Escape

by Barbie Probert-Wright

  Then Eva said, ‘We’re so hungry, I don’t think Mutti would mind one little bit if we ate some of her sausage.’

  So we ripped the Metwurst apart with our fingers, as we had no knife, and broke off lumps to eat. It was very unappetising, as it is meant to be sliced thin and eaten with bread, and we were chewing our way through mouthfuls of it, spicy and fatty and, to me, revolting.

  When I pulled a face and spat some out, Eva coaxed me: ‘We need food, Puppe. We must eat, to have the strength for the last little bit of our journey. Two days from now we’ll be eating with Mutti, remember. We just have to be fit and strong to get there.’

  So, reluctantly, I persevered, thinking longingly of the British army ration packs that had been stolen from us. I never found out what was in them, but I know it would have been easier to digest and altogether more appetising than chunks of fatty sausage.

  As we ate, I slipped my hand into my trouser pocket and there was the little wooden train that I had secretly brought from Tabarz. I still didn’t tell Eva I had it, as I felt naughty not obeying the instruction to bring only Charlotte. But I fingered its familiar shape and felt reassured: something of mine had survived the plunderers.

  After we had rested a short while and gnawed at the sausage, we had another drink and set off again, following the track that had brought us from the road to the ruined farm where these ‘horrible men’, as I called them, had found us. Eva told me later that I used to say ‘horrible men’ and wrinkle my nose and turn down my mouth and shudder whenever I thought about the attack.

  Eva, being the kindest, best sister in the world, immediately tried to distract me from my awful memories. She started singing and I quickly joined in. Then she asked me what story I would like to hear and I chose one of my favourite fairy tales. When the story was over we talked about our mother and father, and our cousins Volker and little Henning, and all the rest of our family who, she said, would be waiting to welcome us to Hamburg.

  Without Eva’s watch, we had no idea of the time. The watch the soldier had given her was not wound up, so had stopped. From the position of the sun we guessed it was still afternoon.

  ‘If we press on,’ said Eva, ‘we will only need to spend one more night on the road.’

  By late tomorrow we would be with our family.

  16

  So Close to Home

  The road was clear and we made good progress. After a few miles, soon after Wintermoor, we were overtaken by a young woman of about Eva’s age, who was going in the same direction. She asked very politely if we minded her walking with us, as she was frightened by the look of some of the people on the road. We knew well what she meant and were more than happy to let her accompany us.

  Her name was Fraulein Gerda and she, like Eva, had been working as a teacher in one of the BDM homes. They had plenty to chat about and I was glad she was there to distract Eva for a while from the misery we had been through so recently. They talked nostalgically about their classes of girls, wondering whether they had all managed to escape back to their own homes. Gerda had taken a party of her girls back to Hanover, where they were from. Some had found their families, others had to be billeted with volunteers and she had been reluctant to leave them. She was worried about them, but she felt it was her duty to get home to her own mother and younger sister. They lived in Harburg, which was where we were heading before we went into Hamburg, so we agreed we would all stick together until we got there.

  When we told Gerda how far we had come she was astonished, and very impressed that I had walked so far and that I was so uncomplaining. I remember feeling very proud. ‘My girls only had to go twenty miles!’ she said, looking at me with admiration. ‘But some of them made a great fuss about it and they are four years older than you. What a very grown-up, brave girl you are.’

  Gerda was a good companion and the miles passed swiftly. It was on this stretch that the sole of one of Eva’s sturdy shoes, which had done such good service, broke free from the uppers and flapped open. We had nothing to tie it up with, as everything we possessed – even our hankies – had been taken by the plunderers. So Gerda gave Eva one of her hankies and we ripped it into strips, tied two or three together and bound it round the shoe, like a bandage. Once again, we thanked God for the warm dry weather. If it had been raining or damp on the ground, Eva would have had one very wet foot. Now it looked as if it had been bandaged and I made the others laugh by asking Eva every so often, ‘And how is your shoe doing? Is it getting better? Can we take the bandages off soon?’

  By nightfall we were at a village called Steinbeck and we tried to find somewhere to stay for the night. At one house where we knocked on the door a woman gave us a plate full of boiled cabbage and potatoes, which was very welcome, but she could not offer us accommodation. She would not even allow us into the house to eat, but served us outside and watched us sharing the food, to make sure she got her plate and spoon back. She must have had some bad experiences with the travellers who were passing through.

  We walked on and after a while we spotted a barn some way from a cluster of farm buildings. It was getting dark, so Eva and Gerda decided we would creep in and sleep there. As long as no dog was about to alert anyone in the farmhouse that we were there, we should be undisturbed for the night.

  The barn turned out to be a stable block, with several horses in it. Each had its own stall, but there was an empty one with a plentiful supply of clean hay in it and we settled down very comfortably. The drawback was that we were so terribly hungry.

  ‘Can I eat some hay?’ I asked Eva. ‘The horses seem to like it.’

  ‘No,’ said Eva, though she couldn’t help laughing. ‘It wouldn’t be good for you at all.’

  ‘It doesn’t hurt the horses,’ I countered.

  ‘No, but you’re a little girl, not a little horse. I know you’re hungry, sweetheart, but try not to think about it. Remember – we’ll be at home tomorrow and everything will be all right.’

  We still had a bit of the horrible sausage to chew, which at least kept the worst of my hunger pangs at bay, but I longed for a proper meal with the delicious food that Mutti made for us.

  It was nice settling down to sleep with the snorting of the horses and the occasional stamp of their feet, and the low whispering of Eva and Gerda, who were still chatting quietly. I slept well, much longer than the night before in the woods and without any disturbing images of plunderers invading my dreams.

  Afterwards, Eva wrote in her diary:

  We thought that this would be our last night, but things always work out differently from what we expect.

  When we woke the next morning, we were surprised to see the rafters of the stables were full of bats, hanging upside down to sleep. I had seen bats, as there were plenty flitting around the brick factory as twilight fell, but I had never seen them at rest before. Eva and Gerda were both a little bit afraid of them and were really glad we had not seen them when we crept into the barn. I did not mind them too much, but I was worried about them hanging so precariously and I was sure they would have to drop when they relaxed. Eva explained that they would not fall, but we were all glad to say goodbye to the horses and creep out of the stables.

  When we got outside, we were accosted by the farmer, who was on his way in to attend to the horses. He was as surprised to see us as we were to see him. He was not angry, though, especially as Eva and Gerda both apologised very politely, and assured him we had stolen nothing. He told us to go to the farmhouse and his wife would give us some milk. We were very grateful. She also gave us some bread and butter, and we borrowed a knife to slice thinly the remaining bit of the sausage. It was much more palatable eaten with bread and butter and a glass of milk.

  Before we set off again, the farmer directed us to an outside wash-house and lavatory, which he said we could use. It was obviously provided for his farmworkers, but he had no workers left and was grumbling about how much he had to do himself. It was a big, well set-up farm, with fields of crops stretchin
g into the distance. Inside the wash-house, which was little more than a wooden shed with a standpipe for washing, we found a three-seater toilet: it was a large hole, presumably over a cesspit, with three holes in the wooden board over it and thin partitions between each seat. When you sat there you could hear the people in the other two seats, but you could not see them. We were all still very keen to stick together, so Eva, Gerda and I lined up side by side on this communal toilet.

  Then something very funny happened. One of them, and I don’t know which one, passed wind rather noisily. I was surprised and a little shocked. I had been brought up to believe this was something polite girls never did in the presence of others. But before I could get over my shock, the other one did the same thing. (It must have been due to the boiled cabbage we had eaten the previous evening.)

  ‘Wow, this is obviously what grown-ups do in toilets,’ I thought to myself. ‘It’s OK to do it in here. It must be a very grown-up thing to do.’

  So I tried and I tried and I tried, puffing out my cheeks until they were red, but I could not do it. It must be the only time in my life when I have desperately wanted to blow off, to prove that I was a big girl. I was so proud of what Gerda had said the day before about me being grown-up and felt this was another chance to prove it. Alas, I failed. I didn’t tell the other two about my attempt and failure, but in retrospect I wish I had: it would surely have given them something to laugh about as we set off walking again.

  The end of our journey was at last in sight. We found a new lightness in our step, buoyed up as we realised that we were almost, almost home.

  Eva and Gerda took turns pushing me in the pram when I was too tired to walk and, with our desire to get there forcing us onwards, the miles were eaten up rapidly. We could soon see the outlines of Harburg on the horizon, which quickened our step even more. As Eva and Gerda chatted happily, I wondered what to do first when we all got home. I had no idea where ‘home’ would be, but I was thinking of Mutti and imagining the kind of place she would have for us. She was a wonderful homemaker: she had turned the brick factory house into a warm, welcoming place, so I was sure we would have somewhere comfortable and beautiful. I missed my Charlotte, but I was confident Mutti could make me another doll, exactly the same. I was planning what colour clothes we would make for her, and I wanted her face and hair to be just as Charlotte’s had been. My excitement consumed the last few miles very quickly.

  Two years before the outbreak of the war, Harburg was officially joined with Hamburg into one city, but the two remained separate and always will, because the mighty River Elbe flows between them. As if to reinforce the boundary, the river splits into two channels, the north and south Elbe, and so, effectively, there are two rivers to cross to get from one to the other, with a substantial island in the middle. Although Hamburg is more than seventy miles inland from the estuary of the Elbe, the size of the river is such that it is a major port for seagoing shipping, and both channels of the river are wide, deep and have strong currents. The island in between Harburg and Hamburg is big enough to have a whole town, Wilhelmsburg, on it, which is where Uncle Hermann, Henning’s father, came from.

  As we reached the outskirts of Harburg we said goodbye to Gerda. She was now on her way home as well, and we said merry farewells and wished each other the best. Although we had become good friends, we did not exchange addresses because we did not have one to give her. A lot of brief, transitory, but nonetheless good friendships were made in wartime. Besides, we were so excited that we were within hours of finding our mother that we could not think of much else.

  We made our way through the streets, which were as damaged as any we had seen from the bombing, towards the river. It was only as we approached the bridges which, remarkably, were intact that we realised the crowd had thickened. We were being jostled and pulled along by a throng of people, and when we were a few hundred yards from the river bank, we saw lots of British soldiers.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Eva asked a woman nearby, shuffling forward with us.

  ‘The bridges are closed. The British are not letting us cross,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ cried Eva, her face anxious. ‘Not letting us cross? Wait here, Puppe, I’ll find out what’s happening.’

  She pushed me in the pram to one side of the road and left me there while she struggled through to the soldiers. She spoke to them in her fractured English and they told her that the bridges would probably be open later on, but that they could not let everybody surge across at once for their own safety.

  In fact, it was no wonder that the bridges were closed to civilians. Although the British army had been camped just south-east of Hamburg since 19 April, it wasn’t until the 30th, the day we arrived at the bridges, that they had finally been given orders to cross the Elbe and take the city, and it wasn’t until 1 May that their troops streamed through the streets of Hamburg. They had moved into Harburg only hours before we got there.

  There had been great anxiety in Hamburg for the past few weeks. Hitler had ordered that every city, town and village should be defended to the last man, but it was clear that the writing was on the wall and that any defence would be met by ferocious attack from the Allies, causing more needless death and suffering for the people of a city that had already been ravaged by the bombing.

  Hamburg had never been a Nazi stronghold. Like most big seaports, it was cosmopolitan, outward-looking and there had been a sophisticated anti-Hitler movement in the city, particularly among intelligent teenagers who resented the regimentation and having to obey the orders of the Hitler Youth. Their rebellion took the form of listening and dancing to jazz: jazz was proscribed because it originated among the blacks and, so Hitler believed, the Jews of America. Many of these youngsters were arrested by the Gestapo and sent to concentration camps, but the very fact that the city bred and sheltered them shows that there was not quite the same frenzied admiration for Hitler as in some other cities. Radio Hamburg was the first station to broadcast the news of Hitler’s death, on 1 May, the day after his suicide. The broadcast toed the party line by saying that he ‘died fighting at the head of his troops’, but by this stage of the war most adults were cynical about this. They believed he had died, but not the nature of his death. Only the diehard Nazi believers accepted it.

  Immediately prior to the British taking the city, everyone living there was issued with an extra supply of food: one 21b loaf of bread, a small chunk of bacon, half a pound of smoked sausage. This was on top of their normal rations and they were advised to keep it for ‘the emergency’. They feared this meant they were going to be under siege or even attacked, so there was enormous relief and celebration when it was announced on 1 May that ‘Die Stadt Hamburg wird aufgegeben’. It was to be a peaceful surrender.

  At the bridge entrance we were shepherded into a large hangar, with open sides and a glass roof. I think it must have been a market hall before the war, or a storage space for all the goods brought on and off the large ships that docked there, before they were loaded into proper warehouses. There were lots of people in the hangar but it was not as crammed as the mine we had sheltered in. There was space for everyone, plenty of fresh air and, thankfully, we did not feel claustrophobic. Little family groups had pitched themselves in their own areas on the floor. Eva and I found quite a good spot, from which we could view whatever was happening at the entrance to the bridge, and parked the pram. We found a couple of wooden crates to sit on.

  Looking around, I saw that most of the others were women and children, with a few elderly men. There were hardly any younger men. The first night we spent there was miserable because we had no blankets and the concrete floor was hard and cold. At least I could sit in the pram, but I was so much too big for it that my legs splayed over the end and if I stayed in it for too long I got pains at the backs of my knees. I could not lie down or get comfortable enough to sleep. If we lay together curled up on the floor, the cold seeped through and made us so stiff that it felt as if we had been paralysed. />
  Eva got through the night without sleep and I dozed a bit. We were sitting on the crates, which we pulled close together, and I leaned on her shoulder with her arm round me. It must have been awfully uncomfortable for her, but we were both buoyed up by being so close to the end of our journey. The following day a group of Red Cross volunteers came round with a large handcart, offering hot soup and blankets, and we were able to get a blanket each from them to wrap ourselves in. After the lovely weather we had had for the duration of our walk, it had now turned colder and was raining, but at least we were under cover and on the brink of getting home.

  We expected to get across the bridge that day, but it soon became apparent that the British were not opening it for pedestrians. Military traffic was pouring through to ‘take’ Hamburg.

  The waiting was interminable and I was very bored. At least when we were walking, the scenery constantly changed. Fortunately, there were plenty of other children around of all ages, to help keep me occupied. I never strayed far from Eva: she was worried that if I was not there we might miss our chance if the bridge opened suddenly. I was also very clingy after our experience with the plunderers. But occasionally I would play with some of the children whose families had made camp near us. Somebody had a piece of chalk and drew a large hopscotch pitch on the concrete floor, so we played endless games of hopscotch. One of the lorry drivers cut up some rope that he had used to bind the crates on to the lorry and we made skipping ropes. We had some shorter ones to use individually, but we also had a big one which two of us would turn while the others took turns to jump into it, reciting rhymes to keep the rhythm going. We all became very good at it. For quieter times, someone gave me some string, and Eva and I would play the cat’s cradle game. She always said I was better at it than she was.

  We played word games and ‘I Spy’, and anything we could think of to pass the time. Once the charity soup was gone, there was nothing to eat at all, apart from some radishes off the back of a lorry that was also waiting to cross the bridge. The driver gave some to us all, for which we were very grateful, as they were crisp and fresh in our mouths.