The Lost Boys

by Catherine Bailey

  The Sippenhäftlinge slept throughout their first day at Matzkau. Late in the evening, they were woken by the camp doctor. After examining them individually, he announced that new beds with feather mattresses would be brought for them, and a detachment of prisoners sent over to clean the barrack. Uncle Moppel and Aunt Anni, both seriously ill, were to be transferred to the camp infirmary, where they would be under his personal care. None of the group had eaten since leaving Stutthof, and the doctor said they would be given a hot meal. ‘We waited in vain,’ Fey remembered. ‘Later we learned that the inmates who had been told to bring it had devoured it on the way. At ten o’clock a second meal was prepared and actually arrived. We were amazed by the luxury of it. There were tasty potatoes, green vegetables, and small pieces of sausage!’

  The next morning, breakfast was of the same standard. For the first time in weeks, they were given fresh fruit and honey with their toast. The good food, and the doctor’s evident concern, indicated that the SS intended to keep them alive. But they could not be sure and remained on edge. A few days after they arrived, Fey was unnerved by a visit to the shower room: ‘In the hard, cold light we were accompanied across the eerie, ugly camp to a special barrack at the far end. There we were ushered into an enormous room and told to strip naked. I suddenly realized that it bore a frightening resemblance to the gas rooms we had heard about at Stutthof. For a moment my heart stopped beating, but the SS left the door open, and when the guard turned on the taps, boiling water poured out.’

  The days went by, waiting for the SS to make their next move. Men and women were segregated in the barrack, and Fräulein Papke, the SS guard in charge, patrolled the building, ensuring there was no contact between them. Fey found her an unpleasant character: ‘A nasty, arrogant woman, with a thin, pointed face and beady dark eyes, she missed nothing and was constantly enforcing petty regulations. We were convinced she knew what was in store for us, but of course she refused to say.’ There was little to do, and Fey spent her time watching the SS guards drilling the prisoners in the yard outside. ‘The sergeant in charge took particular pleasure in making them drag themselves along the cold ground on their elbows. This evidently went into the making of a good SS man.’

  A squad of SS prisoners undergoing correction came in and out of the barrack daily, cleaning the rooms and bringing the group their meals. Towards the end of the first week, one of the prisoners revealed a piece of information that shook them to the core. The morning they arrived at Matzkau, both Fey and Gagi had overheard the inmates referring to them as ‘members of the SS’. They assumed this was a misunderstanding or that the men had simply jumped to this conclusion. But the prisoner confided that the camp authorities had warned the other inmates about the ‘special’ group of new arrivals. They were ‘members of the SS’ and their names were ‘top secret’. If any of the inmates discovered their true identities, they would be shot.

  In the circumstances, the knowledge that they were now categorized as SS caused acute anxiety. The front was at Marienburg, 30 miles away. While they were further from the Russians than they had been at Stutthof, as Fey recognized, 30 miles was hardly a safe distance: ‘Every day we would crouch down on the floor of the barrack, deafened by the thunderous air battles overhead, fearful from one minute to the next that a bomb would crash down on us. But this paled in comparison to our fear of the Russians. If the Red Army overran the camp, as “members of the SS”, we would be summarily executed. Our new status was common knowledge among the inmates and someone was bound to betray us. Whatever we said, the Russians would not believe us.’

  Desperate to be moved, the group worried incessantly. While they were grateful for the plentiful food, which continued to arrive, the luxurious meals were proof that the SS had a hidden agenda. Evidently, they were being ‘fattened up’ for a reason. ‘As the days passed and our health improved, we spent much time speculating about our fate,’ Fey recalled. ‘The general opinion was that Himmler was keeping us alive for his own ends, perhaps in order to use us as bargaining counters in the last hours of the Reich. But we had no idea for what purpose or for how long we would remain of value. We did not believe that Hitler, who had vowed to eliminate the families of the plotters, even knew of our continued existence. This, we concluded, explained why we were forbidden to call each other by our surnames and both the guards and the camp inmates were told they would be shot if they revealed our identities.’

  Fey was acutely conscious of the bitter irony in their situation. Their survival depended on Himmler’s survival. If he were to be killed or the Allies refused to countenance any attempt on his part to use ‘hostages’ to save his own skin, the group would cease to have any currency. They would lose their protection and, as ‘members of the SS’, be subject to dire recrimination.

  Confronted with the precariousness of her position, Fey thought about Corrado and Roberto constantly. ‘If they were still alive, I could only hope that their situation was better than mine. Better not to think about it. Don’t think about it, I kept telling myself. I was terribly afraid for my own fate but got desperate at the least thought of what could happen to the children.’

  ‘February 5. No news still of our transport from here. Tante Anni now gripped by typhus, can’t be saved,’ Gagi wrote in her diary.8

  A week had passed since they first arrived at Matzkau, during which Baroness Anni von Lerchenfeld had been slipping in and out of consciousness. The following afternoon – 6 February – she died. In her last days her thoughts had been with her daughter Nina, Claus von Stauffenberg’s widow, who had just given birth to their last child.

  While Fey had gone out of her way to avoid Aunt Anni, whose loquaciousness irritated her, she, like the others, was profoundly affected. ‘It was our first death. We had become so closely bound together that it seemed to herald the end for everyone. Until that point we had overcome all odds. Now we felt defeated. Some of us poured out our anger against the SS, who told us that she was to be buried in an unmarked grave in Danzig. We knew of a Stauffenberg family estate nearby, and we wanted her to be buried there.’

  That evening, they placed Aunt Anni’s body in a black coffin, decorated with a sprig of pine leaves, which the SS allowed them to pick from the trees around the perimeter fence. Fey was aghast when the camp commandant had the temerity to send his condolences: ‘What a lying hypocrite, I thought. Much later we found out that, in spite of the rapid advance of the Russian Army, the SS had in fact buried Anni on the estate. What illogical behaviour. On the one hand, the gas chambers, and on the other, this act. It would have been so easy, so in character, for them not to have bothered.’

  Another two days went by, until, halfway through the morning of 8 February, Fräulein Papke came rushing into the barrack.

  ‘Get ready! You leave today!’ she shouted.

  As Fey and the other women gathered their things, Papke strode around the room, issuing further orders. ‘Take away what you can. Pull the hooks out of the closets, the screws and nails from the walls, anything that might be useful. Leave nothing behind!’ Stopping in front of Fey, looking directly at her, she snapped, ‘You might as well get used to stealing!’

  Fey felt a surge of hope. ‘Such an order, coming from Papke, who was normally so strict in enforcing useless rules and so careful of her dignity, made me feel that the collapse of the “Thousand-Year-Reich” was but a hair’s breadth away. We did as she ordered, ripping out everything from the barrack that might prove useful.’

  30.

  Fey stood in the courtyard watching the SS move between the barrack and the lorry as they loaded the things she and the others had ‘stolen’ at Fräulein Papke’s instigation. It was ten o’clock on the morning of 8 February and they were due to leave within the hour. Seeing the mounds of junk piled up by the entrance, among them sections of flooring, metal coat racks and an old iron stove, she wondered how and in what circumstances they would prove ‘useful’. Worryingly, Papke had again refused to divulge their destination. />
  It was a cold, blue day and the sun glinted on the snow. Despite her relief to be on the move at last, Fey’s mood was low. A few minutes before, she had bid a silent farewell to Uncle Moppel, who was unconscious. He had spotted fever, a virulent form of typhoid, which she knew was usually fatal. Unfailingly courteous and kind, the former cavalry officer had become a father figure to her and she doubted she would ever see him again. His family were still with him in the camp infirmary as she left, and she could tell from their faces they were prepared for the worst.

  It took the SS several hours to load up. Finally, at midday, the truck carrying the prisoners of kin pulled out of the gates to the camp. Crammed in the back with their luggage, the group exchanged few words. So soon after Aunt Anni’s death, they were all feeling the wrench of leaving Uncle Moppel.

  Ten minutes later, they drew up at a small train halt in the valley below Matzkau. A single cattle car, which was to be their transport for the journey, was waiting in a siding. It was then that Papke told them that they were going to Danzig, where they would be ‘evacuated to the Reich’.

  Papke had not said how they would be evacuated. ‘Our fear of a ship is enormous,’ Gagi noted in her diary as the train set off.1 The recent sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff – the worst maritime disaster in history – had been widely covered in the German press and they had been told of the tragedy. The Gustloff, Germany’s largest cruise liner, had sailed from Gotenhafen, the port outside Danzig, on 30 January. It was the first large ship to reach the city following the launch of Operation Hannibal – the name given by the German Navy to the mass evacuation of civilians from the Baltic Coast.2 Danzig had become the destination for hundreds of thousands of refugees desperate to escape from the Russians. In the space of three weeks, 400,000 had descended on the city, swelling its population to almost a million.3 They included the first wave of trekkers, recently arrived after crossing the ice on the Frisches Haff. Stranded on the quayside at Gotenhafen or living in camps hastily erected by the authorities, their best chance of escape was by boat.

  The Gustloff was designed to carry 2,000, but when the ship docked 6,600–9,000 had scrambled on board.4 Soon after leaving the port, it was stalked by a Soviet submarine. Some 20 miles out to sea, the submarine fired three torpedoes into the ship’s stern. Within forty minutes, the Gustloff sank, bow down. Between 5,300 and 7,400 died – far exceeding the toll of 1,500 lives lost on the Titanic. The victims included an estimated 5,000 children. Many died as a result of direct hits from the torpedoes or by drowning in the onrushing water; others were crushed to death in the initial stampede for the lifeboats. But the majority succumbed to exposure in the freezing water as terrified passengers, leaping from the decks, capsized the crowded lifeboats, tipping people into the icy Baltic.

  The cattle car left the halt at four o’clock in the afternoon, only to arrive at Danzig at one o’clock the next morning – normally a journey of less than an hour. Refugees blocked the railway lines on the approaches to the city, and there were endless stops, waiting for the lines to clear. Throughout the journey, Fey was alarmed by the shouts outside and the constant pounding on the walls of the wagon as the refugees demanded a place on board: ‘Papke and Kupfer had bolted the doors and were standing by, ready to shoot anyone who broke in. Whenever we stopped, people were using objects to batter the sides of the wagon. Listening to these blows of despair was awful; but I was also terrified of what would happen if the wagon was overrun and the guards started shooting. In the cramped space, with bullets flying around, any one of us could be killed.’

  When they finally reached Danzig, the station was crammed with hundreds more refugees, most of them crashed out asleep on the floor. A blackout was in force and it was pitch dark. Picking their way through the bodies on the concourse, Papke and Kupfer directed the group to a bridge. It was a gantry-type structure, built of metal, high over the tracks. Crossing over, Fey could see the silhouettes of the cranes in the nearby harbour. The air was damp and smelled of the sea, making her shudder. It reminded her of Stutthof.

  Soldiers, armed with machine guns, guarded the platform on the other side. As the group approached, they made way for them to pass. The platform was eerily empty; solitary SS men paced up and down, and spots of red and green light bobbed in the darkness as the station guards, carrying lamps, moved soundlessly about. A goods train was drawn up, waiting to depart. A wagon had been reserved for the group and the SS directed them to the front of the train. Walking the length of the platform, past the long line of closed wagons, Fey sensed that they were packed with people. Thin trails of smoke drifted from the high windows and she could hear voices coming from inside.

  Soon after they boarded, the train jolted forward, only to stop a few minutes later in the marshalling yard behind the station. It remained there for the rest of the night. There were no benches in the wagon and, while it was more spacious than the cattle car, the windows, which ran round the carriage at head height, had no glass in them and it was freezing.

  Endeavouring to make the best of the situation, the men set up the stove, ripped from the wall of their barrack at Matzkau, and lit the paraffin lamps they had also ‘stolen’. Fey helped the other women unpack the luggage: ‘The nails and screws we had brought with us turned out to be very useful for attaching all manner of things to the wooden sides of the car. Food, clothes and shoes hung precariously above our heads. Every crack and opening in the boards was stuffed with our pathetic bits and pieces. We could all lie down at the same time, which was at least something. But there was not enough room to turn over, which meant we had to sleep in a fixed position.’

  The next day, the train did not move. ‘Hanging around the platform.5 Second night in the wagon,’ Gagi noted in her diary. ‘We’re lying together like herrings.’

  ‘Unchanged,’ she wrote the day after. ‘Third night in the wagon.’

  The guards allowed them off the train for short periods. But they were only permitted to walk the length of the carriage as the wagons behind were filled with prisoners whom they were forbidden to meet. There was no water on the train and the toilet consisted of a huge wooden tub, positioned next to the brakeman’s cabin. For drinking water, they had to gather snow from the side of the tracks and boil it on the stove. Snow was also used for washing – a basic strip wash, standing outside on the running board of the carriage. Papke and Kupfer took it in turns to go off and find food. With the city under virtual siege and crammed with vast numbers of refugees, there was little available, and they lived off tins of canned fish, bread and cheese, and a few potatoes and cabbages, which they used to make soup.

  The marshalling yard, filled with rolling stock and situated close to the docks, was an important target for the Allies. US and British bombers pounded the zone day and night. ‘The whine of bombs and the roar of fighter planes became as familiar as breathing,’ Fey recalled. ‘None of us, not even Papke and Kupfer, had any idea why we could not move on. We assumed it was because the tracks had been destroyed in the raids, or simply that all lines were already taken up with troop trains.’

  Sensing the tension in the group, Papke and Kupfer suggested a walk in the nearby docks. It was a beautiful morning and the first time, after four months of imprisonment, that Fey was able to experience the bustle of ordinary people on the ‘outside’: ‘They too were suffering from the pressures of total war, but they were at least free. The sun was breaking through the pale, misty northern sky and the sense of freedom as I wandered along, watching the energetic life of the docks, was intoxicating. So far we had been saved; there was so much that life had to offer. Yet this feeling was immediately destroyed when I thought about my two little boys. Where were they? Were they sick, maybe? Were they asking after me? I still had no answer to these questions after four months of separation. I vowed to myself then that I was going to stop dwelling on the unbearable. I had to imagine their salvation. All at once, buoyed by the beautiful day, I felt renewed in my determination to survive and to set ou
t at the first opportunity to rescue my boys.’

  Later that afternoon, the train finally left the marshalling yard. Imprisoned in the wagon again, Fey soon found her nerves beginning to fray: ‘Papke and Kupfer jumped inside, pulling the doors shut against the bright sunshine. As the wagon gained speed it began to swing wildly from side to side. Our belongings, so carefully stashed away, rained down on our heads. This, along with the feeling of suffocation and the constant air attacks, practically drove me out of my senses. I was sure we would be hit sooner or later.’

  The train was travelling in a south-westerly direction towards Neustettin, which was just 12 miles from the front. Through the slats in the side of the wagon, they could see hundreds of refugees, trudging along beside the track, still streaming towards Danzig. Now, travelling against the tide of refugees, they were seeing their faces, not their backs. The sight of their misery close up was heart-rending and it was then that Lotte decided to break the news she had withheld from her daughter since leaving Stutthof. In the tight confines of the goods wagon, she drew Ännerle close and told her that her father was dead. Lotte chose this moment because, confronted as they were with so much suffering, she thought it would help Ännerle put her own grief in perspective.

  A few feet away from them, Fey still clung to the hope her father was alive: no one had yet confirmed his execution.

  After another night in the wagon, the train stopped at Lauenburg, 50 miles to the north-west of Danzig. Papke told the group that it was a brief halt and they would soon continue on. But an hour and a half later she ordered them off the train.