Escape

by Barbie Probert-Wright

  The next day, after we had endured another uncomfortable night, the British started opening the bridge for pedestrians but only in short bursts, no more than half an hour a time.

  ‘Now we will definitely get across,’ said Eva confidently and every time there was any sign of movement among the soldiers or near the bridge we joined the general surge forward to cross. But the bridge was opened for such short periods that we never got through and that night we had to settle down to sleep yet again, wrapped in our blankets, on the hard floor. At least, as Eva said, we did not need to worry about anybody stealing our possessions, as we had none.

  We stayed in the hangar for eight whole days and nights. It was truly terrible to be able to look across the river at the bulk of Hamburg, but not be able to get there. We felt we could almost see Mutti, as if we could just reach out and touch her, yet there was this huge barrier between us. Eva and I sang a song we knew about a prince and a princess who lived on opposite sides of a big lake that was very deep. They loved each other very much, but could not get to each other. It summed up how we felt about not getting to Mutti.

  Es waren zwei Königskinder

  Die hatten einander so lieb

  Sie konnten zusammen nicht kommen

  Denn das Wasser war viel zu tief.

  (There were a prince and a princess

  Who loved each other very much

  But they could not meet up

  Because the water was too deep.)

  Throughout this time, apart from occasional cups of soup or hot drinks, we had nothing except radishes and water. Radishes, radishes, radishes. I don’t eat them nowadays, although when I see a beautiful bunch in the supermarket I am sometimes tempted. But whenever I do have them they repeat on me. I think they are trying to remind me that once upon a time they saved my life.

  These were the days of the most acute hunger. Everyone was conserving their own pathetic rations, so there was nothing to share with us. The soldiers could not give out food: they had very little spare for refugees and if they gave to one person they would be besieged by hundreds. There was a constant gnawing in my belly, as though there were an animal inside trying to eat its way out. All Eva could do was try to distract me. When the Red Cross workers appeared, nobody rushed to get their supplies: it was almost as if everyone was too exhausted, too disappointed and too determined not to miss out if the bridge suddenly opened, or risk losing their good places in the hangar. The women patiently came round to us and, seeing how skinny I was, they sometimes gave me a double portion of soup.

  At first, the hunger kept me awake, but after that I was so tired I slept anyway. There were no washing facilities, but there were some crude lavatories, which I suppose were normally used by the dock workers. I hated having to go to them. I was brought up never to sit down on any toilet seat except our own, in case I picked up germs, so I was used to hovering above the seat. But these toilets were very unpleasant, with so many people using them. Because I was eating so little, I did not need to go as often as normal, which was a blessing in disguise, I suppose.

  One day Eva said, ‘I really can’t take much more of this. I’m going to try to get us to the front of the line so that we will definitely get across when they next open the bridge. Watch this.’

  She took one of our blankets, stuffed it up inside her blouse and went up to the British soldiers who were guarding the bridge. Then she tried to say in English, ‘I am expecting a baby.’ But she didn’t know the English word ‘expecting’ and the German is ‘Ich bekomme ein Kind’. Translating this literally, Eva said, in her heavily accented English, ‘I become a child.’

  The soldiers laughed. They didn’t believe in her improbably shaped belly at all and thought her English very funny. Unfortunately, giving them a laugh was not enough to secure preferential treatment.

  Sometimes we would be approached by men who appeared in the hangar offering to take us over by small boat under cover of darkness. They wanted money to make the trip and we had none since our encounter with the plunderers. But even if we had, Eva said we would not have risked it. The British were shooting anything that moved on the water at night, as they were still afraid there would be more resistance, even though the war was over, all but the signing of the surrender. Not only that but the crossing would be dangerous because of the currents, although these men claimed to be very familiar with the river.

  The British troops were not supposed to fraternise with the Germans, but the soldiers we spoke to were always courteous and helpful. I don’t think they knew when the bridge would be opened, as the commands came from above, so they were not being difficult when they said they could not tell us. There was some fraternisation going on, that’s for sure. We saw German girls in lovely, bright, thin summer dresses, laughing and flirting with the soldiers, sometimes walking along arm in arm with them. Some of the people in the hangar tut-tutted about it and said the girls ought to behave with more restraint. But I think they were just young people, from both sides of the war, who had suffered a great deal and were now enjoying a bit of light relief. It did no harm.

  The longer we stayed there, the more our small ‘refugee camp’ developed its own routines. Some of the women were particularly good at entertaining us children, and there would be story groups for the little ones and perhaps someone would juggle with some stones, or do conjuring tricks to amuse us. Charades became a popular diversion, and I envied the women and children who seemed to have a natural ability for the acting involved.

  There was no routine, though, to the bridge opening. It could be at any time and it rarely lasted for more than half an hour, so we all stayed on constant tenterhooks. The Germans are not good at queuing, so whenever it opened we all pushed forward impatiently, trying to be the ones who got across. The sentries controlled it well, so there was no riot or fighting, but if you didn’t get through, there was nothing to do but to go back and wait again. This happened a few times, but we always went back to our same spot in the hangar: it was as if everybody, after the confusion of the first day or two, respected everybody else’s claim to their bit of territory.

  On the eighth day, without any notice as usual, the soldiers suddenly announced that the bridge was open. Scooping our blankets into the pram, we dashed forward with the rest. Surely, at last, our turn had come …

  I had grown so accustomed to being turned away that I could hardly believe it when Eva and I were ushered forward, past the barrier we had been longing to cross for over a week, to find ourselves actually on the south bridge. We laughed with delight as we realised that we were at last standing above the great river that had divided us from everything we yearned for. We pushed our pram across cheerfully, finally getting nearer and nearer to Mutti, walking on the pavements, as a steady stream of traffic, military vehicles and lorries with supplies for the city, edged bumper-to-bumper along the road.

  Looking over the parapet of the bridge, I could see the huge ships harboured at Hamburg. ‘They are as big as apartment blocks!’ I cried in surprise. I had never imagined that ships could be so vast.

  ‘Oh, Puppe,’ breathed Eva, looking ahead to the island that lay between us and the city of Hamburg itself. ‘We’re nearly home.’

  But when we reached Wilhelmsburg, the town on the island between the south and north bridges, there was yet another disappointment. The north bridge was closed. We were despairing: would we have to wait another eight days? How could we bear it? We didn’t even have the radish man to keep us supplied. We were shepherded into another hangar with yet more crowds all waiting to cross the north bridge.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Eva said to me, as gently as she could. ‘We will probably not get home to Mutti tonight. But with luck, we’ll cross the bridge tomorrow. And do you know what? I’ve had a brilliant idea. Uncle Hermann’s relatives live here in Wilhelmsburg and I think I remember the address. We will go and find them and I’m sure that they will give us a meal and somewhere to sleep.’

  When she had established that we cer
tainly would not be allowed to continue crossing the river that day, Eva decided we should definitely set out to the Villa Cohrs in Dratelnstrasse, where she remembered visiting Uncle Hermann’s family. We asked directions from a local person and off we went.

  We made our way through devastated streets to the address Eva remembered and as we walked along the road towards it we already knew the worst: the house had been partly demolished, with the upper storey completely gone, and there was nobody there.

  But luck, once again, was with us. The family’s neighbours were there, living in a cellar under their ruined apartment block. They told us that the family had escaped unhurt, but they did not know where they had gone. Then they invited us in and made us very welcome. Most large apartment blocks in Germany have big cellars, which are divided into rooms for each family, with locks on the door so that they can be used to store surplus furniture, bikes and so on. This couple had made their home in their cellar room and there were other people living in the other rooms. We were given some food, which we devoured gratefully, and were invited to lie down on their beds for a rest. We both slept for a couple of hours and woke as daylight began to wane.

  We declined their offers to let us stay the night. They really had no room, with four of them crammed into a cellar. And besides, we wanted to get back to the north bridge, because we needed to be there when it was opened. We did not want to risk missing it.

  We spent a night in the hangar by the north bridge, hopelessly expecting to have to wait for many more days before we could cross, just as we had before. But to our great delight we were ushered over the bridge without too much trouble that very day. Because our arrival had coincided with the British taking control of the city, it had taken ten days in all just to cross the River Elbe.

  Now we were truly going home.

  17

  Our Dear Mutti

  You cannot imagine the joy we felt when we pushed the pram on to the far side of the north bridge, into Hamburg. We were both very weak with fatigue and hunger, but despite this we managed to sing, and I was happy to walk, to spare Eva the effort of pushing me in the pram.

  We knew where to go. Our mother had told us in her letter that when we got to Hamburg we should make for Aunt Käte’s house. Aunt Käte was not a blood relative, she was Mutti’s best friend from her days at the Froebel Institute. We knew her well and even if Mutti was not living with her, Aunt Käte would know where she was. We turned right as we left the bridge and headed towards her home in Caspar Voght Strasse.

  It took us about two and a half hours of walking through streets which, although the debris had been cleared from them, looked alien without houses and offices and shops edging them. They lacked all definition. Whole areas of the city were flat, all landmarks gone. Temporary shelters and homes had sprung up in many places, but some districts looked as though they had been abandoned completely, the landscape bleak and bare. Sometimes a street looked complete, until I realised it was only the façades of the buildings that stood with nothing left behind them, like a film set. In other streets the houses were only half demolished, and people were living in the ground floors and cellars, always risking the crash of unsupported masonry on themselves and their makeshift homes. Some of the smaller buildings looked as if their roofs had been clawed by giant trolls. There were unexpected craters we had to skirt round, some of them filled with water. Charred debris lay everywhere.

  As we walked, Eva told me what had once existed in the streets we passed through. She named churches and schools and shopping streets, which had gone for ever, or were unrecognisable. For me, too young to remember more than my own limited landscape of home, kindergarten and friends’ houses, this was not the emotional journey that it was for Eva, as she surveyed the wreckage of the city she had grown up in and had assumed to be permanent and indestructible.

  And yet, in the two years since the bombers had devastated it, Hamburg had begun to come to life again. With the British daytime curfew lifted, there were people going about their business and children playing in what must have been the biggest adventure playground ever, the ruins. We saw a mother calling for her children by name in what looked like a deserted street, until one by one three dirty urchins appeared from inside the labyrinth of broken buildings, and were scolded and taken off for their meal. In the busier areas we saw women and girls dressed well, with clean dresses and neat hair bound up on their head in bright scarves, and we tugged self-consciously at our own tattered and dirty clothes. We saw squads of men working on the ruins, starting the huge clearing-up process that would turn Hamburg into the modern, beautiful city that it is today. We saw washing lines stretched across bomb sites, white towels and nappies fluttering in the spring breeze, reminding us of all the makeshift white ‘surrender’ flags we had seen draped from the windows in the towns and villages we had walked through.

  The sights, sounds and smells of the city were plenty of distraction for us as we walked, and our pent-up excitement kept us going. We had had two cruel disappointments before: one short, sharp one at Wiedersdorf, and another drawn-out, daily, torturous one at the bridges, as every day turned into another long wait. But now, although Eva was trying to calm me down and prepare me for more delays, neither of us could think of any reason why we would not be with Mutti very, very soon.

  As we neared Aunt Kate’s street, our hearts were pounding. Eva clasped my hand tightly, as if to fortify me against yet another disappointment. We had suffered so much in our long march to reach our mother. We needed to see her so badly that it was a physical ache. We’d hoped so much so many times before, surely now we wouldn’t be let down …

  ‘Come on, Puppe,’ said Eva, her hand trembling slightly, as we turned into the street and began to walk down it. The road was untouched by the bombing, the small, neat bungalows intact. Which one was Aunt Käte’s? Yes, things felt familiar; now we remembered. We could see her house. It was getting closer and closer.

  Then, as we approached, I caught a glimpse of two heads and two backs bent low. Two women were crouching in the garden weeding. And I recognised both of them immediately, especially the beautiful curls of the woman on the left. It was my Mutti. At last I could see her.

  Excitement and longing coursed through me. I pulled free of Eva’s grasp and started running. I ran as fast as my tired, skinny little legs could carry me, my sore feet slapping on the pavement as I went.

  ‘Mutti! Mutti!’ I cried, breathless and panting, my heart pounding.

  Slowly, she raised her head and looked up. For a moment she hesitated and frowned, as if she could not believe what she was seeing and thought it must be some mistake. Then, as joyful astonishment covered her face, she sprang up and ran towards us shouting, ‘My Bärbel! Oh, my Eva!’

  I bolted across the garden to her, crushing rows of asparagus as I flung myself straight into her open arms. Eva, finally able to abandon the pram, ran right behind me.

  There are no words to describe the next few moments. The feeling of being close again to my mother was something I can never forget. She kissed my head and face as she wept and laughed in turn.

  ‘My little girls! My babies. You’re home. Thank God,’ she cried, welcoming Eva into her arms as well. Both of us were laughing and crying, hugging her and refusing to let go until we remembered Aunt Käte, broke off to hug her too and then returned to Mutti’s trembling arms.

  Eva wrote in her diary:

  The joy of seeing each other was huge. After we had talked and talked and cuddled and kissed and talked and talked and eaten we just all fell asleep. I don’t know how long we slept, but it was lovely.

  At last we were home.

  For Mutti, the last few weeks had been agonising, with no news from us or from my father. She had already lost Ruth and now she didn’t know whether she would ever see the rest of her family again. For her, the loss of one daughter had been insufferable and had made her very ill; I don’t know how she would have coped if she had lost both of us, too. She had been trying to prep
are herself for never seeing us again, so when she heard me calling her she couldn’t believe at first that she was hearing correctly. But when she saw my fair head bobbing at speed across the garden, her relief and joy were immeasurable.

  The decision to leave Wiedersdorf for Hamburg had been very difficult for Mutti. The others, our grandparents, Aunt Irma, Aunt Hilda, Volker and Henning, were going because they wanted to get back to the city before it was occupied by the British. They were afraid that after it was invaded they might not be allowed in, and after our experience with the long walk and the interminable waiting at the bridges we could see it would have been very difficult for them, particularly my elderly grandparents. So, after much agonising, Mutti had decided to go with them, while there was still a train to travel on. Her decision had cost her many sleepless nights, when she lay awake terrified that we had fallen into the hands of the enemy.

  Later, when we gave Mutti and Aunt Käte a brief history of our adventures. They listened with tears running down their faces and they could not stop hugging and touching us.

  Aunt Käte’s bungalow was small and she had her own two children, Anne, who was Eva’s age, and Hansi, who was about sixteen, back at home, both safely returned from their war work. Her husband was still away. So the three of us shared one room, with Mutti and me sleeping in the bed together and Eva on a fold-up bed. Mutti told me later that throughout that first night she kept waking and looking at us, cuddling me gently so that she didn’t wake me, but satisfying her own need to hold me and reassure herself that it was not a dream.

  We slept very late, until the following afternoon, enjoying the most peaceful sleep we’d had since Tabarz. When we woke, Mutti and Aunt Käte had a hot bath ready. They plopped me in and scrubbed and scrubbed at me until I thought they were going to take my skin off. We hadn’t had a proper wash for ten days, so I’m sure I was smelly and filthy, but nobody cared when we were reunited. I was not even in trouble for trampling the asparagus patch, which normally would have been a real crime, as it takes such a long time to establish.