by Wendy Lawton
“I want to bribe the driver somehow,” Anita said.
“That won’t work. If he were caught, he’d pay with his life.” Hella shook her head. “Besides, all I have is twenty marks.”
At that moment three of the other girls decided to make a run for it into the woods. “Come with us,” one of the girls said.
“I can’t.” Anita pulled her dress up and showed her leg.
“And I’m staying with Anita,” Hella said.
“Do any of you have a pack of cigarettes?” Anita knew cigarettes often worked as good bribes.
“Here,” said one of the women, tossing an unopened package of cigarettes at Anita before the three of them jumped off and ran into the woods.
Anita couldn’t breathe for fear, but no one chased after the girls. Thank You, Jesus.
“Get off,” shouted one of the guards as he finally caught up to the slowing cart. “Get off and file into those gates up ahead.” One by one, the frightened women jumped or fell off the carts. You could see from the looks on their faces those who recognized a death camp. Anita held back. She did not want to get down in front of the guard. He’d know about her bad leg as soon as she tried to move.
When there were only a handful of women left, the guard said, “I need two of you to get supplies for the camp.”
“Hella and I will go.” Anita wondered if this was the chance she prayed for.
He gave them directions and gave further instructions to the driver. As the gate clanged shut behind their fellow prisoners, the cart took off down the road. Anita prayed, asking God to preserve their friends. They scooted up closer to the driver.
“Please sir, take us to the train station.” Anita held out the package of cigarettes and the money.
Hella’s eyes widened. Anita knew what she thought—they’d just put their lives into a stranger’s hands.
“Pray,” she whispered to Hella.
The driver smiled and held out his hand for the bribe. Will he really risk his life for so paltry a bribe?
“Do you know where the train station is located?” Anita wondered if she misinterpreted his seeming agreement.
“Ja, ja.”
He clucked at the horse to trot and off they went. A short distance from the camp, the train station came into view. Anita asked him to let them off since she saw armed Nazi soldiers patrolling the station. The man tipped his hat and winked at them as they jumped down.
Anita’s leg buckled as she landed. Not now, Lord!
They walked toward the train station. “Try to look like we are village girls, fearfully running away from the Russians.” Anita figured in the confusion of people fleeing the invaders and because the death camp looked long deserted, no one would suspect work camp escapees.
Just as they stepped up onto the train platform, the three girls who’d escaped earlier came out of the woods. Good. We’ll look like separate groups of friends from the village who know each other.
They greeted their friends, and while Hella quietly filled them in on the plan, Anita spoke to one of the soldiers. “Sir, we’ve been advised to flee the Russians. We’ve heard of their brutality, and our parents want us to seek safety out of town. They left last week, and we will join them in Sorau.”
The soldier smiled at her. “Those blonde braids remind me of my little sister. It’s been a long war.” He shook his head. “I hope she’s not in this kind of danger.” He pointed to a captured Russian tank chained to a flatcar. “That’s our ride. I can ask my superior if he’d mind us giving aid to five frightened German girls, but it might be crowded inside the tank.”
Anita smiled. “Since the war we’ve lost weight. We hardly take up any room.”
He laughed and went to ask permission.
“He probably thinks this will make a great story to tell after the war—inside a demolished tank, atop a flatbed car, and crammed in with five young girls.” Hella laughed. “It’s story enough, but if he only knew the real story.”
With permission granted, the soldier helped the girls into the tank. As they got settled, they felt the jerk of the train and knew they were on their way. The clang of train wheels against the track seemed to reverberate against the metal of the tank. The chains holding the tank onto the flatbed car screeched and clunked, but inside the wrecked tank they knew they headed to freedom. After thanking God, Anita let the rhythmic clanking rock her to sleep as the soldier listened to his wireless.
When she awoke, she could see through the shredded metal that it was dark. The other girls stirred as well. Their flight from Grünberg had left them exhausted. “Where are we?” Anita awakened fully. “Did we miss Sorau?”
“Ja. Sadly, the Russians are massing to overtake Sorau. I decided to let you sleep and wake you when we get to Berlin.”
Anita knew they dared not go to Berlin. Hella had German relatives in Bautzen. “Can you let us out when we stop at Fürstenwalde? We’ll get a train for Dresden and change to Bautzen.”
“I can do that, but you know that train service is unreliable with the war.” He seemed sad to say good-bye.
When the train stopped at Fürstenwalde, Anita said “I pray you see your little sister soon.” He lifted them out of the tank. “Thank you.”
As she stepped onto the platform, shards of pain streaked up her leg. Her thigh was nearly double its normal size. As she looked down at it, she realized that the Lord not only allowed her to escape, but she hadn’t had to walk more than a couple of steps. Her leg needed care, but she knew He had spared her. He must have a reason for the leg as well.
“We leave you here,” the three friends said. “Our people are in Rostock.” They were some of the few in camp who’d actually received a tiny portion of their promised wages. They had just about enough to purchase tickets and catch the waiting train.
“I gave you all my money for that bribe,” Hella said. “Do you have any good ideas?”
Anita reached deep into the now-ragged knapsack and pulled out the purse Mutti left for her all those months ago. “I’ve saved this money to one day try to buy my mother’s freedom as some were able to do, but rumors are that Theresienstadt has already been liberated.” She clenched the purse. “More than anything I need to get to my mother.”
They took some of the money and bought their tickets to Bautzen, with a change of trains in Dresden.
Less than an hour later they sat side by side in seats on a train—like normal German citizens—looking out a window. How can it be? Anita would have pinched herself except the pain in her leg was the stuff of nightmares, not dreams. Anita wondered about Mutti. God, keep her safe and let me find her again. So many others came to mind as they rolled through the dark countryside—Anita knew the farmlands were dotted with work camps and, even worse, death camps. She wondered if she’d ever see her Tante Käte or Tante Elsbeth or Tante Friede again. What about Wolfgang, Gerhard, and Rudi? Did Steffi make it to freedom? And was Pastor Hornig safe? Vati lived in Sorau. Was he, even now, fleeing from the Russians? Anita kept her face to the dark window so nobody could see the tears that rolled down onto her lap.
“Anita, wake up.” Hella shook her. “We need to change trains here in Dresden.”
As they stepped off the train, the air raid sirens began to wail, just like those days in Berlin. People ran every which way, screaming.
“The shelters!” Train personnel began to direct everyone to the shelters deep under the train station. “Head for the shelters!”
“Go, Hella!” Anita said. “I cannot make it down all those stairs with my leg.”
“I’ll help you.”
The sirens continued to wail. “No, go!” Anita pushed Hella toward the stairs. “No matter what happens, I’m safe with God.”
Hella was nearly pushed down the stairs by the masses of people. Anita put her hand to her mouth to send a pretend kiss in Hella’s direction. Almost immediately she heard the first bomb scream through the air. The building shook with the concussion. Anita stumbled outside, thinking she s
tood a better chance out in the open than entombed in a building.
She remembered the words of the Lord, “I have put my words in your mouth and covered you with the shadow of my hand” as the bombs began to rain down on the city. The ground shuddered under the onslaught. The noise seared Anita’s hearing and seemed to slice into her jaw. “Let me pass through the fire,” she prayed, sending her words into the sky lit up by bombs.
The air seemed to whoosh as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the world at once. The sky exploded in a firestorm of orange flame, and smoke rose in black columns to the heavens.
All Things Together
Find a bed for this girl at once.” The doctor called a nurse over to Anita. “I’ve rarely seen blood poisoning this bad. This young woman will likely lose her leg.”
Anita cringed, remembering the almost-forgotten days when she danced on the stage of Century Hall in Breslau. Her leg—would she lose that now? She’d lost so much over the last twelve years. But the woman doctor had gentle hands and an encouraging smile. Anita trusted her immediately.
The doctor spoke to the nurse again, “Prep her for surgery so I can insert drainage tubes.”
The nurse, Fräulein Grete, assisted Anita into a gown and helped her up on the bed. “What a shame,” the nurse said. “A pretty blonde Aryan girl like yourself needs to be made whole again.”
Uh-oh. Anita pretended to drift off into sleep rather than deal with the danger of the nurse discovering Anita’s deception. Nazis still ran the hospital, of course, but most were Nazi in name only—except her nurse, that is. Anita had seen many super-Nazis over the years and she recognized that fervor in Fräulein Grete. It signaled trouble.
After surviving the Dresden bombings and firestorm—more than 130,000 died that night—Anita had managed to find Hella. They eventually made their way to Bautzen. By that time, Anita’s leg was so infected that Hella took her straight to the hospital. Anita’s temperature registered 105 degrees when she arrived.
All she wanted to do was make her way to Czechoslovakia to find Mutti. Instead they rolled her into surgery. Fräulein Grete smoothed the younger girl’s hair and smiled sympathetically as she put the ether mask on Anita’s face.
A bright light overhead hurt Anita’s eyes. Where am I? Oh yes … she reached under the covers and felt for her leg. Thank You, God. She still had two legs.
The kind doctor laughed a merry laugh. “I’ve heard of people talking under the influence of ether, but never like that little girl talked.” The doctor shook her head. “She’s been through more than the war …”
Fräulein Grete’s face came into view. The woman’s eyes narrowed and her top lip curled in hatred. “Ja. She talked all right.” The nurse bumped hard against the bed, causing pain to shoot up Anita’s foot into her leg.
From that moment, the nurse treated Anita cruelly and tried to make her miserable. Sometimes Anita heard Fräulein Grete mouth “Jude” under her breath. She managed to convey that she ’d be happy to let her patient die.
Fräulein Grete did her best to keep Anita’s leg infected and to keep the doctor from finding out. She always managed to reroute the doctor around Anita’s room, telling the doctor that Anita was nearly well. The nurse refused to change dressings or clean Anita’s wound, and her condition worsened each day.
When Hella came to visit, she took one look at her friend; her temper spilled over; and she walked out of the room.
When she came back about an hour later, she had the doctor with her. Later, she told Anita what happened.
“I managed to find out where the doctor lived and walked all the way over there and knocked on her door.”
“You didn’t!” Anita put her hand over her mouth.
“I did. The doctor had obviously been sleeping.” Hella smiled, “I said, ‘My friend lies in your hospital dying because one of your nurses won’t see that she gets proper care. You must help!’ I told her you said she had been kind to you and helped you.”
“Oh, Hella …”
“At first she seemed confused. She said that Fräulein Grete told her you were doing well and that she didn’t need to look in on you anymore since the hospital was so overcrowded.”
“Did she really?” Anita should have suspected this.
“The doctor got this angry look on her face and asked me to wait while she dressed.”
From that time on, Fräulein Grete rarely came into Anita’s room, but it still took four surgeries over many weeks to finally stem the infection in Anita’s leg. Even at that, they still had drainage tubes coming out of her foot and thigh.
When she was finally able to get out of bed, Anita found she had to learn to walk all over again. Hella came in and spent hours helping her hobble up and down the aisles of the hospital.
One morning, as Anita pulled herself out of bed for a walk, the gauze bandage slipped. Hella saw ugly crisscrossing scars, raw skin, and open wounds. She gasped. “Why would God allow that to happen to you? You’ve always been faithful. How can you still believe He cares for you?”
Hella’s anguished questions sounded like those being asked all over Germany. They always started, “How can a loving God permit …”
Anita took her friend’s hand. “Hella, look. I still have my leg, don’t I? That means I can walk all the way to Czechoslovakia if I need to.”
“But if God could spare your leg, why didn’t He spare all the scars and pain as well?” Hella sounded angry.
“I don’t know. Many questions will never be answered until we get to heaven. Remember the verse we used to read at our Bible study in the barn in Barthold? Romans 8:28—remember? ‘And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.’”
“Would you call this good?” Hella raised her eyebrows and gestured with her hand toward Anita’s leg.
“But we haven’t seen the ‘working together’ part yet. We have no idea how this fits into the whole plan. I don’t doubt that it does, though.”
She was still very weak several days later when they heard a familiar sound echoing through the hospital—artillery. Without much warning, the staff moved patients into a cramped bomb shelter in preparation for a Russian invasion.
The frightening days turned into wakeful nights. Eight days passed while the Russians over ran the town. Anita had to share a bed with three other patients. The hospital staff did their best, but there was no food or medicine. Hunger battled with pain.
Nothing was as bad as fear. The Russians hated the Germans for what they’d done. The invading Russian army took town after town throughout Germany, and as they did, they destroyed property, tortured its citizens, and captured the soldiers, sending them on trains to Siberian prisoner-of-war camps.
When the Russian soldiers finally stormed the hospital shelter, everyone expected to die. The men were brutal. Elderly patients were thrown up against stone walls; men were beaten; women were abused. When two soldiers grabbed Anita, she shut her eyes and prayed. In the struggle, her gown pulled to the side, and the soldiers saw her leg with its angry wounds and oozing drains. One soldier gagged, and the other dropped her onto the floor. For the rest of the attack, they left her alone.
When they finally left, she silently thanked God that no one in the shelter had been killed. As frightening as the attack had been, she watched God’s hand of protection and saw that “all things worked together” today in a way she could never have foreseen. The ugly wounds on her leg—those wounds Hella Frommelt hated—had saved her.
Others continued to suffer, and though Anita had been spared, she ached for them. She remembered Hella’s question about why God allowed this kind of suffering. When someone asked the question, it always sounded as if God were responsible for the evil. But Anita knew wickedness was never God’s choice. Anita looked around the room at the frightened patients, doctors, and nurses. She knew that God wept along with all of them.
When it was finally safe to come out of the air
raid shelter, Anita hurried to her old bed, hoping to find the Bible that Pastor Hornig had given her all those years ago. How she had missed it those eight long days in the shelter!
It lay upside down on a table—soiled and crumpled. Many of the pages had been torn out. As Anita reluctantly put it in the dustbin, she couldn’t help remembering Teddy—shabby, well-loved Teddy. Sometimes losing treasures hurt almost as much as losing people. Auf Wiedersehen, Bible. Thank You, Lord, for letting me have it this long.
The Russians had been pushed back temporarily, and the entire hospital was evacuated to Sudetenland, a safer place in the mountains between Germany and Czechoslovakia.
When Anita finally stepped out into the cold sunshine, she thanked God for healing her leg and caring for her throughout her long ordeal.
Now to find Mutti …
But the war raged on. Anita prayed amid the confusion. Somehow, God, let me get to Theresienstadt and let Mutti be alive. It wouldn’t be easy. To the Russians, she looked like an Aryan. To the Czechs, her language made her suspect; and to the Germans, she ’d always be a Jew.
The country was in shambles. Wherever Anita turned, she saw nothing more than piles of rubble and burned-out buildings. The war was as good as over, but the victors won no spoils—everything lay in ashes.
The people were in chaos. Hitler killed himself inside his Berlin bunker as the Russians raised the Red Flag over the city. The full extent of the Nazi evil unfolded little by little. The world reacted with horror. Everyone seemed to hate the Germans now, especially those people whose countries had been brutalized by the Nazis. Germans themselves recoiled from the atrocities committed under the Swastika. In the confusion, no one even bothered to sort out whether a German had been a Nazi or not.
Because people had been moved and resettled, it seemed like the whole country was trying to get home or trying to reunite with those who’d been lost or taken. Few homes remained unscathed. Travel was nearly impossible, and most of those trying to find family members had no money. They stayed at resettlement camps or Red Cross camps along the way.