Escape

by Barbie Probert-Wright

  After they had gone Eva said, ‘I just hope they don’t have the same disappointment we had at Wiedersdorf.’

  Halberstadt had been bombed – its cathedral was badly damaged – but we hoped that both their families were safe. For the nights to come, we included them in our prayers.

  That night we slept in a very exciting place. In the dark it was dangerous to be on the road, partly because of the military traffic that lumbered along, and partly because Dr Hagen and Eva didn’t trust some of the other refugees also on the road. It was at night that those who were hiding from the Americans travelled, mainly soldiers who had escaped capture and were trying to make it back to their families, but also the foreign workers who had been brought into Germany to work on farms and in factories, and who had freed themselves and were roaming the countryside, stealing alcohol and looting.

  So when evening began to fall, we went into the woods at the side of the road, following a well-worn track. We intended to find a suitable place to shelter among the trees, as we clearly would have to sleep in the open. We left the track and after a short walk came into a clearing; there in front of us was a hide, a wooden house on stilts, which the foresters used. I knew what it was at once because I had been in a hide on the Sundermanns’ estate in the Wartegau, which was used by hunters.

  I was thrilled to see the hide. It looked like a treetop Hansel and Gretel house to me, a small wooden structure above the ground, with a crude ladder, just notches in a plank of wood. Eva was worried about my climbing up, but I was nimbler than either she or Dr Hagen and reached the top very easily. We had to leave the pram below, but we made sure we brought all our belongings up.

  This hide might have been designed for watching wildlife because there were holes to look through and one of them was just above the floor level, as if meant for a child who was sitting down. More likely, the foresters stayed there, because we found some food – just packets of dried fruit and nuts, but they tasted so good. There was also a bottle with some liquid in, which both Eva and Dr Hagen sniffed but decided against drinking. Fortunately, we had had a drink and a wash from a stream not long before.

  We settled down for the night, but I was too excited to sleep. From the window I could see the clearing, which seemed to be a focal point for the forest animals. We saw deer and I particularly remember two large stags with antlers. There were rabbits and wild pigs. I felt very safe and secure, being above the ground, and in the twilight it was as if the animals were putting on a floorshow just for me. Eva kept telling me that I needed to sleep, as we would have another long walk the next day, but I was too thrilled by what I could see. Night fell, but there was a good moon and the cabaret changed – now there were badgers and foxes. When clouds blocked out the light I could hear rustling and catch the occasional glint of eyes down below. I must have fallen asleep eventually, but I know I was awake long after my two companions. As I had travelled in the pram for much of the day, they were bound to be more exhausted than me. But even as they slept I was happy and secure, wrapped in my blanket, listening to Dr Hagen’s gentle snores and feeling the warmth of Eva’s deep, peaceful breathing next to me.

  When we woke the next day it was bright sunlight, the forest was alive with the sound of birdsong and there were more rabbits hopping around the clearing. Magically, there was a mother deer with her baby, a real Bambi, snuffling about in the mossy undergrowth. I watched them, transfixed, until a noise somewhere else in the forest startled them. The mother lifted her head, looked around as if she were sniffing the air, then bounded away, the little one following closely. I was so glad it had not all been a dream and I was reluctant to leave. I could have stayed for hours, watching the serene forest life. But I knew we had to go on.

  14

  Just the Two of Us Again

  In these last few weeks of defeat and occupation there was chronic disorder. A surging tide of displaced people roamed the roads. There were freed prisoners of war – liberated British, French and American servicemen trying to find their way back to their own armies – and many dispossessed families, mainly old people, women and children, with small handcarts containing all their possessions, trying to find somewhere they could call home. Everyone carried parcels wrapped with string, suitcases, wicker hampers, or shopping bags; some had blankets across their shoulders. There were also the slave workers, the foreigners, mainly from the Baltic states, who had been forced to work in Germany and who saw their liberation as a crude opportunity to abuse what was left of the country; to loot, vandalise and even rape.

  Without Eva to guide me through my own memories, I cannot put an accurate chronology on all the things I saw at this time. Her diary was written, in pencil, whenever she had a quiet opportunity to herself. But there were not many spare moments on this second leg and her notes are very sparse. A great many events went unrecorded.

  I remember the roads getting gradually more and more crowded with refugees, and Eva huddling me closer to her. She was now very reluctant to share even more than the briefest pleasantries with other travellers. We saw children on their own, older than me but not old enough to be independent; we saw the very old being pushed on makeshift carts; we saw occasional German soldiers, no longer in charge but hurrying, like the rest of us, to their own personal destinations.

  There were some volunteer organisations already helping people. Villagers and farmers along the way would leave pails of water out by their gates for us to drink from. Once, when I think we were at Braunschweig (Brunswick), we were lucky enough to come across a camp of American soldiers, and there were American Red Cross girls handing out coffee and doughnuts. The smell of doughnuts, sweet and fatty, lives with me still. The girls looked so healthy, not skinny as we were; they laughed and joked with the soldiers and, as usual, petted me. We greedily stuffed doughnuts into our bags for later, for ourselves and to share with the others we met who had even less food than we did.

  One day we saw a small group of people standing by the side of the road, gaunt beyond belief and wearing striped uniforms. They hardly looked like people at all but more like walking skeletons. Their heads were shaved. One of them had his hands out for food, the others did not seem to have the energy to beg.

  ‘Who are they?’ I asked Eva. I had not realised people could be so thin.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘I think they must have come from a hospital or something. They look so ill. They were probably being treated for their terrible condition somewhere that has now shut down.’

  They were, of course, survivors of a concentration camp and I now realise they must have been among the healthiest of the survivors to have made their way from the camps to the road. We were to learn later of the appalling experiences of people in these camps and, together, Eva and I wept at the memory of those we saw and of how little we were able to do for them. Many years later, when I watched my own son dying from cancer and racked by chemotherapy, his hollow cheeks and gaunt frame reminded me for an instant of these men in their striped pyjama-like clothes, appealing to the world for help.

  As a small child, I saw these poor scraps of humanity as just another enduring image of a world gone crazy, a world in which all order seemed to have been overturned and it was, truly, every man for himself. Now I look back with despair, wondering how people can treat others in this way. There are almost no words for the horror of it.

  We saw other strange sights in the chaos that the end of the war brought. Somewhere along our route we saw trainloads of human beings crammed into goods carriages, being taken who knows where. This must have been before we were in territory held by the Allies, but there was so much confusion, and such a welter of jumbled memories, that I don’t know where it happened. Once, we saw a train stop and all the people were let out. They were some way from us and we watched them crawling like ants down the banks from the elevated train tracks, scrabbling down the steep embankments and scurrying away in all directions to make sure they were not captured again.

  The talk on the
road was always of where the Russians were. Everybody wanted to be with the Americans and the British, and we were all terrified of falling into the hands of the Soviet troops. We kept ourselves to ourselves and Eva cautioned me about being too free with information about where we were going. If asked, she would simply say, ‘Hamburg.’

  ‘Hamburg’ had now become a name as loaded for me as ‘Wiedersdorf’ had been on the first leg of our long march. Hamburg was where we would find our mother and it really did sound like home, in a way that Wiedersdorf never had, because it would be our permanent base, just as it had been before the war. Naively, even though I knew that our home had been bombed, I dreamed of it being rebuilt exactly the same and of us running into the big wide hallway to find Mutti waiting for us, with delicious smells coming from the kitchen and a big bowl of gooseberries for me to prepare. As we walked, we endlessly reminisced about the Hamburg we had known and loved before the war.

  ‘You mustn’t be disappointed if it’s not the same as before,’ cautioned Eva when she saw me getting carried away. ‘It will be very different now.’

  But she was never downbeat, never depressed. She told me it was a good thing that we had not met Mutti in Wiedersdorf and then been stranded there.

  ‘Omi and Opa would not have been able to do this walk,’ she said. ‘Thank goodness they all managed to get home on a train. Little Henning would not have been able to walk, either, and the pram would not support both of you.’

  She did not know how right she was. If we had all stayed in Wiedersdorf for a couple of months longer, we would have ended up in East Germany, the Russian-occupied territory.

  We were nearing Celle, where our friend Dr Hagen would leave us. The three of us spent our last night together sleeping outside. We were not lucky enough to find another hide, but we did find a dry place in some woods. There were others camping nearby and they had made a fire, but we didn’t join them, preferring to settle down with our blankets wrapped tight round us; some bushes sheltered us on one side and the pram, laid down on its side, was on the other.

  Eva and Dr Hagen were aware of the risks from scavengers, so we put our few possessions between us and the doctor used a large hankie to tie the handle of the pram to his wrist, so that he would wake if anyone tried to move it. We really did not want to lose our precious pram and we knew that others on the road looked at it covetously. Some of them had nothing to carry their belongings in and staggered under the load of small children. Others had handcarts. But ours was a highly sprung, well-made piece of engineering, light to push, yet very sturdy. Many, many times we said our thanks to the American GI who had loped away with our heavy, unwieldy wheelbarrow and brought us this pram in exchange. Now, if anyone tried to steal it, it would wake Dr Hagen, who must have had a rather uncomfortable night tethered to it.

  We had finished the last of our American army rations and were becoming increasingly hungry. We had some bread to eat that night, but there was nothing to have with it except water from a stream. I can remember my hunger keeping me awake for a while, my tummy rumbling noisily. But eventually I slept and we woke to another warm spring day.

  We were up early, partly because our makeshift beds were so uncomfortable and partly because Dr Hagen was eager to be up and off now that we were so close to his home. After a short walk, we came into the ancient town of Celle and Dr Hagen left us at last. Before going, he gave me my last lesson. I had learned so much from him, almost as though I had been in a travelling schoolroom. His parting gift to me was a potted history of Celle, in particular its connections with the composer J. S. Bach, and he whistled airs from Bach’s music to me.

  Although Dr Hagen was undemonstrative and, for the most part, taciturn (we had learned very little about his private life), he had been a very good companion to us. We were sad to part from him, but of course we were happy for him that he had reached home. Besides the security of having a man with us, it had also been very good for my sister to have an adult to talk to and seek advice from. While they were chatting, I could sit in my pram, look around, and dream of home and Mutti.

  Only someone who has been forced apart from their mother as a child will understand my longing to see her. Eva was a wonderful substitute mother, always putting me first and doing everything she could to protect me from the realities of what we were passing through. But all the same, I longed for my own bed and Mutti telling me stories as she plaited my hair. I constantly dreamed about her, day and night. I dreamed I heard her laughing ahead of us in some thick undergrowth that we were hacking down to get to her; I dreamed so vividly that I could smell her perfume and hear the rustle of her skirt.

  But we were now very close to seeing our mother again. Eva showed me on the map, and we knew that we would probably have to spend only one more night on the road before we reached Harburg, the town which occupies the south banks of the Elbe directly across from Hamburg on the north.

  I was beginning to get excited again. We had been on the road for six days, but the long trek was going to be worthwhile, because in two days’ time we would be with our family again.

  We set out jauntily. The roads were clearer and we were once again walking on our own for most of the time. We sang, because our spirits were high. We ate more bread and we still had some of the American Wrigley’s chewing gum, although I’m not convinced it helped with the hunger pangs. It seemed to make my tummy rumble even more.

  The lush, pine-wooded countryside was giving way to a much flatter but equally spectacular terrain, the Lüneburg Heath. This is a huge, 200-square-kilometre stretch of mainly uncultivated land, with odd smallholdings dotted about and with its own peculiar brand of sheep, the Heidschnucken, who look as though they are half goat. Shepherds to this day still wear traditional green smocks. The heath is a mass of heather and in the summer it bursts into deep purple colours, edged with the bright blue bell flowers, which grow in profusion. At the time we were passing through, its colours were more subtle greens and greys. (I would see it in full bloom in the not too distant future, in more settled times.) The landscape was created in medieval days, when forests were cleared for the firewood, which was used to distil salt, the main industry in the area. Today the area is famous for its beauty and for its preservation of an old way of life: cars are prohibited in many areas, so horse-drawn vehicles and bicycles are the most common forms of transport.

  We saw hawks hovering in the air before swooping to prey on small field animals and I learned to recognise the harsh chatter of jays, which sounded as though they were always in a bad temper and scolding someone, and the caw-cawing of the flocks of crows that assembled on the gnarled oak trees. I discovered that in the hedgerows were thin strips of tin foil, blackened on one side, and I started to pick them out as we went past. Eva did not know what they were, but in the course of an hour or two of walking, I found maybe half a dozen and started my own little collection, putting them in the pram. We found out much later, when the war was long over, that they were dropped by the incoming Allied bombers, heading for Hamburg, to prevent radar from tracking their paths. Apparently, on the morning after a big bombing raid the heath was festooned with them, but most of them had dispersed in the months since Hamburg was flattened. To me, they were just pretty, shiny strips, novel playthings, but they had sharp edges, as tinfoil does, and Eva warned me to be careful.

  The heathland was flatter than the countryside we had passed through and we could see the spires of churches from tiny villages miles away. There were small cottages, used before the war mainly for weekends or holidays, now taken over by families desperate for somewhere to stay, probably refugees from the bombing of Hamburg. Their vegetable patches were well tended and the houses neat.

  When we first broached the heathland, we were lucky enough to come across a woman in the garden of one of the cottages who gave us drinks of milk and some bread and honey. She was rather brusque, complaining about the number of refugees and how she could not be expected to feed them all. But as we were the first of th
e day, she said, she would make an exception for us. Even though her words were sharp, her voice was not aggressive and when she saw me she said, ‘Poor little one, you need something to eat.’

  The honey from the Lüneburg Heath is a famous delicacy and most of the small farms have their own hives to collect it from bees who feast on the heather during the summer months. It has a warm, heathery taste to it and on fresh bread it made one of the best breakfasts I have ever eaten – although that was probably because I was so hungry.

  It was now 29 April, twenty-two days since we’d left Tabarz and, unbeknown to me, momentous events were happening. This was the day that Hitler, preparing for death, married his mistress Eva Braun. The following day they would commit suicide together in his bunker in Berlin, along with members of his High Command. Eight Russian armies were surrounding the capital city and even the most diehard Nazis were facing up to the reality of complete defeat. Five days after this the Lüneburg Heath would gain its own place in history, as it was here, on 4 May 1945, that the British military leader Field Marshal Montgomery received the unconditional surrender of all German troops west of the Elbe, including those in Denmark and Holland, three days before the final end to the war when Germany conceded defeat on all fronts.

  We were now in the British-held area of Germany and, as we walked, we no longer met American soldiers. For the first time we met the British army. The uniforms were different, but to me the soldiers were all the same: friendly men with smiling faces who gave us food from their ration packs and spoke politely to my sister whose fractured English seemed to amuse them. Occasionally one of them wolf-whistled at Eva, but they all behaved with respect and kindness, just as we had come to expect from the Americans. The British were not as chatty as the Americans, or as ready to tell us their names (although that was not unusual to us, as Germans are rather formal) but they were just as generous and we liked them just as much. We got more corned beef, which we devoured gratefully. I ate so much corned beef at this time that today I cannot face it, except to cook it in a corned beef hash. The thought of the yellow fat around it in the tin turns my stomach, but I am grateful that I can be so picky. Back then, a tin of corned beef was manna from heaven.