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In 1931 I was born of German parents in Hindenburg (now Zarbze) in Upper Silesia when that whole region was German and had been so for several centuries. After living a few years further west in Saxony, our family moved back to Silesia, to its capital city Breslau (now Wroclaw) in April 1939. We made so many moves because my father, a structural engineer, was building bridges for the Autobahn and he had to live near the building sites in order to be able to supervise the construction.

Already, before this latest move, I remember that as far back as 1938 at least, if not earlier we had ‘black out’ drills, when all the windows had to be covered in strong black paper so as not to permit any light to shine to the outside and black shades were put over the light fittings. Also, there were supplies of gasmasks in the house. There was much talk of war and we children were quite excited at the prospect. When we met at school on the Monday morning after that fateful Sunday, 3rd September, when war had been declared, we 8year olds danced around the classroom. Had not the day of reckoning come, when our beloved Führer, whose picture hung in every classroom and who we greeted in the morning with ‘Heil Hitler’, would lead us to victory over those who had imposed on us the unjust Treaty of Versaille?

In the beginning nothing much changed except that food started to be rationed. So far east, we lived far from the immediate dangers of war. But young as we were, we did our bit for the war effort. As we had a mature mulberry hedge growing around our playground, our school was given the task to raise silkworms. Large trays were set up at the back of the class which we covered with leaves from the hedge. After the eggs had hatched it was our duty to feed the worms until they had grown big and fat and spun their cocoons. These were then sent off to be sterilized, unravelled and woven into silk for parachutes. We also got busy going around the doors of our neighbourhood to collect materials for recycling — iron, aluminium, rags, bones, bottles and paper. The school acted as the collection point with those bringing in the most being awarded merits. We also were taught which wild plants had both nutritional and medicinal value, how and when to collect and dry them. These too, when ready, were brought to the school.
We had regular weeks of collections for charitable purposes organised through the Hitler Youth, to which all of us had to belong. To encourage people to donate we sold themed series of badges, usually made up of twelve different pieces. Many of these badges were beautifully crafted in wood or ceramic and had all manner of themes; familiar characters from fairy tales or animal families, birds and flowers. We wore our uniform when selling on the street or at the doors and felt very proud. All these activities did not leave us much time to just hang around and get into mischief. In our spare time we read of the victorious exploits and conquests of our brave soldiers published in illustrated, cheap, thin booklets.

Slowly life changed. We heard the reports of the troops’ victories, but also of bombing in the west and eventually our troops losing ground. At midday dinner time we had to keep quiet while my parents listened intently to the news over the crackling radio. On the wall of my father’s study hung a large map of the world with pins stuck in with differently coloured heads, to mark the positions of our armies and those of the allies.
Gradually over the months and years, our city of around 600,000 inhabitants had swelled to over a million with people bombed out of their homes in the cities of the west seeking refuge in our safer area. Every second school building was taken over and adapted to serve as a military hospital for the many wounded soldiers, many of whom we watched hobbling along the street with their crutches and amputee’s stumps. Occasionally we went into the hospitals to sing to the wounded soldiers clad in our Hitler Youth uniforms and brought them flowers and rare titbits. The remaining school buildings were shared by two different schools on a fortnightly turnaround rota of morning or afternoon school. This worked out quite well as schools in Germany normally taught only on half days, there were six consecutive lessons at most each day. Returning from school in the evening it was fun walking home in the dark with the moon and stars so clearly visible in the unlit city and gave me many an opportunity to gaze at them in awe.

It never occurred to me to question what had happened to the people I had seen on the streets with their yellow six pointed star sewn to their outer garments. They had just slowly diminished in number.

Our food rations grew ever smaller. I cannot remember ever eating my fill for a long time. We learnt to find food wherever we could and learnt what in wild nature was edible. My brother, older than I by four years, who attended the local boys grammar school, was put into uniform at barely sixteen years old. He, along with his whole class at school were commandeered to live in barracks at the edge of the city where they learnt to operate anti aircraft guns while studying for the Abitur, the final exam in the German school system.

As the Russian troops fought their way towards Germany in the east after their victory at Stalingrad early in 1943 and the Americans and British were advancing up north in Italy, we gradually came within reach of the aircraft of the day so became vulnerable to attack from the skies. Therefore, in April 1944 my school was evacuated out of the city into the small market town Oels (Oleśnica) east of Breslau. Each child was placed with a host family and we continued our education in one of the local school buildings. Not long after that my father found a place of relative safety in the Sudeten mountains for my stepmother and my two youngest brothers. The family was now well and truly broken up with my older brother living in barracks out of town and my father working away from home most of the time. My teenage sister, who had to cut her schooling short and stay in the city to work in the munitions factory, went to live with my aunt and grandmother in the northern district of Breslau in order not be on her own in a large flat in the south of the city.

Evacuation offered me a break from an unhappy situation as I did not particularly want a stepmother and did not get on very well with her. My host mother was a young lawyer’s wife with two very young children whose husband was serving in the German forces in France. Her parents had a local grocer’s shop and during out of school hours I enjoyed helping with the time consuming task of sticking the stamps cut out of ration books onto sheets of paper as prescribed by the authorities. Helping out behind the counter was an exciting experience. In those days customers stood by the counter and asked for the goods they wanted, which then had to be found from all corners of the shop and presented in front of them to be reckoned up and paid for in cash. With my 13 years I felt so grown up doing this work, although I do not remember working very hard at school!

During the lazy summer days spent by the pool I heard mutterings of people talking in low voices about the war, but it did not perturb me. Life was sweet. I liked Frau Schubert, my beautiful and kind host mother, who was glad of the help I was able to give her in coping with her young children, and all the new experiences the life in this small provincial town had to offer.

My parents had arranged that I should join them for Christmas 1944 in the Sudeten mouintains. Petersdorf was beautiful in a permanent coat of snow. Every morning I had to walk a mile or more down to the village to buy milk and other essentials. When work was done I enjoyed the local sledding run. It took at least half an hour to walk up to the start of the run, which was on the road near the top of a mountain path where a bridge crossed a railway line. Beginning with a tight ‘S’ curve, it then led straight down towards the middle of a village. One had to gather enough speed to be able to keep up the momentum to negotiate the centre of the village, which was flat and then continue further down towards another sharp bend to the left near a brook and on downwards towards the main road. In those days there was hardly any traffic on those roads. The bends were more dangerous, for if one did not take them well one could shoot off into the rough field or land in the water. One day I took my brother and we lost control on the totally iced up top ‘S’ bend and knocked ourselves unconscious when we careered at high speed into a telegraph pole. After recovering consciousness, I took my younger brother to a local Red Cross station to have a deep cut to his cheek attended to. This happened on Boxing Day 1944 and my parents were not very pleased. He needed to be taken to the doctor’s surgery on foot a long way off in a village beyond, but all seemed well. By New Years Eve, after my father left for work again, we trekked through a snow storm with my two young brothers on the sled across the mountain to enjoy the rare treat of eating food in a restaurant. The following morning the sun shone brightly when I had to go down for my daily errand to the village through more than a foot of newly fallen snow, which nobody had yet stepped on all the way. It was quite hard to pull the sled through the soft downy surface but a wondrous experience.

Some days later my first winter holiday in the mountains came to an end and I had to return to Oels (Oleśnica) to go back to school. We had hardly settled into the new term when our teachers gravely informed us that we all had to return to our families. My father suddenly arrived and there was some consultation with my host mother. In the short time since my departure from the mountain paradise, as I saw it, my youngest brother had contracted scarlet fever and it was most unwise for me to go back there as I had not had this highly infectious and dangerous disease before and therefore was at risk. It was finally decided that, in spite of the dangers, I should join my sister at my grandmother’s house in Breslau. It was all a bit bewildering. We children were not being told very much of what was happening. There was talk of the Russians coming. We had heard fearsome tales of the Russians in the past.

The cold in January grew bitterer by the day but I was glad to be with my capable aunt. The city was being prepared for battle, with detonators being fixed to the bridges over the river Oder. My Grandmother left a few days after I arrived in the city. She and my cousin, a young woman with a baby daughter, had been ordered to be taken out of the city on one of the first evacuation transports. My aunt was busy sewing rucksacks for my sister and myself out of some strong curtaining she had in the house while we two girls went to our parents flat to hide the table silver and other valuables in the pile of coke in the cellar to be retrieved when we would come back after the fighting was over. After eating our fill on some of the bottled fruit stored in the cellar and collecting some things, like photographs, which we wanted to take with us we locked the front door and left. With artillery fire audible in the distance but still only an occasional bombing, all women and children were now ordered to leave the almost totally intact city, while the men were to stay behind for the defence. But there were hardly any trains or any other form of transport available. All the trains, laden with people from further south just went straight through the mainline station. There was snow and ice on the ground, the temperature had plummeted to below -20°C and remained there.

My uncle was on the staff of a local wagon works. There, on the outskirts of the city they assembled a train of goods wagons, each fitted out with a board running around the thin walls to offer some seating, straw on the floor and a small stove in the middle, burning whatever one put into it. My uncle gave up his place on this train for his wife, his two younger adult daughters, my sister and myself — five persons in the place of one. There was little room for luggage. We sisters shared a hastily packed, middle sized suitcase and each carried one of my aunt’s home sewn rucksacks on our back with essential clothing for the winter. As we thought we would be back in a few weeks time, we took nothing for summer wear. We wore as much on our person as we could bear to move in.

It took hours for everyone to board the train and was night time when we finally set off. We were bound westwards towards Bautzen on the main line to Dresden, where Linke Hoffmann had a branch works, normally a journey taking no longer than a few hours. We moved slowly, stopped frequently, moved backwards and forwards again and were not sure what was happening. We finally arrived in the wagon works in Bautzen after 36 hours on the train where they had put mats and palliasses on a vast factory floor to give us time to get some sleep, and provided hot drinks and some food. We were lucky; a long time later we learnt that many had started to walk out of Breslau in the dreadful cold pushing prams and carrying young children. Many of them perished at the road side and those who got to some hamlet found that there was no food for them as everyone was short rations since the declaration of ‘total war’.

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