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. Following 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 鈥榖lack out鈥 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 F眉hrer, whose picture hung in every classroom and who we greeted in the morning with 鈥楬eil Hitler鈥, 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 鈥 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鈥 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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 (Ole艣nica) 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鈥檚 wife with two very young children whose husband was serving in the German forces in France. Her parents had a local grocer鈥檚 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 鈥楽鈥 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 鈥楽鈥 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鈥檚 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 (Ole艣nica) 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鈥檚 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掳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 鈥 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鈥檚 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 鈥榯otal war鈥.
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 sister 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 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. 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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