ESCAPE
Our journey home through
war-torn Germany
Barbie Probert-Wright
with Jean Ritchie
Contents
Foreword
Family Tree
Map
1: A Cosy Hamburg Childhood
2: A Peaceful Polish Interlude
3: The War Draws Closer
4: The Flight from Poland
5: The Journey Begins
6: Eva Nearly Loses Me
7: A Little Music in Our Lives
8: The Witch
9: The Mine
10: Into the Path of the Invaders
11: In Sight of Wiedersdorf at Last
12: Back on the Road
13: The Boys from the Hitler Youth
14: Just the Two of Us Again
15: The Plunderers
16: So Close to Home
17: Our Dear Mutti
18: Hammer Park
19: A Family Restored
20: Growing Up
21: England
22: Michael
Epilogue
Picture Section
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
Barbie Probert-Wright (Author)
Barbie was born in Germany in 1939. She moved to the UK in her early twenties as a student, married an Englishman, and has lived here ever since.
Jean Ritchie (Author)
Jean Ritchie is a successful ghostwriter. She has written, amongst others, the Sunday Times bestsellers How Could She? and Little Girl Lost with Barbie Probert-Wright. The Day the Angel Came is her first novel.
ESCAPE
Letters to the Author
Readers all over the world have been captivated by Barbie and Eva’s story
‘I was so moved by your inspirational story. It was good to hear the other side and I felt that I travelled the journey with you.’
Pennsylvania, USA
‘I was deeply moved by all your experiences on your long trek home with your sister Eva.’
Adelaide, Australia
‘This wonderful and poignant story brought back many memories of my own life as a child in war-torn Germany and the sad times after the end of the war.’
East Sussex, UK
‘You are an inspiration.’
New York, USA
‘I remember being a child in London during the raids and, like you, I had no real understanding of the wider events. Thank you for your frank and thoughtful account of your eventful life.’
Surrey, UK
‘I admire your sister Eva’s courage, strength and love for you, and how you were both able to carry on together on your long journey home.’
Essex, UK
‘Despite your awful experiences, your love for your family shines out from every page.’
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
‘The love of family, compassion and understanding comes through very strongly. In this awful world we need much more of that.’
Cambridgeshire, UK
This book is dedicated to the loving memory of my sister Eva, whose courage and determination got us through this journey alive, and to my husband Ray and my daughter Babette, with my fondest love.
I would also like to dedicate it to all children across the world whose lives today are being torn apart by the brutality of war.
Foreword
In the spring of 1945, in a dark and dangerous world of conflict and defeat, my sister saved my life.
The Second World War ripped apart the lives of millions of people and nobody who lived through it remained completely untouched by it. As a small child growing up in Germany, I was protected by my loving family from the horrific events that were ravaging Europe, and I remained innocent of the true nature of war until the final few months, when I was seven years old and we were on the brink of defeat and invasion. Then, no amount of love could protect me.
With my nineteen-year-old sister Eva, I was thrust into the maelstrom. Separated from our beloved mother, and with our father missing in action, we set out together to trek across Germany to find her, walking through battlefields, witnessing death first hand, sheltering from gunfire, sleeping rough and starving. I saw sights that no child should ever have to witness. I also met with incredible generosity and overwhelming kindness. I came to understand that enemies are united by their common humanity. I began to realise what sacrifice was and what really matters when you are faced with losing every single thing you own.
Into a few short months I packed a lifetime’s experiences, observing them through the prism of my own childish innocence. It is only years later that I have come to understand fully what was going on around me and what happened to the two of us. It is only now that I fully appreciate the courage and selflessness of my sister Eva.
I am writing this in the sitting room of my comfortable home, where I live with my husband. On the table beside me is a tattered exercise book, filled with the dreams and memories of a girl writing sixty years ago. It is falling apart now and faded in places: there are yellowing scraps of newspaper, brittle old photographs and pasted cards inside it.
This is the diary that Eva kept throughout those months, writing in it sporadically, whenever she got the chance. It is the spine of this book, giving a framework to all my memories of what was to come. Its pages, coming loose after more than sixty years, are filled with diary entries, poems and quotations. Its very survival is remarkable and it is, perhaps, my most treasured possession. I owe my survival to Eva and she has also provided me with the means of writing this book. The memories of a child are sometimes dreamlike, blurry and disordered. Her diary has helped me put them all in place. This book is based on what she wrote, as well my own memories, and the details I gathered from when Eva and I would reminisce about our journey over the many years that followed. It is not a history of the war – though I have included details of the situation as it affected us – it is simply the story of two sisters, desperate to get home and struggling to survive. It is Eva’s story, and my story.
Eva is now dead. I am not sure, if she were still alive, whether she would have wanted the attention this book brings her: she remained self-effacing, gentle and wholly concerned for others throughout her life. I don’t want to make her sound too good to be true – she was also very jolly, with a fine sense of humour, and she knew how to enjoy herself. But she would never have sought praise for what she did. To her it came naturally. She loved me, so she protected and cared for me. No child could ever have asked for more.
As I get older and the rhythms of my own day-to-day life are slowing, I find myself thinking more and more about the great events of those few months and feel ever closer to those times.
At the table beside me as I write, my granddaughter Amy-Lou is sitting quietly, colouring in the pictures in her drawing book. Her fair head is bent down as she earnestly concentrates on her task. In a minute she will raise her head, fix me with those imploring eyes and say, ‘Can we go and feed the ducks? Can we? Please?’
She is seven years old, the same age that I was when the main events of this story happened to me. I cannot imagine her ever having to face the sort of hardships that I did. I would hate her world ever to become a place where things like that can happen.
And yet, there are plenty of places around the globe where children are suffering as much as and more than I did. It breaks my heart to think of little ones, like my granddaughter, being subjected to the terror and hunger that we endured.
Even so, I do not regret what I went through. Young as I was, it forged my character, made me determined to see things through. It also made me realise, in a way that perhaps we all take too much for granted today, the sheer power of love. We were sustained throughout our travels by our love for our
mother, and I was protected and cherished by Eva’s love for me.
My book is a testament to that love.
The Route Taken by Barbie & Eva Through Germany in 1945
1
A Cosy Hamburg Childhood
Two weeks after my second birthday Europe was plunged into the deep, dark, depressing days of the Second World War. It meant nothing to me, a toddler living in a comfortable home in an affluent, middle-class area of Hamburg. To a child of that age, love, warmth and food are the main ingredients of happiness and I had all three in abundance. Despite what was happening in the world, it was an idyllic childhood until 1943, when the first darkness entered my life.
Before then, my tiny universe had been utterly content, a world of innocence and happiness. Our life was nothing out of the ordinary. We lived, as thousands of Germans did, a normal, comfortable, domestic life. Soon this quiet, civilised world would be shattered for ever by the horrors of war but in the years before, as I grew from babyhood, everything was perfect. We lived in a spacious third-floor flat on the Wandsbecker Chaussee, a well-known main road in Hamburg, lined with impressive apartment blocks like ours. Our flat had a long, wide hallway in which there was room for me to have a swing, and to roller-skate up and down, and it had a balcony that overlooked the road below. One of my earliest memories is of sitting out on the balcony with a large bowl of gooseberries. I was four years old and had been given a blunt knife so I could top and tail them for my mother. The balcony immediately below our flat had an awning, and when I accidentally dropped a gooseberry over, it bounced down the taut fabric of the awning with a ping, ping, ping. What a wonderful noise! I thought and let another one fall over the side. Before long, I had dropped every single berry over the balcony, just to hear the sound they made.
When my mother saw this she was not pleased. ‘Darling, what have you done? That’s very naughty,’ she scolded me. But even when she was trying to be cross with me, it was clear that she thought the whole incident rather funny. She said I would never again be trusted with a bowl of gooseberries on the balcony and from then on I had to sit inside to do them.
I was much younger than my two older sisters. Ruth was fourteen when I was born and Eva was twelve. It was like having three mothers, because they all fussed over me so much. I was not spoiled materially, and I was always required to be polite and well behaved. But the attention and love I received were wonderful, and the world of that apartment really did seem to revolve around me. My family always called me Puppe, which means little doll, or Kleine, little one. My full name is Bärbel, which is what I am still known as to my German family and friends, but when I came to live in England in 1957 people seemed to find it hard to say or remember and I became Barbie. As a tiny child, I was always on tiptoe, always dancing around the flat, always singing. I went to a kindergarten run by a motherly lady where we learned songs, invented our own make-believe games and did simple handicrafts. We were taken out in long ‘crocodiles’, all holding hands, to walk on the wide boulevard near the canal. We put on little plays and in one I was a snowflake, in another a rabbit. One Mother’s Day I made a brightly coloured paper bouquet for my mother.
With my family I also went to a local sports club, where there were special facilities for small children and where I played with my best friend, a girl called Inge, who was a twin and was also in kindergarten with me.
By now the war was well under way, but I knew nothing of it. The dramas going on far away in other countries as German armies advanced across Europe did not impinge on my world. I was sheltered and protected by my adoring family. Whatever worries and fears they must have had about the great conflict and the changes taking place in our beloved country they kept well hidden. I knew nothing of them.
My father Waldemar – or Waldi, as my mother called him – was already forty when I was born and too old to be conscripted to fight in the war – at least at the beginning. He had fought in the First World War and had been shot down in a plane over the English Channel, permanently damaging one of his hands and sustaining other injuries. His age, war record, disabilities and the fact that he worked in a reserved occupation meant that he was able to stay at home with us. My father worked on the railways in a senior management job, detecting and preventing crime on the networks and trains.
Some time during the early years of the war he was sent to work in the Wartegau, or the Polish corridor. This was a zone of land which had been taken away from Germany at the end of the First World War and had been colonised by Poles. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, most of these Poles were evacuated to southern Poland, and their farms and jobs were taken over by Germans. The Poles who had lived there before the first war by and large remained, but now worked for Germans, not for wealthy Poles. My father’s job was to try to stamp out the smuggling that was rife there. Although he was working away, he was able to travel back to Hamburg regularly and was a familiar part of my early childhood.
While he was away, my father lived in a rented flat in Posen (the Polish name is Poznan) and when he wasn’t visiting us in Hamburg we occasionally went to visit him and stay for some time. Most often it was just my mother and me, as I was not yet at school and could easily travel away from home, but sometimes Eva and Ruth joined us at weekends for a family visit and we would go for walks, play in the park and pick wild strawberries.
One of the things I loved when we stayed with my father was visiting the Sundermann family. They were friends of my father and lived in a manor house in the countryside near Jarotschin (Joroslaw), where they ran a large farming estate. We would approach the imposing house along the sweeping drive, coming to a halt beside the fountain at the front. The Sundermanns – Uncle Hermann and Aunt Freda – would come out to greet us and then the men might go shooting, or the grown-ups would talk and drink tea while I played with the Sundermann boys, Heinz, who was a year older than me, and Fritz, a year younger. We were all great friends, and we three amused ourselves and had lots of fun while the adults played cards.
The estate was vast and Uncle Hermann had to go round it every day to oversee the workers. He used a sturdy two-wheeled horse-drawn cart to make his rounds and I was sometimes allowed to ride with him, which was a great treat. We travelled very fast over uneven fields and I was a little bit scared I would fall out, although I never admitted this to anyone in case they stopped me going. The estate had several horses, who seemed to me very big and a little scary, but very beautiful.
There was a lake near the big house, and we regularly took boats out with picnic baskets and played games on the other side of the lake. They bred pigeons and there was a big pigeon coop designed like a small house, which fascinated me. I loved watching the different-coloured birds with their iridescent sheen, strutting in and out of the little doors. Small children remember and are impressed by the oddest things: this family had the first English-style lavatory I had ever seen and I was mesmerised by it. German toilets have a ledge inside them, English ones go straight down to the water, so you get a splashing sound, which really impressed me. We called it a Plumpsklo. They were idyllic days. Between my cosy city life in Hamburg and my days of outdoor country adventure in Wartegau I was completely happy.
My father was a prosperous man who had made his own way in life. He was an orphan and had been brought up and educated in a Catholic convent home for little children. He had a sister, Else, who lived near Berlin, but no other family. My mother was different – there was plenty of family on her side. My grandfather, known to us as Opa (like Grandpa), and my grandmother, Omi (or Granny), had three daughters: Norma, who was my mother, Hilda and Irma. The daughters – my aunts – and my grandparents all lived in Hamburg, close enough for us to visit them regularly. My grandfather had worked all his life as an engineer at sea. On his travels across the oceans he saw many different places and strange countries. In one of them a gypsy prophesied he would have a great piece of luck. When he returned home it came true: he won a large amount of money on the German State Lottery. Th
is was before I was born and I have no idea how much it was, but it was a big win. Like a father in a fairy story, he gave his three daughters a share of his win, asking them all to choose something they would like. My mother chose very fine silver cutlery and Meissen china, which she loved, and other things she wanted for the house. Aunt Irma chose jewellery, because there was nothing else she needed. And Aunt Hilda, like the wise daughter in a story, chose a plot of land, which in the end, as we would discover, turned out to be the best option.
My grandfather always told me that I had inherited his luck. I’m still buying lottery tickets just in case!
In Hamburg, when I was growing up, my grandmother ran a sort of luncheon club for businessmen. They would come to her apartment for lunch each working day, so it was like a small restaurant, but it was not open to the public and she only served weekday meals. All her three daughters, my mother, my Aunt Hilda and my Aunt Irma, would help out, so I would go there too. I can remember Grandmother had a small table with little chairs for me and my cousin Volker, Aunt Hilda’s youngest son. Volker is only four weeks older than me, so we were like twins, and the two of us had to sit quietly, as the businessmen liked to discuss their affairs over their meals and did not want to be disturbed by young children. Our other cousin, Henning, Aunt Irma’s only child, was also there, but only a baby at the time as he was four years younger than Volker and me. The family always told a joke about Henning’s birth: Aunt Irma had been waiting so long for a baby that when my grandmother heard that she was pregnant at the age of forty she said, ‘Don’t be silly, don’t listen to her. It is the change of life.’ Aunt Irma’s life certainly did change, but luckily it was with Henning.
I have many memories of my life in the flat on the Wandsbecker Chaussee. The smell of baking bread still takes me right back there, because on the ground floor of our block was a bakery run by a family called Wedemeier and from very early in the morning the delicious aroma of baking bread would pervade the area. Sometimes Mutti would phone down and tell them what she wanted and I was allowed to go down on my own to collect it. Ours was a big, double-fronted apartment block with a sweeping staircase, which I would run down and then walk slowly back up, savouring the smell of the warm bread I was carrying. I was not allowed to use the lift without an accompanying adult.
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