such horrific stories inside him, that’s where he kept them.r />
  Years later, when we discussed the boys, wondering whatever became of them, Eva told me that it was Wolfgang she worried about. ‘Claus would be fine. He would get a job where he had to obey orders, or he would work on the farm, and he would never think too deeply about what he saw or what he did. Wolfgang was different. I only hope he did not spend the rest of his life tortured by the things he witnessed and the actions he was forced to take. They were only children,’ she said.

  It was just one day that we spent with the boys but I recall them vividly. I can clearly remember Claus pushing me in the pram, running for a little way and then giving it a huge shove, so that I sped away down the road, which was downhill. Eva shouted at him and he ran after the pram, laughing, and caught me. Luckily, because I was heavy enough, he had not been able to send me off too fast. It was hard to believe that this same boy, larking around with my pram, had, a week earlier, been killing soldiers, narrowly escaping death himself. Too young to shave, too young to vote, but old enough to die for his country.

  The road we were following was good, but hilly as we were passing through the foothills of the Hartz mountains. We saw the historic city of Quedlinburg, its tallest buildings rising above us on promontories. We avoided its centre, mainly to keep moving but also because we were unsure where there was trouble.

  As we skirted round it, Dr Hagen was able to tell us about the town. He really did seem to know everything. Wolfgang and I listened attentively, but Claus was easily distracted. If American convoys drove past, we had to restrain him from shouting abuse at them. Eva reminded him that it was not too late for him to be taken prisoner. Wolfgang always pulled his oversized white shirt tighter to himself, making sure he obscured the uniform underneath, but Claus didn’t bother.

  Near Halberstadt we parted company. Claus and Wolfgang recognised where they were and we could see they were both excited to be close to home. They could hardly bear to hang around long enough to say goodbye before they dashed off.