In September she went back to Tabarz, to try to claim the possessions she had left behind. It was another adventure, because the trains were still very erratic and she had to travel part of the way on a milk cart. She met some of the other staff and a few of the girls, but the home was closed and, when she got there, all her things had disappeared.
Then came the big disappointment. All my important and precious belongings, which I wanted to take back to Hamburg, had been stolen. I cannot say what a disappointment that was. But what can you do? what is gone is gone.
Her journey back was dangerous, because Tabarz and the whole of that beautiful Thuringia region had been allocated to the Russians when Germany was divided between the Allies. East Germany was now controlled by the Communists and we had heard many tales of the barbaric behaviour of the Russians. She wrote:
If I had been caught, I would have been in trouble. If ever I meet the person who pinched all my things, they will certainly get to know me.’
Eva returned safely, to our mother’s great relief. She recorded that Mutti said:
‘I don’t care anything for your things, I’m just so glad that the Russians didn’t get you.’
Mutti felt no possessions were worth risking your own safety for. I think the loss of her own beautiful home, and everything in it, when Hamburg was bombed had made her very aware of how unimportant material possessions are. What she valued was the safety of her family and to have us all around her, secure and happy. One day we made a pilgrimage back to the Wandsbecker Chaussee and found the remains of our apartment block. We could even see our cooker, still attached to a chimney breast that stood up, like an accusing finger, in the wreckage. We wandered among the ruins and found shards of Mutti’s lovely Meissen dinner service, white with a gold rim. But the looters had long since taken anything worth salvaging and who can blame them? They had to make homes among the debris, so they naturally took anything they could find that was serviceable. If Mutti was upset by what she saw she didn’t show it. And I know from talking to her in later years, when I was an adult, that she really did not feel the loss of a home acutely, because she had learned what real loss was with the death of Ruth.
Eva next had a job with a dentist, as a receptionist, but this only lasted four weeks because she was ill again. To help with her asthma she joined a walking group of twenty to thirty people who went on regular excursions to the Lüneburg Heath. I was sometimes allowed to go with her, if the walk was not going to be too strenuous. She obviously didn’t mind that we were walking in the same area where we had our devastating encounter with the plunderers, or she wouldn’t have chosen to go. Neither of us had been put off walking by our long expedition. In fact, I used to love those days out, because they reminded me of the nice parts of our adventure, and when we stopped for lunch or tea I got to taste the wonderful heath honey again.
As the long months after the war wore on it seemed less and less likely that my father would ever return. When 1945 became 1946, the trains delivering ex-servicemen and ex-prisoners from the Russian camps slowed to a trickle. Mutti and Eva deliberately talked less and less to me about Father, because they wanted to prepare me for the fact that he might never return. But when they were alone together they kept their memories of him alive and lived day to day in hope that there might still be good news.
On 15 September 1946, a full sixteen months after the end of the war, a letter came. To our astonishment it was from Father – he was alive. There was great celebration in the house. Even Mutti had almost given up hope, as most of the prisoners of war had now returned and all around us there were families happy to be reunited, or mourning the loss of a father or son. Father’s brief message told us that he was in a camp in Mühlhausen in Thuringia, having been sent there from the prisoner-of-war camp in Murmansk, in the very north of the USSR, for medical examination and quarantine before being allowed home. By coincidence, Mühlhausen is only a few miles from Tabarz.
When she heard the news, Mutti cried and laughed, and Eva and I joined in, dancing round our little living room. Father’s fiftieth birthday was on 28 September and we prayed that he would be back by then. I was secretly praying that he would be back for my ninth birthday on the 20 September.
Eva wrote in her diary:
How will he be when he gets back? I don’t really care, as long as he makes it home, even if we have to look after him for a long time. The main thing is that he will be back with us. As long as Mr W. provides us with fruit, vegetables and potatoes, we can make sure we get him back to good health.
It was a real worry: we had seen others return from the Russian prisoner-of-war camps emaciated, with a yellow tinge to their skin, hollow cheeks and strange tufts of hair beginning to reappear on their shaved heads. Getting them back to normal required gradual and careful feeding, and tender loving care. We were all prepared to do anything it took to get Father well, but we were dreading seeing him in that condition.
One afternoon, on 25 September, I was playing in the bedroom I shared with Eva at the back of our house when a strange man peered in through the window at me. I ran out of the room, shouting, ‘Mutti, Mutti, there is a man coming here! There is a man in our garden!’
I really did not recognise my father. I was so young and had not seen him for two years, and he was thin and changed. But Mutti knew who it must be. She gasped and ran out of the door to fling herself into his arms, and they held each other for ages before he hugged me. ‘Hello, Bärbel,’ he said, smiling and kissing me. ‘Do you remember your old father?’
Now I did, and I cried too, so happy to see my father home with us. He sat with Mutti and me in the sitting room, telling us what had happened to him. Then we heard Eva’s footsteps coming up the path. Father stood up and as she came into the room she saw him and gasped with astonishment. Without a word, he took Eva into his arms and hugged her and hugged her. None of us could speak, we all had tears streaming down our faces, just as I have now when I remember it.
I couldn’t imagine anything better than all of us being back together again.
Father was very, very thin, but not in as bad shape as some other survivors. He never talked very much about what he had seen and endured in the camp, but we know he witnessed the death of many friends. He told us that when he was first taken to the camp he lied and told the Russians he had been in the catering corps. This probably saved his life, because they put him to work in the kitchens. After his hand was injured in the First World War, a physiotherapist told him to exercise it by kneading bread, so he was used to that. (I remember that he used to make delicious plum bread in the Wandsbecker Chaussee.) The rest of the cooking involved boiling vegetables, which was not difficult, so his lack of catering skills was never noticed. The kitchens were the warmest place in the camp and the kitchen staff had access to supplies, which they could use to help other prisoners. So although he was half starved, he was better off than most. He gave me a silver knife, a gift from another prisoner who was grateful for some extra food Father had managed to smuggle to him. I still have it and I use it every day. Murmansk, where he was imprisoned, is so far north that it is inside the Arctic Circle. He told me it was dark for almost the whole day and colder than he could have ever imagined.
We told Father all about our long walk, and he was astonished and very proud of our achievement. We often talked of the adventures we had had along the way, especially the funny bits. We did not speak of the dark and dangerous parts of our story, focusing only on the kindness and generosity of the many people we had met.
Father’s recovery was slow but steady. I can remember him once going out for a walk, leaning on Mutti for support. We went to the restaurant in the centre of Hammer Park, which was run by a family Mutti had got to know quite well. (The father, before his marriage, had been the valet of Pope Pius XII.) My parents sat there and drank shandy together. Then Father went to the counter and said, ‘Twenty cigarettes, please.’
The girl behind the counter looked at him in astonishment.
‘Waldi,’ said my mother gently, ‘cigarettes are on ration. They are vastly expensive. I doubt you will be able to afford twenty of them!’
In fact, he could only afford two. They were also terrible, not at all like the ones they were used to smoking before the war. Father had no idea.
Before long, he started growing tobacco plants in our garden and I can still see the leaves strung up and hanging in our shed to dry out, before they were made into ‘tobacco’ and rolled into cigarettes.
At that time cigarettes were an unofficial currency. The British soldiers got bigger rations of them than the Germans and they would exchange them: twenty cigarettes for a watch, fifty for a camera and so on. Soap was also very scarce, and again the troops had more and could barter with it.
All food was on ration and things were very difficult for those first two winters after the war. Fuel ran out, although we were lucky and could collect branches fallen from the park trees. When the park wardens cut down a tree they would not bother with the roots, so Father and some of the other men would dig them out, which was back-breaking work. But it was worth it once they dried them out and could use them for fuel. In some areas of the city all the trees were cut down for burning. I was blissfully unaware of all these privations, because as a child I was always given a full plate of food. Other people in my family probably went hungry to make sure I was well fed, because I was the only one who was still growing. And because my mother was such a good cook, she was very inventive and found lots of ways of making our meagre rations appetising.
While we were establishing ourselves in the little house in Hammer Park, the rest of our family were also finding their feet back in Hamburg. Because they were old, Opa and Omi, my grandparents, were found an apartment quickly. It was close to a railway station, so when we visited them I loved being allowed to run on ahead and press the bell. I remember there was a huge mahogany chest of drawers in the bedroom (donated, probably, by one of our relatives) and there was a small drawer at the top where Opa saved his rations of sweets and chocolates for when we visited. He also stored apples in tissue paper in there and the wonderful smell took me back to the cellar in Wiedersdorf.
Aunt Irma and Henning stayed at first with relatives, Uncle Hans and Aunt Erika, cousins to my mother and her sisters. They were rather posh; they spoke with a plum in their mouths and I was in awe of them. Uncle Hans was a director of a big shipping company and because they lived in the outer suburbs their beautiful house was unscathed. Then, when Aunt Irma’s husband Hermann returned from the war, they found a flat on the Elbchaussee, an elegant road that runs along the bank of the Elbe, and a place favoured by the rich and famous. They had a steep flight of steps outside their apartment leading down to the river bank, which we children called the Himmelsleiter, the staircase to heaven. We used to tear up and down the steps, while our mothers grumbled about how many there were and how long it took them to climb.
I can’t remember where Aunt Hilda lived temporarily with Thekla, Ulrich and Volker, but after they were reunited with Uncle Willi, they built their own house on the plot of land that was their share of my grandfather’s lottery win. So it had been a very wise choice after all, now that my mother’s china was smashed and Aunt Irma’s jewellery had long since been stolen in all the looting. They worked hard on it and built their house themselves. It must be very satisfying for my cousin Thekla, who still lives there, to know that she helped build her own home.
Uncle Willi was a very practical man, who could tackle anything, a real jack of all trades. He was an amateur boxer and the family lived very close to the famous German world champion heavyweight, Max Schmeling, who was a friend. Uncle Willi and Max Schmeling even sparred together. (Max Schmeling outlived Uncle Willi by many years, dying in 2005 at the age of ninety-nine.) We would sometimes be allowed to go to the gym to see Uncle Willi in the ring and those were always very exciting days. Sadly, Uncle Willi died early, in 1959, when he was only fifty-seven years old.
Despite everything they had suffered during the war, the adults focused on getting back to a normal life, for themselves but, most of all, for us, the children. Before the war the family had always held literary evenings once a month, which they took it in turn to host. Everyone was expected to read something: a poem or an excerpt from a book, and then talk about it. Sometimes it would be a song, especially for us little ones. It was a lovely tradition and it kept the family very close, and as soon as we all had our own homes it started again.
There were other evenings when the adults played cards. We children, Volker, Henning and I, used to hope that Uncle Hermann would win, because he always gave his winnings to us and it was, in our terms, quite a lot of money. He was a seafaring engineer and after the war he worked on whaling ships. We had some stunning photographs of him and his crewmates, with icicles hanging from their eyebrows and moustaches. He allowed me to take the photographs to school and do a presentation for my classmates about his life at sea.
But usually the card games were won by Father, who had a very sharp mind and could easily work out which cards had already been played. When he was sufficiently recovered, he started work again for the railways, but now he had a desk job in Hamburg, without any travelling. He stayed there until he got his pension.
Four months after Father’s return, things began to look up for Eva. She and two friends used to visit a temporary military hospital in a collection of Nissen huts in Harburg, to read to soldiers who were recovering from war injuries, or to write letters for those too disabled to do it themselves. It was there, on 17 January 1947, as her diary records, that she met Kurt, who came originally from the German part of Romania, Siebenbürgen. He had not been injured, but he was so malnourished that he needed care and convalescence.
Kurt and Eva fell deeply in love and stayed that way until Eva’s death in 1990. Everything she had written in her diary, all that poignant longing for a man to love and be with and look after, came true for Eva. She and Kurt were so happy together. When he was transferred for more convalescence to a home at St Andreasberg, in the beautiful Hartz mountains, she travelled there to see him.
It did not take them long to realise their feelings for each other and she wrote:
I love kurt so much, I cannot imagine being away from him.
She made her last diary entry in April 1947. It read:
Happiness and sunshine have finally come my way.
They were married almost a year after they met, on 29 November 1947. It was hugely exciting for me, because I was the bridesmaid. I had what I would now think was a strange dress, but at the time I thought it was the most beautiful creation ever made. We were sent care parcels from Britain and the USA, and in them we sometimes received material. My mother was a brilliant needlewoman and she made me an off-white satin top, with long sleeves, beautifully smocked. There was not enough fabric for the skirt, so she made that in light-blue patterned satin. I was so thrilled with it that I preened and twirled like a catwalk model.
Eva had a traditional white wedding dress that the daughter of one of mother’s cousins had worn, and with a few small alterations it fitted her perfectly.
It was a beautiful November day when they married, cold but bright and sunny. The whole family came to celebrate Eva’s wedding. They had their legal marriage ceremony in a register office, then went to church for a blessing. Afterwards, we walked through Hammer Park in a little procession to the restaurant, where we had a lovely meal. We toasted the happy couple with Sekt, which is German champagne, and even I was allowed a small glass. It was a day of great laughter and happiness, because we all loved Kurt almost as much as Eva did and were so happy he was to be a part of our family.
Eva’s and Kurt’s first home was in the cellar of a bombed-out house in a road opposite Hammer Park. The entrance door to the cellar was still there and there were steps down into it. The walls and ceiling were sound, although our father was always afraid the ruins would collapse on top of them, and when it rained they ha
d to put buckets and bowls around the place to catch the drips. There were no windows, but they made it into a beautiful home and I used to love going there. I had my own little room, which I was very proud of. One night I woke up and, half awake and half asleep, went looking for the toilet. Eva found me trying to climb on top of a chest of drawers. I remember her taking hold of me, shaking me gently and saying, ‘Wake up, Puppe, darling,’ which is what she always used to say when she needed to get me up after the air raid warnings during our walk.
When Eva became pregnant, she and Kurt decided the cellar was not a good place to bring up a baby. They rented an apartment in Flottbek, part of a large villa with beautiful gardens. Kurt worked for a very upmarket shop in Othmarschen, a posh area of Hamburg. It sold crockery, pots, pans and all sorts of other things. Kurt could do everything: he was an electrician, a plumber and a handyman.
Later they bought a big house in the same area, with help from Kurt’s employers, a lovely couple who had lost their own sons in the war and who treated Kurt like a surrogate son. It was big enough for them to let out rooms to students in later years.
Kurt and Eva were so right together. As a child I always felt that if I could find a husband as good as Kurt I would be happy. He could play the accordion by ear, which impressed me greatly at that age. When their first daughter, Angelika, was born in 1948 Eva was only seven months pregnant and the baby weighed two pounds. She was so small that I had her baby clothes afterwards for my dolls. Gunda, their second daughter, was born three years later.
Although my mother could make clothes out of any scraps of material, and adapt and alter things to fit us, shoes were a real problem. There were none to be had, for love nor money. Eva’s Kurt came to our rescue. He would buy large sheets of compressed rubber, which he cut to the size of our feet, using our old shoes as a template. He even added a small heel at the back. Then he punched holes round the edges and threaded through strips of leather, cut from old coats. These went across our feet, and one strip went round our ankles and fastened with a buckle. I have a photograph of myself, taken in 1948, sitting on the wall outside my high school wearing them – I always sat on the wall outside waiting for my best friends to arrive before lessons. Not many years ago, on holiday in the Canary Islands, I fell into conversation with an elderly German couple who had lived opposite the high school in Hamburg. They knew Aunt Käte, who lived nearby. They remembered the girl with fair curly hair who sat on the wall with her distinctive sandals. It is, as I have often had occasion to observe, a small world.
Escape Page 21
