Escape

by Barbie Probert-Wright

  There was another, much darker, reason why this area gained a place in the history of the war and the whole history of what the Scottish poet Robert Burns two centuries earlier called ‘man’s inhumanity to man’. It was on the fringes of the heath, near the pretty village of Bergen, that one of the most notorious of all the concentration camps, Bergen Belsen, was established. We pushed our pram through Bergen, with no idea that four miles away lay this graveyard for human bodies and souls, a place where unredeemable sins were committed: 50,000 people died there, many from starvation and disease, others because of the cruel decrees of the notorious camp commandant, Josef Kramer, known as the Beast of Belsen, and his lieutenant, Irma Grese. It was here that Anne Frank perished. The camp was liberated by the British on 15 April, just two weeks before we passed through, and they discovered thousands of unburied corpses and mass graves containing an estimated 40,000 bodies piled into pits. Belsen was not an extermination camp: there were no gas chambers as there were at other terrible camps. But the imprisonment of so many men and women in such a small space with few provisions and inadequate sanitation meant disease was rampant and it contributed to Hitler’s ultimate aim of extermination as effectively as any planned murder.

  Even just the day before British soldiers walked into the camp, the guards opened fire on inmates who, having spotted the white sheets of surrender, had rejoiced at the approach of the Allies. The troops who arrived in tanks the next morning found 38,000 survivors but, tragically, most of them were so ravaged by disease and hunger that 28,000 of them died, despite the medical care that now came to them as fast as the British could get it there. The camp was in chaos when the troops arrived: order had completely broken down and there was no food except in a locked building crammed with rations for the SS guards. As recently as ten days before the liberation of Belsen, prisoners were still arriving at the camp, mostly transferred from others. Some of them were prisoners of war who were transported in cattle trucks and then forced to march to the camp, where they slept among corpses in the final few days of the war. As we passed by, oblivious and still savouring the lovely honey we had tasted, dedicated and selfless teams of British medics and volunteers were battling to save lives in that awful place, where everything that is good and pure about humanity seemed to have perished.

  This book is not, as I have said before, a history of the war, or a comprehensive record of what happened in the dark days afterwards. It is my story and I can only report what I witnessed. I did not see the camp at Bergen Belsen, and Eva and I did not even hear about it until much later. In fact, it was not until I lived in England that I became fully aware of the horrors committed by the fanatic who had control of my nation. In Germany, it was never much talked about: perhaps, as a nation, we found it too big a guilt to wear round our necks for eternity. At school I never heard it discussed. But I have read and seen much about it since I moved to Britain, in books and on television. I have not shied away from it. I cannot apologise for what I, as a seven-year-old, knew nothing about. One of the criticisms levelled at my nation is that we must have known what was happening, we could not have coexisted with these horrendous camps without having some idea of what was going on inside them. This may, perhaps, be true of those who lived near them. But our metropolitan life in Hamburg during the early days of the war, our time in the Wartegau and our return to Hamburg when everything was over meant that my family, like millions of others, was genuinely insulated from these appalling excesses. I know now, although I was far too young to understand it, that there was racist propaganda, and my parents and sisters probably knew Jewish friends who fled before the war or who lost everything and simply disappeared. But we had, I swear, no idea of what they fled from. When I read about what happened, and when I read The Diary of Anne Frank, I cried the same tears as anyone would cry reading her story. For me, there was a peculiar resonance: Anne was slightly older than me, but she was a child of my time, living under a regime that I lived under, but with widely different results. I cried bitter tears, not only for Anne but for my guilt by association and for a country which, somehow, allowed an Austrian madman to take over and commit, in the name of Germany, such atrocities.

  We walked on that bright spring morning, unaware of what had happened so close by. I can only be glad that we did not know then, as we had to keep up our spirits if we were to survive what lay ahead.

  15

  The Plunderers

  There were more travellers on the road now, but we were still making very good speed. A lift on the back of a farmer’s cart helped us, allowing Eva to rest her legs until we got beyond the town of Soltau. We walked on and it was getting towards time for us to have our lunch. We had our British rations, which was exciting for me because I had no idea what was inside the packs and was looking forward to discovering what they contained.

  ‘I think we’ll have to leave the road, Puppe,’ said Eva. ‘We need something to drink and there’s nothing along here. If you spot a stream or building, we’ll turn off and have a little picnic, all right?’

  It sounded like a good idea to me and I would be glad of a drink. The streams and brooks, which had been so plentiful earlier in our walk, were now much more difficult to find.

  A few hundred yards further on Eva noticed a farmhouse down a track. ‘What do you think? Shall we go over and see what we can find?’

  I agreed with Eva, as I always did. So we turned off the road and made our way down the track towards the building. As we approached it we could see it was deserted and falling into ruin, although the fields around it were cultivated.

  ‘Oh, it’s a ruin,’ Eva said, disappointed. ‘There won’t be anyone there. Oh, well, let’s carry on anyway. There might be a well or a tap that we can use.’

  We carried on towards it and were almost at the outbuildings when across the green field a dark shadow seemed to emerge. As soon as we saw it we froze and watched, semi-paralysed, as it approached. The shape shifted and separated until it became clear. It was a band of men, about twenty-five of them, wearing rough, dark clothing and with dark hair and beards, a frightening gang of what we called ‘plunderers’, the freed slave labourers who were roaming the countryside scavenging and looting.

  It took a couple of minutes for Eva to shake off her paralysis. Then she whispered urgently, ‘Don’t argue with them, don’t disobey them, do exactly what they say and say your prayers.’

  As she told me this, she deftly threw a few bits from our pram into a nearby ditch. I was transfixed and terrified, clutching Charlotte to my face but peering over her head at the approaching menace. We did not try to run or hide: there was nowhere to go, and they were moving at speed and had seen us.

  As they got nearer my terror deepened. The men were oddly silent, just one or two of them barking what were probably orders in a guttural language that we could not identify. We knew it was not German, French or English. The whole group seemed to move as one, coming towards us through the field without swerving or splitting up.

  Then they were upon us. I clutched Eva’s hand tight. They were dirty, dressed in dark jackets and ragged trousers. Some had boots, others were barefoot, with rags tied round their feet. They smelled very strongly of alcohol. Some of them, probably about half, were brandishing pistols. I closed my eyes tight when they were a few steps away and fervently prayed for them to move past us, to keep going and leave us alone. But my prayer was not answered, and they descended on us with strange whoops and cries.

  A few seemed to sheer off and start exploring the farm buildings. I heard crashing noises, the shattering of glass and the splintering of wood, as they wrenched off doors and smashed windows, looking for things to take. But the others surrounded us, grabbing the stuff from our pram and thrusting it into the sacks that most of them seemed to be carrying. They looked at us and one of them grabbed my arm while three or four of the others pulled Eva away from me, leering at her and cackling an uncouth laughter that I can still hear. I screamed and the one holding me clenched his
fist and threatened me with it.

  As she was dragged away, Eva called, ‘Remember – do what they say!’ Then she said ‘Charlotte’, which was our code for me to cover my face with my doll. She must have been terrified, but she was still thinking of me.

  They dragged her into a tumbledown wooden shed. The man holding me thrust me against a wall and gestured for me to sit down on the hard ground. I obeyed. I did not dare move, not even to turn my head to see what was happening. I kept my face buried in Charlotte shielding my eyes behind her blue velvet hood, now tatty and dirty from our travels, rigid with fear of what was happening to my sister.

  The wild men seemed to ebb and flow around me, calling to each other as they swept rapidly in and out of the crumbling buildings. They ignored me, until one of them suddenly pounced on me, tore Charlotte from my hands and stuffed her into his ragged sack, jabbering at me in the language that meant nothing to me. I wanted to call out, protest and try to hold on to her, but I was too scared. I remembered what Eva said and knew I had to let the man take Charlotte away if he wanted to.

  I can still picture the man who took Charlotte. He had a pistol tucked into the top of his trousers, which were held up with string. His boots had no laces, his face was black with ingrained dirt and he had a mouth full of broken teeth; bushy black eyebrows met over his nose, and his chin and cheeks were covered with dark stubble. A black bandanna on his head made him look to me like every image of a bandit I had ever conjured up in my worst imaginings. He stank of alcohol and sour sweat.

  I squeezed my eyes tight shut after he wrenched Charlotte away, convinced that he was taking her from my face so that he could shoot me more easily.

  I sat motionless, holding my breath, my hands in my lap, feeling empty without Charlotte. I was so terrified I could not think of beautiful memories, which is what Eva had told me to do if ever I was frightened. When he did not shoot me, my biggest fear was that I would hear the sound of a gunshot from the shed. I could only think that they had taken Eva away to kill her: I knew of nothing else they could do to her. But, thank God, the sound never came.

  After what seemed like an age, the men reassembled at some indefinable signal into their strange and awful band, and departed as suddenly as they had arrived, taking off across the fields once more, travelling fast, ignoring the track that led to the road, until they all merged into one again and became an ever smaller splodge of black on a green and grey landscape.

  It was only when they had utterly vanished that I dared to move. My muscles were almost in spasm from being held so tight for so long. I stood up gingerly and looked about me. Our pram was still there, although it had been roughly thrown on to its side. There was nothing left in it.

  I called Eva’s name, but to my horror there was no reply. Slowly, because I was deeply afraid that one or more of the men had stayed behind, I went towards the shed where I had seen her taken. I was terrified of what I would find, imagining the corpse of my sister abandoned there. I had seen enough death to know what it looked like and to have no trouble visualising it.

  As I went through the broken-down door into the shed I heard a sound. I was hugely relieved – Eva was not dead! But the noise was the sound of her sobbing, deep, racking sobs that must have shaken her whole body. I could not see her, stepping from the bright midday light of a fine, warm spring day into the darkness of the barn, but gradually my eyes adjusted and I could make out her shape. She was lying on a thin layer of straw with some old milk churns behind her.

  ‘Eva,’ I said timidly and this time she heard me, hurriedly turning and putting her clothes in order.

  She quickly wiped her tears and sniffed, saying, ‘Puppe, darling little Puppe, are you all right? Did they hurt you?’

  I ran over and threw myself down in the straw with her, all my pent-up fears releasing themselves in tears of joy that we had both survived. Eva held me tight and for a long time we sobbed in each other’s arms.

  This was only the second time that Eva revealed her true emotions to me. The first had been when we discovered Mutti had left without us. At every other stage of our difficult journey she had been upbeat, always seeing the bright side of everything, relentlessly cheerful to keep my spirits high. But the horror of this attack was too much. Even Eva’s spirit was broken by this outrage that had been committed against her and by the great fear for my safety that had engulfed her. We cried until we were both exhausted with the effort of heaving sobs out of our bodies. Then we lay quietly holding each other for some time.

  When I remember this awful moment, I can still feel Eva’s body trembling and hear her bitter weeping.

  For days afterwards, whenever she thought I was not aware, tears would roll down her cheeks, and she would quickly and surreptitiously brush them away. At night, when she cuddled up to me, I would stir in my sleep and feel her thin body racked with silent sobs.

  I knew nothing about rape until years later. Children were innocent in those days, and their innocence was prized and protected. I knew the men had been cruel to Eva: their sour smell – sweat, alcohol, tobacco, dirt – lingered on her as we lay in the hay. I realised her clothes had been torn, and when we finally sat up and took stock, it took her a few minutes to get dressed properly again.

  We never talked about it. In years to come, when we discussed our walk from time to time, if I mentioned the ‘plunderers’ she would agree with me that they were very nasty men, but she would only talk about what they stole from us. She never mentioned the biggest theft of all: her virginity. In those far-off days, girls like us preserved ourselves for our husbands and for Eva what was taken from her that day, in such a cruel way, was a huge loss. I don’t know any details, but she must have been raped by several of them, not just one. Reminded of it, her eyes would swim with tears and mine would, too. Today, as I write this, there are tears running down my cheeks, tears for her loss and for the dreadful ordeal she suffered, but also for her bravery, which I did not fully appreciate until years later.

  She locked away what happened. She could not confide it to anyone, even to herself in her own private diary. She later wrote:

  Then came the biggest disaster of the whole journey. We were stormed by twenty-five plunderers. When you see twenty-five wild men come running towards you, what can you do? You just have to shut up and endure whatever happens.

  I know that some of her friends and our parents’ friends back in Hamburg, girls of the same sort of age, also endured attacks and rapes by Russian soldiers, but none of them dwelt on it. Today we have a culture of therapy, everybody talking about their bad memories, but in those days we were preoccupied by survival and Eva was not alone in burying deep inside her the terrible wrongs she suffered in those minutes she endured in that dilapidated shed. Who is to say what is the best way of coping? My dear sister appeared to regain her normal self almost at once, but if the subject of the day ever came up, I could see the fear in her eyes.

  On that day in April 1945 Eva was, as always, a pragmatist and as we sat in the hay she said to me, ‘Well, Puppe, we are both alive and well. That’s as much as we could ask, isn’t it? We must thank God for that. He answered our prayers.’ She got up from the hay stiffly and stretched.

  ‘They took Charlotte,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, little one. That’s terrible. But you mustn’t worry because when we get home you will have more dolls.’

  ‘I want Charlotte,’ I said indignantly. Looking back, I am ashamed of myself. What was my loss compared with hers? But I was too young to understand, and Charlotte had been a shield and companion for me through difficult and terrifying experiences. Now I wonder what made the plunderer take her and thrust her into his sack. She had no value. At best, she was a home-made rag doll, and by the time he seized her she was very battered and worn. I can only conclude that he did it purely out of spite, revenge, a need to make things as horrible as possible for us.

  ‘Let’s see if we can find that drink we wanted in the first place,’ Eva said, quickly back to he
r old self.

  We went outside and the first thing we did was to go to the ditch where Eva had thrown some of our things. The plunderers had missed them and we retrieved Mutti’s Metwurst sausage, the watch the soldier had given Eva as a keepsake and her diary. I wished with all my heart that I had thrown Charlotte into the ditch with them. We had lost everything else, including Eva’s own watch, and a ring had even been taken off her finger. But we knew we were lucky, because they could have shot us and nobody would ever have known who did it. Our bodies might have lain there for weeks before being found. We also realised later that it was a good job our friend Dr Hagen was no longer with us as he would undoubtedly have been shot, and probably we as well because we would have been witnesses. Also, many years later, when I heard about the rape of small children, I realised that I was lucky to have gone untouched. All in all, with so many horrific things happening in those lawless days, we were very fortunate that it hadn’t been worse. Neither of us could ever bear to think of what would have happened to me if they had killed Eva.

  We righted the pram and Eva said cheerfully, ‘Well, at least they didn’t take this, so my little princess still has her carriage. And we will make such good progress now that we have nothing to carry apart from ourselves, won’t we?’

  We found a pump and Eva had a good wash, although we no longer had our beautiful soap and our soft towel, and we both finally had that much needed drink. But the plunderers had taken our dishes, so we had to hold the water in our cupped hands.