大象传媒

On the German side.

Hamburg had been horrifically bombed in July 1943, and as there were none of the amenities of civilisation left, no running water, no electricity, no transport system and very few buildings left standing, schools were evacuated to safer places in rural Germany. In October 1943 the upper classes of our grammar school, all girls between fifteen and eighteen years old, were accommodated in a former convalescent home near a village in Bavaria. Early in April 1945, when the war was nearing its end, we had been hearing the sounds of shooting, bombing, shelling and just lately the terrific explosions when bridges over the Danube were blown.
There was an SS unit entrenched in the woods behind our buildings. When they were withdrawn, taking the ammunition truck, which had frighteningly been parked outside our gates, with them, our teachers found supplies of tinned food left behind by the soldiers in the woods. We had to go out in the middle of the night to collect them and get them back to our building. As the fighting got ever nearer we spent many hours in the cellar, emergency supplies of food and spare clothing ready packed. Then things went quiet and we were just waiting for what might be either Americans or Russians to find the school. When finally a jeep drew up in the courtyard we were told to go to our dormitories, but some of us peeped furtively over the banisters instead. Two G.I.s, one black, one white, in unbelievably sloppy outfits, nothing like our own soldiers鈥� correct uniforms, entered the hall and conversed briefly with our head teacher. They left soon after. Our premises were inspected a few days later, but no further visits were made. No food supplies had been getting through to our school of 100 girls and eight teachers. Our numbers had by then increased to about 200, as we had taken in pupils and teachers who had fled from their schools further east before the advancing Russians. When food became so short we were near to starving, our head teacher had to find places with farmers for us where in return for a lot of hard work we were given meals and beds to sleep in. Hard work on the farms because all able-bodied men had long been conscripted to the various fronts, and the Poles who had been forced to replace them had left after the liberation.. Long before the Americans ever got to us we were told to wear our unflattering track suits whenever we went outside: 鈥淭hose soldiers may not have seen any women for months, and you don鈥檛 want them to see your legs.鈥�
Once we started working on the farms we wore our normal clothes again.
American soldiers in jeeps often drove through the villages, but they just smiled when they saw us and none of us were ever harmed. That was not what we had been led to believe, but we realised how lucky we had been when stories from Russian occupied zone reached us.
The Americans had arrived on the ninth of April, but we only got back to Hamburg and a very civilised British occupation on the twenty-first of July.

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