Escape

by Barbie Probert-Wright

  No, the most memorable event was something I would, over the next few days, become familiar with. But the first time is etched deep into my memory, even though I did not actually witness it. Beneath the window of the room where we were attempting to rest, we heard a loud commotion. As the windows were all shattered, it was impossible to avoid the noise outside. There were soldiers in the village and we could hear them shouting questions at someone, demanding his papers. Apparently he did not have any, or they were not the right ones, or he was refusing to co-operate. They shot him. It was a single shot and, although I was already familiar with the sound of firing, I had never heard it so close. And I had never heard a human being shot in this way. Fighting in the distance was impersonal: we did not see or hear the bullets strike their targets. This was different. I had heard a gun fired and a man died at that very instant. To have someone shot dead under our bedroom window was extremely shocking.

  Eva was aware of what was happening when the soldiers began interrogating the man and struggled to distract me. She started telling me a fairy story, but both of us could hear clearly the barked questions and the mumbled replies, then the sickening report of the single bullet. Afterwards there was the sound of the soldiers moving on, then silence. Nobody moved the body.

  I hope that the next day somebody gave the dead man a decent burial, but I don’t know. I have since often wondered who he was and how he came to meet his death in Stutzhaus in the way he did. He may have been an American scout, although we thought he was speaking in German, not English. He may have been a deserter from the German army. He may have been one of the farm labourers who were brought into Germany from the Balkan states and who liberated themselves when the end of the war was in sight. He may also have been an Italian: after Italy pulled out of the Axis in the autumn of 1943 the Italians were the enemies of Germany and many of them who were in the country were shot. Whoever he was, I felt very sorry for him, and often in later years I have wondered whether his mother and father or brothers and sisters ever knew what happened to him. Was he married? Did he have children growing up who would ask, ‘Where is Daddy?’ But I also felt great sympathy for the soldiers who had to shoot him. In the confusion and panic of those last days of the war, they thought they were doing what was right. These were abnormal times and terrible things were happening everywhere.

  6

  Eva Nearly Loses Me

  The next day at 6 a.m. we set out again. I remembered clearly what I had heard in the night but as we left the bakery I did not see the body of the shot man. Perhaps it had been moved or, more likely, Eva skirted round the building away from it. As always, she sheltered me as best she could from what was happening around us. She told me to carry Charlotte as we walked along, which I was only too happy to do, and when she said ‘Charlotte’, it meant I had quickly to put the doll in front of my face and only look down at the ground so that I could see where my feet were treading. Eva would hold my arm and guide me, saying, ‘I don’t want you to look right now.’ When she said this I knew it was something serious. Eva wanted to prevent me from seeing the dead bodies along the roadside but I did, of course, catch glimpses. I saw soldiers and civilians, women as well as men, and sometimes I smelled the rotting flesh. It is another of the smells that haunts me, not a happy one. For anyone who has ever smelled it, it is unforgettable.

  As we carried on walking there were plenty of occasions for Eva to say ‘Charlotte’. The heavy fighting around Stutzhaus had taken its human toll and there were dead bodies lining the roads. When we passed through villages where there had obviously been heavy shelling there were more corpses lying on the ground, and among the smouldering ruins and heaps of rubble.

  We saw convoys of German military vehicles, moving under direction to some fresh encounter with the enemy, and we caught glimpses of the sad faces of soldiers who were piled into the backs of trucks, being taken to a battle from which they might never return.

  Young as I was, even I knew what was happening. I turned to Eva and said, ‘Why don’t they just go home?’

  Eva had tears running down her face. ‘They can’t, Puppe. They have no choice. Do you remember what I told you about what being a soldier is? It means you have to do your duty. They can’t go home. They have to fight.’

  We watched the trucks disappear down the road, taking the soldiers to their fate.

  By mid morning, we were walking down a long, straight road, heading towards the village of Crawinkel. The Americans had already been in the area for five days. On 4 April, three days before we set out on our walk, they had liberated the forced labour camp near Ohrdruf, one of the Nazi concentration camps. I can say nothing to expiate the guilt of my nation over such horrors, but I can truly attest that we knew nothing about it. I had a child’s eye view of the war and was sheltered from as much of it as possible, but my sister and the rest of my family were just as ignorant of the appalling things that were being done to human beings in the camps. As we walked through the area, we did not even know of its existence.

  The atmosphere became menacing. We could hear the rumble of heavy artillery, like the constant growl of thunder, then the pitter-patter of small-arms fire. Tracer from the guns tracked across the sky like fiery shooting stars. To our left, the land swept away from the road, a patchwork of open farm fields, punctuated by the distant grey spires of churches in hidden villages, and to the right it rose steeply and was heavily wooded with fir trees. We were the only two people on the road: the place was strangely deserted. The fighting seemed to be far off and then, suddenly and without warning, there were planes overhead, swooping down and strafing the road with bullets. Other planes came and a real dogfight began above the fields to our left. Because the ground fell away, they seemed to be flying at almost the same level as the road and I could clearly see the pilots, and the American and German insignia on the wings.

  We were stunned for a moment, and watched the extraordinary sight of the planes darting in and out of combat, stuttering bullets at each other as they flew. Then Eva realised the danger we were in. ‘Get down!’ she shouted, and we both flung ourselves flat into the small hedge on the left-hand side of the road. We lay there, listening to the explosions, terrified, until the planes roared away. But it was not over: artillery fire was coming from the fields below us and the bombardment was fierce, with shells exploding all about us. We lay still, petrified, in the hedge. Shells must have struck the hedge further along, because it shook violently from time to time. Eva stretched out her hand and found mine, and she told me again not to move. My left leg was in a puddle and my right was growing stiff because I had it at an awkward angle, but I did not dare to shift it. The earth, in the early morning spring sunshine, had been warm at first touch, but a deep cold had seeped through and into my bones. I was so still that ants began to crawl up my cheek and I had to move my head against the earth to dislodge them. Charlotte was in my arms, but we had left our little cart on the road. I squeezed my eyes tight shut and tried to think of nice things, a trick Eva had taught me. I thought of Mutti and our home in Hamburg, and playing at the brick factory, and of my little puppy, Lumpie. I thought of Christmas and the sparkle in everybody’s eyes from the flickering candles on the tree, and the parcels wrapped up in brightly coloured paper. And I thought of Ruth, my sister in heaven with the angels, and prayed that she was looking down and protecting us.

  Then we heard a voice calling us. There was a lull in the fighting and we could clearly hear someone saying, ‘You two! You girls! Over here, quick.’

  I opened my eyes and turned my head, without raising myself from the ground. Across the road from us, sheltering at the edge of the wood, was a German soldier. He was crouching down and gesturing to us to run across to him. Eva tightened her grip on my hand and yanked me to my feet. She pulled me, running with her head down, across the road, grasping hold of our little cart on the way. As we neared the other side the soldier ran forward and grabbed me, pulling me fast into the shelter of the trees. The shells we
re still whistling over us and there was answering fire from above us up the hill. The pine woods down the hill were slashed by the bright tracer tracks of the bullets.

  Breathless and scared, we rested for a few seconds. But the soldier, who was still holding my arm, spoke quickly: ‘Come on, there’s no time to hang about. We have to get you up the hill.’

  He set off, holding me tight to one side and Eva to the other. She carried the cart that contained all our possessions. Together, we made our way up the steep hill. There was no track and we were forcing our way through the undergrowth, going round trees, upwards, always upwards. It seemed to my little legs to go on for ever. I was struggling to breathe and was unbearably tired but we forged on, the noise of the guns roaring above us. The soldier had a strong grip on my hand and was propelling me forward, which helped me to carry on.

  But at the top of the hill disaster struck. He let go of my hand for a second, to clear away the brushwood that was in our path. I had been relying on him completely and at the moment he took away his grip I fell back, tumbled and rolled backwards down the hill. It seemed that I was falling for an age, as I rolled and bumped off trees, bounced through the undergrowth and slid down the scree. In reality, it only took a few moments for me to reach the bottom of the hill, where I came to a halt at the edge of the wood, right back where we had started.

  I was dazed and hardly knew what had happened. Terrified, bruised and exhausted, I heard someone shouting ‘Stay still!’ so I lay motionless, obeying the order but also remembering what Eva had told me about pretending to be dead so that the enemy would ignore me. I concentrated on pressing my body as flat as I could on the hard earth. My right leg was twisted under me and pain from it began to throb through my whole body. I was bruised and cut, and in a state of shock.

  I heard the whine of shells and the dull thump as they hit the hillside above me, followed sometimes by the groaning of trees uprooted by the explosion. In reply came the angry stutter of gunfire. At the top of the hill, Eva clutched her hand over her mouth to stop herself screaming. I was so still that she was convinced I really was dead.

  I seemed to lie there for an eternity, but then I heard the crackling of twigs and a voice close by me saying, ‘Come on, run for it.’ A large hand took hold of mine and I was pulled to my feet again. It was the same soldier. He had risked his life again to come down the hill for me. He half dragged, half carried me to the shelter of the trees, then paused and grinned at me. ‘Right, kid,’ he said, ‘we’ve got to get up this hill again, get you safe.’

  I felt safe already, from the moment that his rough hand encircled mine. Silently I clutched his fingers again and we made the long climb back up the hill. This time he made sure that he never relaxed his tight grip on me.

  We made our way up, through the tangle of undergrowth, following tracks made by deer or other woodland creatures. Near the top, in a clearing, Eva was waiting, crouched down behind a pile of logs. As we approached, she rushed forward and took me in her arms, hugging me tight. Then she started to brush the leaves and twigs from my clothes, and retied my red-and-white headscarf over my fair plaits. ‘Oh, Puppe, I thought I had lost you,’ she said, sobbing with relief. ‘What would I have told Mutti? And how could I go on without you, little one?’

  More soldiers came out from the bushes and we were hastily bundled into a safe spot behind some logs. Eva could not stop hugging me and fussing over me. We sat together, our backs to the logs, and clutched each other.

  The planes had gone, but the artillery bombardment continued. Eventually the firing abated and we came out of our hiding place. We discovered that we were in a small encampment of soldiers, screened by the trees but with a good vantage point to see across the valley. There were about a dozen, all of them very friendly.

  ‘Hey, what an adventure you’ve had, kid! That’ll be something to remember, won’t it?’ said one. ‘Let’s take a look at those bruises and make sure you’re all right.’

  My cuts and bruises were carefully inspected. I was remarkably undamaged: there is an old saying that little children and drunks know how to fall, and I think it must be true. But I was badly shaken, and they were all anxious to cheer me up and make me relax. ‘Come and sit down over here,’ they said, ‘and we’ll get you something to eat.’

  They made comfortable places for us to sit and set about making us a meal. It was still early, but they were used to seizing any break they had. It was like a little party. We had white bread and strawberry jam, Eva had tea and I had hot chocolate, made from sachets, which came with the milk and sugar already in them. We even hummed a little song, but not too loudly, so that our hideout would not be discovered. The soldiers joined in, eating and drinking hot drinks, and chatting to us in low whispers. They pulled crumpled, dog-eared photos of their own children from their pockets to show us, and talked wistfully about their homes and their families.

  The one who rescued me was the tallest and the best-looking of them all, a very handsome young man, slim with dark hair. For many years afterwards he was my dream hero, my knight in shining armour. When I was teenager I used to fantasise that one day I would meet a man like him, fall in love and live happily ever afterwards. I am sure that I idealised him but to me he was everything you could want in a man: courageous, good-looking and charming. I can’t remember his name, but I never forgot his face or what he did for me that day. I wonder what became of him and whether he survived the war. I hope he did.

  Eva, too, always treasured the memory of him, because she really was sure for a few minutes that I was dead and was beside herself that it was her fault.

  Before long, the soldiers had to move on. Our party, a tiny moment of carefree friendship and happiness, had to come to an end because their camp was no longer safe after the attacks. They took us with them to their vehicles. There was a tank, and some big lorries with machine-guns, and others full of equipment and large canisters of petrol. They lifted us up into a lorry with camouflaged sides and a bench along each side. Eva and I sat there, swaying with the movement of the truck as they drove us towards the next town. One of them gave me a bag of sweets.

  ‘Where shall we drop you?’ they asked.

  ‘Can you put us down near Marlingen? I have a letter to hand over there,’ said Eva. Someone in Tabarz had given it to her to deliver if she could and here was the opportunity.

  ‘Sure. You girls take care now.’

  We said goodbye to our new friends on the outskirts of the village, grateful for all their help. The kind soldiers gave us more bread and a pot of jam to take with us. It had been quite a day and it wasn’t over yet.

  In her diary Eva wrote:

  You cannot imagine how scared I was, and I cannot describe what I felt when little one rolled all the way down the hill. We had so much good luck.

  She also wrote about our delight in getting the bread and jam:

  How our tummies were jumping with joy!

  As we walked into Marlingen, Eva was in a good mood. ‘That was very lucky,’ she said. ‘Not only have we had an escort here and saved ourselves some walking, but we should be well looked after and given somewhere nice to sleep.’

  But it wasn’t like that all. Unlike in most of the towns we went to, our welcome was distinctly chilly and after a short time we were sent on our way. Eva wrote:

  We really had great expectations of being looked after, and having a good night’s sleep. But all we were given were potato pancakes, they couldn’t have cared less.

  Of course, people were all very scared at the end of the war and could be apprehensive of strangers. I love potato pancakes, which are made by grating potato, mixing it with egg and frying it, and then eating it with apple sauce, so I was probably quite happy, but it must have been a let-down for Eva. It is perhaps surprising that the people there were happy to let a young woman and child go walking off alone into the night, but the circumstances were hardly normal. For the most part we experienced great kindness, so we couldn’t complain.

&n
bsp; As usual, Eva hid her disappointment from me and we walked on. Because we had nowhere else to stay that night, we slept in a ditch. Fortunately the weather was warm and we found a dry place with bushes around to shelter us from any wind. The temperature dropped at night, but we put on our extra jumpers and cuddled up close together. I don’t know how well Eva slept, but I was so tired that I went out like a light, before she even had time to comb out my hair and make me say my prayers. Normally, sleeping outdoors would be a great adventure, but I was too exhausted to appreciate it. Instead, huddled close to my big sister in a hedge, I fell into blissful unconsciousness.

  7

  A Little Music in Our Lives

  At daybreak we woke up and got ourselves together. It was the fourth day of our walk and we had not made much progress because the fighting was forcing us out of our way, so we set off early, hoping to press on. Luck was on our side again: a farmer came by on his horse-drawn open cart and offered us a lift. So for six or seven kilometres we sat with our legs dangling over the edge of the cart, savouring the luxury of not having to walk.

  When the farmer dropped us off we walked on, throwing ourselves into the ditch or scrambling under the cover of the woods when we heard the sound of planes or fighting. On one occasion I struggled to my feet after a raid and found Eva laughing at me: I had plunged into the grass so hard that my cheeks were stained green. Another time I was upset because I found I had crushed a whole bed of tiny blue forget-me-nots.

  There were more people on the roads now, some of them going the same way as us. Although we kept to ourselves, occasionally we would walk with others, especially if they knew the way. Sometimes, near the towns and villages, there were deep trenches called Panzergraben, literally ‘tank graves’, dug by the local people to halt the progress of the American tanks, and we would cower inside these when we heard the sounds of guns. That day there was a particularly heavy attack and we were both very scared. Eva wrote: