大象传媒

My aunt now considered her next move. She had in-laws in Th眉ringen, known as the green heart of Germany. Somehow we had to get there. The following evening we managed to get a standing place on a ledge at the front of a goods wagon with steps leading up to it to facilitate easier loading. There we stood on a slope of iced up snow, holding on to the handrail so as not slip off this precarious perch onto the railway lines below while the train was moving. It was bitterly cold with a keen wind blowing around and it what felt like right through us in the subzero temperatures. Again we started and stopped, heard sirens in the distance announcing an air raid, saw flares, known as Christmas trees, dropped to the right and left of us and wondered what would be our fate. Thankfully, our train was not attacked and after four hours of this gruelling journey, literally holding on for our life, we arrived at midnight in the main station of Dresden, crowded with refugees. We immediately sought to find another means of transport to take us further west. The five of us finally got a place a small train to Meissen. After that I do not remember much until, I do not know how much later, we arrived in the small hours, in Erfurt totally exhausted, cold and hungry. We waited for daybreak before making our way on foot to the house of an elderly maiden aunt to knock at her door and ask for shelter and a hot drink. This poor lady was somewhat overwhelmed by this invasion of five refugees on her doorstep. On the way we had passed through Dresden, and a long while later we heard that the allied air raid came only a short time after our passage through that once beautiful city. We had been lucky indeed.

My aunt lost no time in planning further moves. Soon after our arrival she contacted her in-laws and friends and we were split up to be given a place to stay at various addresses. I took over the bedroom of one family鈥檚 young son of who was serving in the war. There on his bookshelf I discovered a series of popular adventure books my stepmother had always prevented me from reading as she considered them not to be good literature. I devoured them. By day and more so by night with the bedside lamp under the bedclothes, coming up for fresh air at intervals, I read about the strange world of cowboys and red Indians, of journeys and adventures in deserts and foreign lands. Later, when we had had moved on to Gotha, I tucked one of these books under my arm when regularly trotting off to the air raid shelter in the castle cellars in the middle of the night after the wailing warning of the sirens, to read while the bombing was going on outside. My aunt was horrified at my coldbloodedness and calm as I enjoyed reading the adventure stories of Winnetou, the red Indian chief and Old Shatterhand, the paleface slugging it out in the Wild West, whilst the town outside the castle鈥檚 old wine cellars was being destroyed by bombs.

It must have been a few weeks before my aunt secured a post as an assistant teacher at a village school just outside the western outskirts of Gotha. My cousins and my sister Irmgard had been found other accommodation and I, as the youngest of the group, stayed with my aunt in the old schoolmaster鈥檚 house where we were granted a room to live in. Once my aunt had an income, she arranged for me to go to the local grammar school to continue my interrupted education. But this was not to last for long. Every day I walked several miles into town until one fine day in early spring I arrived to find every schoolchild鈥檚 secret dream had come true 鈥� the school had been bombed in the previous night and lessons were cancelled. However, to my dismay we were told to come back as lessons would now continue in the cellars among the heating pipes and other obstacles. So my fantasy of having a long holiday from school was not to be.

We heard more rumours and snippets of news about the war and the progress of the allied forces into Germany. We wondered whether we had gone far enough West to avoid being taken by the ferocious Russian fighting troops.
On the morning 3rd April, the first Tuesday after a quiet Easter, we heard that the Americans were near. We watched from an upstairs window overlooking the main street of the tiny hamlet to see what was going on. Then suddenly, around the corner came a troop carrier crowded with soldiers in their distinctive American tin hats, which I thought looked like upturned night chamber pots, with their guns vigilantly at the ready. We soon lost sight of them because of the surrounding buildings, but listened intently. I thought I heard some women screaming. My aunt, without hesitation, picked up a few eggs out of a bowl and dragged me out of the house and down the only other road in the village, down a lane and past a few fields towards the nearby woods. At the last house in the village a German soldier was crouching with a Panzerfaust, an anti tank weapon in his hand, asking for information. We passed the shepherd not far away, who was herding the sheep as usual, and soon reached the cover of the woods. There we saw more soldiers hiding, but they did not seem to be keen to fight. We spent the rest of the day walking or sitting in the woods watching from what seemed a safe distance. Some of the eggs my aunt had picked out of the basket turned out to be raw, others had been boiled for Easter. However hungry I was, I could not suck a fresh egg so I got the boiled eggs to eat.

By nightfall it grew very chilly and we had no shelter or covering of any sort. We decided to return to the village as there had been no more noise or any other frightening signs to observe. We walked slowly and watchfully over the open fields. Suddenly a machinegun opened up in our direction with tracers flying over our heads. We flung ourselves down to the ground, found a ditch and remained hidden there from view for what seemed a very long time. Then, very gingerly, we again attempted to approach the village. Keeping low and silent we made it finally to the backdoor of a barn without being discovered in the dark, quietly opened the door, bedded down on the straw and covered with bales we slept fitfully for the rest of the cold night until it dawned.

Through a chink in the large barn door we could peer along the village street. When no one was in sight, we quietly slipped out; not far from a guard we only saw after leaving the barn but he was looking the other way, and we got home to the schoolhouse without any further harm. In the following days the American commandant commandeered the teacher鈥檚 house, a fine old residence, as his headquarters. This was hard for the teacher鈥檚 old wife who was in the habit of picking up a mop which she had strategically positioned in the corner, and followed any visitor wiping diligently away any footmarks before sitting down to talk to them. The soldiers did not keep up this practice.

My aunt and I found a room in an empty house opposite, we put down bales of straw covered in a sheet which made a comfortable enough bed. However, the mice had also moved in and become established there during the cold winter, so someone lent us the most ingenious mousetraps I have ever seen in my long life! They walked into the open door to take the bait, once in, there was no other way out than over a vertical rough surface, which they climbed up and with their retreat blocked halfway they fell at the top into a butt of water on the other side and drowned. The mechanism reopened the door for the next victim to walk in for a meal, a climb and a drop into the small butt and so it went on as the mice were tempted by the unusual offering of a meal in the once empty house. Our night鈥檚 sleep was thus somewhat disturbed by the various noises made by this activity. Scuttle, clatter, squeak, plop all night long!

The weather was mild now and the sunny, windy days of March had dried out the sodden land a little. School had been suspended again and I was out in the country wandering over the fields, sitting on knolls watching the sky larks rising and carved intricate patterns into the bark of hazel sticks like the Barbarossa sticks I had seen back east. Before going home I made sure to collect some tasty wild field salad which grew in abundance.

The Americans had set up a mobile laundry in the centre of the village, drawing water from the well of fresh water and discharging it into the village pond. We soon found that the foamy waste was better than anything our poor soap, laced with sand could produce. There we were with buckets and bowls collecting the dirty water to wash our own clothes in. I was very intrigued by the black men of that unit for we had never seen anyone with a black face which made their white teeth and their eyes very shiny. The field hospital in the neighbouring village was also of interest to us children, but we never went too near, we just watched from afar the comings and goings of the trucks and other vehicles. I also watched in disdain how these Army soldiers marched; since primary school we had been drilled by our old school mistress during our P.E. lesson. We marched around the playground keeping straight rank and file, the column of three turning corners with accuracy that would do the Queen鈥檚 regiment proud, whilst roaring at the top of our voices the many patriotic songs we were never to sing again. 鈥淭hese Americans just do not know how to march鈥�, thought I. It never occurred to me that they might be tired.

With the village school shut down, again my aunt had no income and had to find a way of bringing us through the tough times ahead. My two cousins were old enough to be better able to fend for themselves. But my sister and I as teenagers still needed to be in a protective environment. The war machine had rolled over us and we were still relatively safe with shelter over our heads and some food to eat. My aunt, an ever resourceful person, decided that the only way for us to survive was to be on a farm because that is where we would get fed.

At that time, 14 years was the official basic school leaving age, so on Sunday, the 6th of May 1945, the day before my 14th birthday she took me to a farm in a village some distance away for an interview with a farmer鈥檚 wife with a view to me starting an apprenticeship in Agricultural Housework. I was accepted and started a fully indentured apprenticeship on the 15th of May 1945, one week after the end of the war. My sister had also been placed into an Agricultural Household Economics apprenticeship elsewhere, the next step up on the professional ladder in agriculture for women. It took me some time to understand that I was there to work and not to play. It turned out that I learnt mainly to work in the stables looking after the beasts, feeding and cleaning out the pigs and cows, calves and all manner of fowl. It took some time for my aching arms to grow strong enough to milk out the cows. Once that work was done in the morning we walked out into the field in our wooden clogs to hoe, make hay or harvest, whatever the time of year demanded. On a Saturday, one of the women had to stay at home to clean the house from top to bottom including washing the windows and polishing the bare wooden floors, sweep the cobbled yard and along the whole front of the house to the middle of the street as was the custom. By evening, the routine of feeding, milking and cleaning the stables had to be repeated. My working day began before 6 am and lasted until after 8pm. I was fed, worked hard and grew strong.

After some months the part of Germany we were now settled in was traded away to the Russians for West Berlin, who took possession of the area later in the summer. Soon the border between the East and West was closed and crossing westwards became very difficult. Once more my aunt saw to it that we were safe and relatively happy by finding for my sister and myself separate farms in the same village to continue our apprenticeships in. Once settled there, she bade us good bye and some day in autumn she made her risky way across the border by dark and fog in search of my parents and the rest of the family, for through all this eventful time ever since we last saw them in Silesia in the winter, we had no idea what had happened to them, where they were, or whether they were alive or dead.

Silesia is the German province beyond the Oder-Neisse Line, which was annexed to Poland after the end of the World War II. We thought when we left to escape the dangers of fighting that we would return in a few weeks or months at most. I first revisited my old home city in the summer of 2000, when I took my Scottish born husband to see the scenes of my childhood one year before he died.

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