The sandals were very comfortable and looked good: there was always a lot of demand from friends and family for Kurt to make them, and his fingers were often numb and blistered from stitching the difficult material.
Mutti’s skills as a seamstress meant she spent one day a month at the home of one of her cousins, the one who owned the plant nurseries, repairing, lengthening, shortening and adapting clothes for their three young boys. She would unpick the frayed collars of shirts and turn them over, to give the garment a new life. The family were reasonably wealthy, but no amount of money could buy clothes, which simply were not in the shops. They did not pay Mutti, but she and I would get lovely food while we were there because they had land to grow things and there were farms around – as ever, those who lived in the countryside fared better than those in the city. We took the precious parcels back home with us.
Times were hard but we looked forwards, not backwards. Mutti kept up the pragmatism and stoicism that Eva displayed during our long march, and always talked about the new Hamburg that would rise from the ashes and how lucky we were that a modern city was going to take shape. Her attitude, which she imbued into me, was that all we had lost were possessions and they were unimportant. Our family was intact and our spirits were strong.
20
Growing Up
Eventually, after our endless holiday, school did restart for all of us. A kindergarten was established in a temporary building, donated by Denmark, in the park itself, but of course I was too old for that. The elementary school was quite a long way from the park, but in those days children were trusted to walk on their own. Karla, another friend Helga, who lived in the same row of houses as me, and I made our way together, walking through devastated streets. In some places we saw faded messages scrawled on walls, telling a husband or a son or a daughter that the family had survived and where they had moved to. I wonder how many of those messages were written in vain and how many of those husbands or children made it back to be reunited with their families? There were signs on the rubble saying that looters would be prosecuted, but by this time there was nothing left worth looting. Even the timbers used in the construction of the buildings had all been taken for firewood or floorboards.
We explored some of the smaller houses and I dare say that if we had found anything worth having we would have kept it – but there was nothing left at all. We were told by our mothers not to go into the ruins, as they could obviously be dangerous, but the temptation was sometimes too strong. It was an adventure. We didn’t think of the tumbled-down structures, where rats and feral cats lived, as the wreckage of people’s lives but as a fascinating playground.
School started early at 8 a.m. We all took along our own metal basins and spoons, and we were given a meal mid morning. Two children from every class were picked to have extra food, as they were particularly undernourished. I was one at first, but I hated being different from my classmates and gladly relinquished the ‘honour’. School finished at around 1 p.m. so we were home for lunch, which meant we were all getting an extra meal a day to help build us up. In the afternoon we could go to extra lessons – music, dancing and gymnastics – but we had to pay for these.
When I was nine I contracted polio, probably from swimming in the River Elbe. We’d been to visit relatives who lived near the river bank and I went for a swim. Within twenty-four hours I was terribly sick, vomiting and hardly able to move my body. I was admitted to the local hospital, then transferred to the big children’s hospital, where I was diagnosed with polio. I spent two months in hospital, but, to my great good fortune, I was one of the first victims of the disease in Germany to be treated with a new American serum. My parents had to give permission for it to be tried on me and I’m so glad they did because I recovered without any ill effects. It took several months for me to get back to normal and I had to struggle to regain my fitness, but I forced myself to go to gym club and ballet lessons, until I was back to my earlier form. It is another reason I have to thank the Americans.
My classmates were grateful to me: because the disease is infectious they were all given a fortnight off school, until it was clear that none of them had caught it from me.
Four years later I was dangerously ill again, this time with meningitis. I really thought I would die. I had a blinding headache, I was vomiting, I couldn’t hold up my head and bright spots swam before my eyes. I was rushed into hospital again, and my fear that I was dying was confirmed when my parents came to visit me and brought me a watch. I had always asked for a watch or a bicycle for my birthday and Christmas presents, but they told me that because I was such a tomboy I would hurt myself on a bike and break a watch. So when they turned up with a watch, I was sure it meant that the end was near for me and they were granting me my last wish. I started to cry, but I couldn’t tell them why.
I was really ill and crying was the worst thing, as it agitated the inflamed tissues of my brain even more. But then a good-looking young doctor came and sat on my bed and took my hand. He said, ‘I’m new here, I’ve only just started working as a doctor and I have to prove myself. I really want to get you better but I can’t do it on my own. I need you to help me. We can do it together.’
He calmed me down and I fell asleep, my first proper, deep sleep since I became ill. When I woke up, he was sitting on my bed again – at first I thought he must have been there the whole time. That was the turning point and I started to get better. I had to have several lumbar punctures, in which a long needle, almost a foot long I seem to remember, was inserted to remove fluid from around my spinal cord. I used to think, ‘If they’re not careful, this needle will come out of my belly button in the front.’ Afterwards I had to lie flat on my back without pillows for twenty-four hours, to prevent me developing headaches. Again, I was in hospital for several weeks.
One day, when I was getting better, the nurses dressed me up in one of their uniforms. When my parents came in to see me, my bed was empty but as they walked through the door I came up behind them and said, ‘Can I help you?’ They were really surprised that I was well enough to play tricks on them.
My classmates were thrilled to get two more weeks off school because, again, meningitis is infectious. When I got back to school they asked me, ‘What is your next illness? Come on, we all want another two weeks’ holiday.’
I told them it must be someone else’s turn. ‘I’ve done my share – I want two weeks off now.’
But it never happened.
When I was ten I passed an exam, which meant I could go to the high school that was the equivalent of a grammar school here. The little house in the park was very close to my new high school – I could practically hear the morning bell from my home – and it was great not having to walk far. The boys’ high school was still being used as a hospital, so they were given the upper floors of our building, but strenuous efforts were made to ensure that the girls and boys never met and mingled. It was only at dancing classes, held after school, that we got to know any boys.
My after-school hours were fully booked with a programme of activities. As well as gym and ballroom-dancing classes, I also went to ‘movement with music’ classes, which were like ballet except that we didn’t stand on pointes. The teacher was a very effeminate chap whose name, Bodo, made us giggle. But I was always very proud to be chosen to demonstrate with him.
I made three really great friends at high school, Ilse, Antje and Karin. Ilse’s mother was a war widow struggling to bring up three children by running a confectionery shop, which we passed on the way to school. We four made ourselves into a special little club and we called ourselves CDS. We never told anyone what it stood for and, even though Antje and Karin are both now dead, I will still not reveal it. (Ilse and I are in close contact and I see her whenever I visit Hamburg.) Both Antje and Karin came from fairly wealthy families, living in villas outside the city, but I never felt disadvantaged because we had lost everything in the war. Once when Antje, who was very good at sport, damaged her leg badly fal
ling over the finishing line in a 100-metre sprint, she stayed with us because we were so close to the school. She left behind her beautiful villa for our little cottage without a bathroom, but she was very happy with us. Mutti was a real homemaker, who made everyone welcome.
An English student teacher, Daphne Asplin, came to Hamburg to give us English lessons. The school appealed for families to put her up for a month at a time. Although our house was small and there were other girls in the school with substantially better accommodation to offer her, she liked it so much with us that she stayed for not just one month but two. (I am still in touch with her. She never became a teacher because she realised she would always have favourites among her pupils, so she worked for the Foreign Office in London instead.)
I was always top at English in school and for that I thank the British soldiers who educated me so well in the language. I was very keen to go to England and we had a school exchange with Leigh Grammar School in Atherton, Lancashire. I remember it rained a fine drizzle for most of the two weeks we were there in August 1954. We had little tennis dresses and we wanted to show off in them, but the weather was rarely good enough. I thought the men looked very strange, because they wore suits with back vents in the jackets, which made their bottoms seem to stick out.
When I got home I said to my mother, ‘Whatever happens in my life, I will never, ever marry an Englishman.’ She often teased me about that, after I married not one, but two, Englishmen.
Luckily, the trip was a success, despite the bad weather; we got on well with the English girls and it did not put me off wanting to go back. I even had my name in the local paper there, because a reporter came to a party that was given for us and asked for our impressions of England. Four girls and four boys, out of the thirty on the trip, were quoted in the paper. We girls focused on trivial but telling differences between the two countries: open fires, thick carpets and orderly queues for buses impressed us most. The boys talked rather more seriously about the relationship between the two nations.
I stayed with a lovely family: a girl called Marion Archer, who was the same age as me, her parents and younger sister. I was introduced to cricket for the first time and was completely baffled by it to begin with. (In later life I came really to appreciate the game and am a great supporter of the England team.)
I inherited all my mother’s and grandmother’s skill at knitting, crocheting and sewing, and my nickname at school was Strickpuppe, knitted doll, because I knitted so many of my own clothes. Unlike English schoolgirls, we didn’t have to wear a uniform. I knitted one skirt that was so full that when I spun round, it flared out to waist level. It was green, with rows of little brown rabbit heads round the hem, and I embroidered ears on every rabbit. Later, when I was old enough to go out socially, one of my friends, Ursi, would come round and we would make ourselves new dresses in one evening.
When I was eighteen, after the German equivalent of A-levels, I came over to England to study the language. Father was always very protective of me, perhaps because we had spent so long apart in the war. He always called me ‘kleine Bärbel (little Bärbel) and as a teenager I used to chafe at his early curfews. One night he stayed up all night, falling asleep in an armchair, because he thought I was still out. In the morning he went to Mutti, very worried that I had not come home, to be told by her that I had changed my mind about going out and had gone to bed for an early night. Despite this, he was happy to let me go off for my studies, because Ilse was coming with me.
I attended a language centre in Oxford Street, London, to learn English and French, and after that passed the ‘lower’ and ‘proficiency’ certificates in English from the University of Cambridge. My accommodation was arranged by Daphne Asplin and I stayed with a wonderful couple, Mr and Mrs Lawson, in St John’s Wood. They are now quite elderly and I am still in touch with them.
Most people in England were very welcoming, but there was some suspicion of Ilse and me because we were German. We were sitting on the long seat at the back of a double-decker bus once, talking together in German, and a man threw tomatoes at us. I could understand that people still felt hurt and angry about the war, but I spoke up and said in English, which by now was quite good, that I had been two when the war started and seven when it ended, so it could not be anything to do with me.
We were sometimes accused of being Nazis and when we protested that we weren’t we were told that all Germans were Nazis. I usually dealt with it by making clear how sorry we were for what had happened.
After a year in London I went to university in Geneva, accompanied this time by another friend, Ursula. I graduated in English, French and Literature. The international student accommodation was at the top of a hill, in an old building with cloisters and arches everywhere. It was run as a benevolent dictatorship by Madame Müller. We got on well with her, always making sure we cleared up after our breakfasts and giving her little presents. Nonetheless, when we were summoned to see her after our first term we were really worried. Was our room too much of a mess? Had we come in late and been reported to her?
But we were not in trouble. She explained to us that she had a new student who had arrived from Israel with her father. Her name was Miriam and the family were Jewish. Her parents, both dentists, had fled Germany at the beginning of the war and, although Miriam had been born there, she had grown up in Israel. She knew what the Germans had done to the Jews and, as a consequence, she refused to speak German or read German literature. Her parents were upset by this: after all, German was their mother tongue and they would have liked their daughter to speak it. They also knew that only a very small percentage of Germans were implicated in the Holocaust, that most people were honest and decent, and that the language was that of some of the world’s most beautiful literature and poetry.
‘Her father wants her to learn that there are good Germans. So will you agree to having another bed in your room?’ Madame Müller asked.
We agreed and Miriam became a great friend. She, Ursula and I formed a very tight bond and we became like sisters. We taught her German, giving her dictation every day, so that she could speak to her parents in their own language. They were so grateful that we became such good friends. We did not really know the full story of the Holocaust ourselves: I think the truth was too painful for our nation to admit and, although it was touched on, it was never openly discussed. Miriam is now a Professor of Languages and Islamic Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has written many erudite books and always sends me one, writing in the front ‘Meine kleine Schwester Bärbel’, my little sister Bärbel.
Ursula went on to marry a Jewish man and much later, when he died he left his coin collection to a museum in Jerusalem, so just after his funeral we went out there and stayed with Miriam for the opening of the collection to the public.
After I graduated I was going to become a teacher. Mutti was very keen on this as she said that when I had my own children I would be able to have the same holidays as they did. But on my flight back to Hamburg from Geneva I found my new career. I chatted on the plane to the Lufthansa stewardesses and I was attracted to the life they led, visiting so many places. They told me how to apply to work for the airline. My career was about to take off.
21
England
Before I went to Geneva we were living in a new apartment in old Horn, an area of Hamburg close to Hammer Park. It was a spacious, two-bedroom flat in a beautiful new landscaped complex, part of the rebuilding of Hamburg into the stunning modern city that my mother had predicted would emerge from the ruins in time. My bedroom had a balcony overlooking the well-tended gardens. It was our second home since the prefab in Hammer Park, which we left in 1954 (a year before they were all pulled down). First we moved to Tyrolerstrasse, an area that Mutti didn’t like, so fortunately we didn’t stay there long. We soon moved back to the part of the city she did like, which was close to her sisters, and to our beloved Hammer Park.
It was at this time that I lost my dear grandparents.
Both of them had remained mentally sharp until the end of their lives and we were all very close, visiting often. My grandfather died three or four years before my grandmother. I was sixteen when Omi died. She was seventy-four and her death left a great void in my life. I miss her still. They are buried in the family grave at Ohlsdorf, in the plot bought first for Ruth. Now it is the resting place of many others – my mother and father, Eva, Aunt Irma, Uncle Hermann, Aunt Hilda and Uncle Willi are all buried there. My cousins Thekla and Henning care for and maintain the grave.
When I arrived home from university in Geneva I was feeling restless, so on impulse I dressed in my best outfit and went to the Lufthansa offices at the airport to see if I could get an interview. I didn’t have an appointment but I was lucky and they saw me. I had to do a battery of psychological tests, which I obviously passed with flying colours, because they rang me the next day to arrange for another interview. The fact that I could speak German, English and French fluently was a big mark in my favour. I was offered a job in the department dealing with customers’ complaints, based in Hamburg.
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