Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Map
Family Tree
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
Copyright
For many years I have been saying that one day I would write down the story of my childhood but somehow I have never found the time. Then my husband Ray heard an announcement on Richard & Judy on Channel 4; they were looking for the best true-life stories to publish. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘you have no excuse. You have to write it.’ So I did – and this is the result.
I have to thank Ray for the initial impetus, and for his patience and support during the months that I have been preoccupied with writing this book.
I must thank Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan for coming up with such a brilliant idea, and for being so lovely to me when I made my first (very nervous) appearance on their programme. I must also thank the thousands of viewers who voted for my story to be one of those published, and I want to give a big thank you to Käte Elton, Emma Rose and everyone at Arrow Books for all their fantastic support and encouragement. I also want to thank Zoe Russell-Stretten, who made the mini-documentary about me and my sister Eva, which so captured the feeling of those times.
A very big thank you goes to Jean Ritchie, who is such a pleasure to work with. Jean, this is our book.
Most of all, I want to thank all the unnamed people, many of them soldiers, who helped us when we needed help so badly.
Finally, I give my thanks to my extended family and my many friends, for all the love I have enjoyed throughout my life.
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. This 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.
Inside the flat we had a large living room, with double doors across one end, which closed off another room, the smoking room. This was effectively my father’s study, where he kept all his books. He would retire into it to smoke and it was his own domain, a bit forbidden to the rest of us. There were long leather settees that seemed enormous to me and they were freezing cold on my little bare legs that poked straight out of my short skirts. But after a while, they’d warm up and stick to my skin.
At Christmas a tree would be smuggled into the smoking room, and the grown-ups would secretly decorate it and put the presents underneath. Then the doors would be firmly locked until Christmas Eve, which is the day of the great celebration in Germany. In the evening we would go to church and when we returned, the big folding doors would be opened and my father would ring a little bell. With huge excitement we would hurry in to see what was waiting inside. To my amazement, the tree was ablaze with real candles and piles of presents were heaped beneath. Then we would have dinner and the children all had to perform by singing a song, reciting a poem or reading aloud something they had chosen. Father would always read the Christmas story of the birth of Jesus, and the whole family would sing ‘Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht’ – the beautiful carol ‘Silent Night’. I was taught from the earliest age how to sing in harmony with my sisters. Even now, the fragrance of pine needles will take me right back to those Hamburg Christmases, when we were all together in our warm and comfortable home.
Then sickness and death came to our house, and the axis of my small world shifted irreversibly.
It was 1943 and I was five years old. I was ill with scarlet fever and, because it was infectious, my mother had put a gate across the doorway to my room to keep me inside. Eva, now seventeen, had also caught it. She had spent six weeks in hospital but the worst was over and she was back home with us, convalescing. Only Ruth had escaped the infection.
Ruth was my beautiful, glamorous, ever-so-grown-up sister. At nineteen, she worked as a graphic designer in the city and had a busy social life. She was a member of a biking club and she loved the theatre. One night she was planning to go to the theatre with friends, but at the last minute she cried off. Her throat was sore – too sore for her to go out – and she decided to go to bed instead. Within a very short time she was extremely weak and they feared that she too had caught scarlet fever. But it wasn’t the fever – something else had taken hold of her. The apartment was hushed, and the atmosphere tense and strained. The doctor came, but this time she did not come to see me.
Ruth was ill for only three days. Everyone was terribly concerned about her and she was about to be taken to hospital. The ambulance was on its way and had even arrived downstairs, but her throat was gradually closing until she could no longer breathe. She suddenly sat up, put her arms round our mother and in barely a whisper said, ‘Oh, meine liebe Mutti’ – oh, my darling Mummy – and died.
I stood at the door to my room, against the gate, wondering what was happening. Then I heard a strangled cry from my mother and, although I did not realise it at the time, my beloved sister had at that moment died, just three weeks before her twentieth birthday. It would be a long time before I was old enough really to understand that I would never see her again, or that her death had shaken my secure, happy world to its foundations.
Our father, who was working away, had a dream that something was wrong. The phone connections were all down and our mother had not been able to contact him, but because of his dream he set off for home at once, arriving the next morning. He had no idea why he had come, except for an overriding feeling that he needed to get back to us. He and Ruth were close: of all his three daughters, she was the one who took after him, while Eva and I were both more like our mother. Perhaps it was this strong bond between them that pulled him back. He arrived to find his darling eldest daughter gone.
I know the details of Ruth’s death from a letter my mother wrote to her sister-in-law, my Aunt Else, who lived near Berlin and was married to Uncle Artur. She refers to my sister as ‘big Ruth’, because Aunt Else had a daughter, also called Ruth, who was always known as ‘little Ruth’. Little Ruth was just three weeks older than me and, like me, was a surprise unplanned baby, born after the others in the family were in their teens.
Dear Else and family
The first few days of this uncertain time have passed. For us, the loss of our beloved ‘big’ Ruth is still hard to believe. Her death came too quickly. Waldi had to go back to his post. He has been transferred so much further away. You can imagine how hard it was for him to return there.
Dear Else, you have a lot of troubles too. Please let me know very soon what is happening with Günther. I can’t help thinking about you all.
Our Bärbel is in bed with scarlet fever. She is over the worst and can hopefully get up soon. Eva contracted scarlet fever at work and was in Mecklenburg Hospital for six weeks. She had just come home for convalescence here with us in Hamburg, so she was present when Ruth died. Ruth was only ill for three days. She felt very weak on Sunday evening. On Monday I called Doctor Wagner. She tested her for scarlet fever, which was negative. In the night from Tuesday to Wednesday Ruth was very poorly, so I called the doctor again on Wednesday morning. Ruth was supposed to be admitted to hospital at 3 p.m. with ‘severe angina’.
As the ambulance men were bringing the stretcher up to the third floor Ruth suddenly sat up in bed, put her arms around me and said, ‘My darling Mutti’ and she was dead. I am still shaking when I relive these seconds. Our so industrious, ever-ready-to-help-out and so happy Ruth! It is awful. She died of diphtheria. We bought a beautiful plot at the cemetery at Ohlsdorf, a family resting place for all of us.
The funeral service was most beautiful. All that was dear to her we sent off with her. If she looked down she would have seen how much love and devotion everyone paid her on her last journey. The chapel could hardly contain all the mourners. So many flowers: Ruth always gave flowers to people and it seemed that people gave them all back to her in one lot.
Two days ago, on 8 April, Ruth would have been twenty years old. Our big Ruth, and now she is covered by cold earth. I don’t think I will ever stop crying.
Dear Else and Artur, please reply to my letter very soon and tell me what is happening at yours – how is everyone keeping?
Your very sad sister-in-law Norma, Eva and Bärbel
With Ruth’s death, our home was a different, much sadder place. A stranger came to the flat to look after me during the funeral, because I was still unwell and too young to go. She was a friend of my parents but I did not know her and it added to the feeling of everything being fractured in a way I did not comprehend. Then they came to fumigate the flat, to kill off any remaining infection, and I had to wear a mask while they did it.
We had to go on as best we could after Ruth had died. After all, a great many tragedies were taking place all over the world and thousands, even millions, of people were losing loved ones in far worse circumstances. Nevertheless, a great sorrow filled our lives and I can remember the sadness of that time.
My mother coped by throwing herself into caring for Eva and me. We were both still poorly, recovering from our own bouts of scarlet fever, and my mother was selfless in her devotion to getting us better. Perhaps she was terrified at the thought that anything could go wrong with one of her two remaining daughters, or maybe it was her way of coping with the enormity and finality of Ruth’s death. Whatever the reason, she worked tirelessly, constantly checking on us and ministering to us, and taking no account of herself or her own health. When Eva and I were both fully recovered, my mother’s poor body finally rebelled and she collapsed. She was taken to hospital, paralysed and unable to walk. The doctors could find no reason for her paralysis and initially feared she would never walk again. Home was a strange place without my beloved Mutti, but she was gone and it looked as though it would be months before she returned home to us.
My sister Eva was doing her war work, which was compulsory for girls of her age. Before then, she had been a member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls, which was the equivalent of the Hitler Youth for boys. It was compulsory for everyone from ten to eighteen to belong to one of the two organisations, the BDM or the Hitler Youth. When they were initially set up, in the early thirties, the Hitler Youth attracted lots of boys because of its sporty outdoor ‘Boy Scout’ adventures, but very few girls volunteered for the BDM. Once Hitler had abolished all other youth organisations the ranks swelled and, with the increasing Nazification of Germany in the pre-war years, it became the acceptable thing to do. It provided an ordered social life for young people and no doubt lots of fun, with hikes and sing-songs and campfires. They learned dancing, cooking and needlework. Of course, it was all overlaid with Nazi indoctrination, but in those days most parents and children were oblivious to this. In 1936 it became obligatory to be a member and this was reinforced by law in 1939.
From 1943 onwards, girls of Eva’s age were expected to do war work. Some of them worked as secretaries in military or government establishments, some manned anti-aircraft batteries, some even became soldiers and fought and died alongside men. Luckier ones were sent to work on farms, the equivalent of Britain’s Land Army girls. Others, if they were intelligent and had some education, were assigned teaching jobs, educating the young girls of ten upwards who were evacuated to BDM homes in the countryside.
Eva was one of these. Although she was not qualified and was too young to have been to university, she was deemed able to teach the younger girls, so she was sent away to a BDM home as a teacher.
With Mutti ill and Eva away, there was nobody left at home in the Hamburg apartment to care for me, so I went to live with my father in Posen. I did not know it then, but I would never return to that apartment. My happy days on the Wandsbecker Chaussee were over for ever. I’m glad now that I lived in innocence and did not know that I was departing that life for good.
Because my father’s work on the railways involved travelling about, and because he was living on his own in the flat, I was billeted with a succession of his friends. My father was a very sociable man, always good company, and he had a wide circle of friends who were happy to take me in. I was well brought up, had good manners and I don’t think it was hard for him to find people to look after me. First, I was with the Sundermanns, whom I already knew well and where there were my friends Heinz and Fritz. Then I stayed with other families with children of the same sort of age as me and, apart from missing my mother, I was well looked after and happy.
But not always. I have one miserable memory of that time. I was staying with a couple my father knew but whom I had never met before, a childless couple who had little understanding of small children. They had two German Shepherd dogs roaming free around their house, so when the woman put me to bed she told me there was a chamber pot under the bed for me if I needed a wee-wee in the night, as the dogs would prevent me going to the bathroom. I was five, I had not used a potty since I was a baby and I was scared of using one on my own. So I decided I would not use it, no matter what. Then, in the early hours of the morning, I did want to wee. I held it and held it, determined not to use the potty, but then I dropped off to sleep again and dreamed that I had found a toilet. What a great relief! I found it and was at last able to stop holding in so hard. There was a lovely feeling of relaxation and warmth. Of course, I woke to find I had wet the bed, something I had never done before. I was very ashamed, but nevertheless the woman looking after me was cruel, because she told everybody in the village what had happened. I was very unhappy and longed to go home. Oh, I wanted my Mutti, my own mummy! I can still remember that sensation of great relief.
My mother was ill for five or six months and after a while she was transferred from her hospital to a nursing home near to where I was living with my father. Although she was improving, she was still suffering from the paralysis that had come upon her so strangely. The only medical reason we were ever given for her condition was that it was to do with her nervous system: the acute psychological distress she was in had caused her body to refuse to obey. We visited her often and would take her into the grounds in her wheelchair, and our father would lift her on to a blanket on the grass and we would have a picnic. Gradually, she improved and at last she was able to move into the flat with my father and me, and we were reunited.
It seemed so terrible at the time, but actually my mother’s illness and my evacuation to the Wartegau saved our lives.
ON 25 JULY 1943, British and American bombs started to fall heavily on Hamburg. There had been bombing raids before, but nothing as intensive as this. Hamburg was a natural target because it was the second biggest German city, with a population of one and three-quarter million, and the biggest port in the country. It was an important industrial target for the Allies, as the city’s shipyards were busy producing the U-boat submarines, averaging more than one a week for the two years before the raids. The city also had factories producing aircraft parts, lots of different engineering factories and vital oil refineries.
Even before we left, Hamburg had been attacked and, while I was too young to know why it was such a prime target, I certainly understood the words ‘air raid’. The approach of the bombers would be announced by the howling of the air attack alarms and we would hurry down from our flat to the underground shelter beneath the apartment block. Almost every block had its own shelter and all the residents would huddle there together, waiting for the end of the raid before we ventured above to see what had happened. It seemed that we were lucky – our building always escaped serious damage.
But that July, two months before my sixth birthday while we were far away in Posen, the heavy raids began. In a few short days over 10,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the city. More than 500 British and Allied airmen died in the battle for Hamburg and approximately 44,600 German civilians died. Some were killed directly by the bombs but many more by the fires that raged through the buildings. Over half of all homes in the city were destroyed and 900,000 people were homeless. Many of them fled from the city. Remarkably, some train services were still running and fares were waived so that refugees travelled free. Others escaped as best they could, in horse-drawn carts or on foot.
The news came that the apartment block on the Wandsbecker Chaussee had suffered a direct hit and was destroyed. There was at first relief that we were safe – my father and mother, Eva and I – so we were very lucky indeed. But we had lost all our possessions except those we had with us. Perhaps the most difficult loss was of everything that had belonged to Ruth: that hit my mother much harder than the destruction of her other, more valuable, belongings.
It was an anxious time as we waited for news of what had happened to the rest of our family. Soon, we learned that my grandparents and my mother’s two sisters, Aunt Hilda and Aunt Irma, and their children had also survived in underground shelters, but all three families had been bombed out of their homes. The husbands of both my aunts were away fighting and there had been no news of them for some time. Now they were all homeless and initially they stayed with other relatives who had homes in the suburbs that had escaped the raids. Then my father took charge and they all made their way to the Wartegau to join us. Through some good friends, a German family called Boetels who ran another large estate, my father knew of an empty house in the nearby tiny hamlet of Eulau, near the town of Punitz (Poniec). It was a large, one-storey building which had previously been the home of the manager of a brickworks. The brickworks had closed down and the house stood empty. It was set back from the road and behind it a track ran the 500 yards to the brick factory. My father set about taking it over and the whole family moved in.
It was a splendid and roomy house with four large bedrooms, which we called wings, all leading on to spacious communal rooms. My grandparents had one bedroom and each of the three sisters had her own room with her children. I don’t know how they got there, but I can remember we all arrived at the same time and my father led my mother into the bedroom he had chosen for us. I have a vivid picture of each little family group sitting on the beds in their chosen room: there was no squabbling about who went where. Everyone was relieved and happy to have a solid roof over their heads, safely reunited.
We were all so glad to be together again, but it was not to last. One day a telegram arrived and after my mother had read it I heard her crying. It ordered my father to report to a certain depot at a certain time. She knew what it meant. His age, his injury and his important job could no longer save him. Germany was running short of conscripts for the army and men who had previously been excluded from service were now being called up. Soon, even the young boys would start to receive their papers to do their bit in the last struggles. My father was drafted to fight on the Russian Front. It was the worst possible news.
The grown-ups tried to keep their fears from me and told me that my father would be going away for a little while but that I was not to worry. To cheer me up and take my mind off his imminent departure, my parents took me to visit some friends whose dog, a dachshund, had just had a litter of puppies. I was thrilled with them and even more thrilled when, as we left, I was given a present of one of them. I called him Lumpie and he was adorable. As he got bigger he used to follow me everywhere.
With my father gone, we all got on with living in our new home. Besides the four wings, there was a big living room with a Kachelofen, an oven built in to a high protruding section of the chimney breast, with a door at the front to put apples or potatoes in to bake. It was wood- and coal-fired, and was fed with fuel from the room behind. You simply shut down the fire to low at night and once a day emptied the ashes. Along the side of the oven, which was covered with shiny green ceramic tiles, was a bench where you could sit and toast yourself. There were also a dining room, a large kitchen and, at the back, a utility room and another kitchen, where we had a churn to make butter and cheese, and a special boiler for boiling sugar beet to make syrup. There was a further boiler for washing white clothes and a scrubbing board, and a large walk-in shower.
The house was comfortably furnished, which was fortunate as we had very few possessions. I had the clothes and toys my father had brought with me, and my mother had a little brown leather suitcase, which she had in hospital with her, with a soft towel and good soap, her underwear and nighties and dressing gown, and a set of silver cutlery she always carried. It was a tradition in our family that we all had our own individual silver cutlery with our names engraved on the handles. (I had mine as a child but it was lost in one of our moves. I still to this day have Aunt Irma’s spoon, which she gave me as a confirmation present.) My mother also had an album of photographs. Thank goodness she did, or all record of our previous lives and all pictures of Ruth would have been destroyed by the bombing.
My aunts and grandparents and cousins had the clothes they stood up in. But the women in the family were resourceful and good with a needle, and they could turn any bits of fabric into serviceable clothing. We children did not care anyway, as we were too busy having a good time.
Like my mother, Aunt Hilda had two children who were much older than her youngest, Volker. They were Ulrich, who was then away in the Hitler Youth, and Thekla, who, like Eva, was off teaching for the BDM. There was so much room in the house that when Ulrich came to visit us he turned one large empty room into an aviary. He caught wild birds, sparrows and robins, and put tree branches and food and water in there. I remember him digging up lots of worms for them. We always nicknamed Ulrich ‘the crazy one’ but it was the aunts who went crazy when they saw the mess the birds made, and Ulrich was forced to release them and clean up.
Ulrich was eight years older than Volker and me, so he was naturally the leader of our little gang whenever he was around and often led us into mischief. He was very clever at persuading Volker and me to do what he told us. ‘Bärbel is much braver than Volker!’ he would declare. I liked this and, of course, to live up to it I had to agree to his games. Volker, too, would always agree, as he was keen to prove he was just as brave as me.
The old brickworks had a series of ponds next to it. They were man-made and were used to cool the hot, newly made bricks. The bricks would have been loaded into small railway trucks, which were then shunted down rails straight into the water. The rails and the trucks, which were big enough for us all to clamber into, still existed and we played with them endlessly. We were warned off by our mothers, especially after someone drowned in one of the further ponds, but under Ulrich’s command we did it.
The factory itself was a three-storey building and we roamed around inside. Ulrich told us there were foxes and that we could befriend them. In fact, I think the only creatures living there were probably rats and bats. One of the items of clothing my mother had brought with her was a fox fur stole, which she wore round her neck like a collar. It had the fox’s head on one end and the long bushy tail at the other, which sounds gruesome but was very fashionable then. One day Ulrich told me to get the stole from the wardrobe in our bedroom, but not to tell anyone. He took it into the brickworks, hid it in a corner and tied a long piece of string to it. Then he took Volker, Henning and me on an adventure, and made us sit down in the same room as the hidden stole. As he cleverly pulled the string, the fox’s head appeared, and Volker and Henning fled in fear. Mutti was not too happy when she found out: ‘My beautiful stole on that filthy floor!’ she said.
When Ulrich wasn’t around, Volker, Henning and I were a great little team and we played together endlessly, occasionally getting into trouble. One day when the weather was bitterly cold the ditches around the farm fields were all frozen, and we three decided that if the ice was thick enough to support a stone, it would hold our weight. When the stone stayed on the surface, I was selected as the first to try my weight on the ice. I plunged straight up to my neck in icy water. Thank God, somebody was going past and hauled me out. I was not popular when I got home. My mother was obviously very worried that I could have drowned or frozen to death, but she was very cross with me, too, for being so stupid.
Eva and Thekla also visited us when they had leave from their teaching duties at the BDM homes. We were very excited when we knew they were coming and would run along the road to the turning for Poniec, to meet them as they walked from the train.
Next to our house was a courtyard and a small house where a Polish family lived. The mother used to help out in our house, and the father drove us in a horse and cart when we needed transport. Their son was younger than Volker and me, and he was not allowed to play in the brickworks, but he joined in our games in the courtyard. His name was Polish for Peter, so we always called him Peter. I even learned to speak a little Polish, but all I can remember after all these years is mleko (milk) and daja mnie pocatunek (give me a kiss).
Besides the marvellous playtimes we had, there were lessons too. Our parents were not going to allow us to neglect our education because there was a war going on. The people who had found the house for us, Mr and Mrs Boetels, had a tutor for their three children, so for a while we went up to the big manor house to share tuition. Later, perhaps because the tutor left, or because the family wanted to integrate more with local people, we were taken to a small school about two miles away. Every morning a lovely little horse-drawn carriage from the big house would collect me and Volker (Henning was too young for school). We felt ever so grand riding in it. I can’t remember learning anything at the school, but I loved the journeys. Sometimes we would persuade the driver to stop and let us pick mushrooms on the way home.
The grown-ups also taught us. My mother had herself been a student at the prestigious Froebel Institute and had worked as a governess before she married, so she took charge of teaching Volker and me to read. Aunt Hilda had been what today is called a graphic designer, doing artwork for big businesses. She had beautiful handwriting and she made us write out line after line of letters. Aunt Irma taught me embroidery, and Grandmother taught me to knit and crochet. I remember sitting on her lap as she showed me the stitches. Little as I was, she always talked to me as if I were mature.
She passed on to me her own philosophy of life and it has served me well. ‘Whatever you do, you don’t have to run to church every day or every week. As long as you can put your head on your pillow at night and not be sorry for anything you have done during that day, that is what being a good Christian is about.’ I have heard her voice in my head many times, reminding me, ‘If you are going to have to say sorry, don’t do it.’
There was one occasion when I was naughty and had to say sorry to my grandmother. She had a blouse with a lace collar, which was fastened all the way up with press-studs. Sometimes she had trouble doing it up, as her fingers were stiff. One day, while I sat on her lap, I pulled it all open. I was fascinated by the press-studs and wanted to see them pop open. But of course, as her blouse opened I saw her underwear. She was old-fashioned and very proper and private about things like that, and I felt so ashamed of what I had done. I can still recall the feeling of prickly embarrassment, but I can also remember seeing the most beautiful cream-coloured vest trimmed with lace that she had made herself. It was like the camisoles that young girls wear today. Omi did not really get angry with me, but I knew she did not like it. That night I said I was sorry in my prayers, and the next day I gave her a big hug and told her I would never do it again. She forgave me, of course.
I think we enjoyed Opa’s lessons the most. He had been at sea for many years and he had wonderful stories to tell us about foreign countries. We had a globe with a light inside it – I’ve no idea how we came to have such a thing. He would plug it in and we would all crowd round him, near the warm stove in the living room. ‘Where are we travelling today?’ he would ask and we would roam the world with him, hanging on every word.
The women were all very good cooks and I learned from them too about how to run the house and conjure up delicious meals. There must have been food shortages, but we were protected from them and I was never aware of lacking anything. There was always something to eat on the table. I’m sure the three sisters and my grandmother had to be very resourceful, but we children took it as normal. The house we lived in had a garden full of fruit trees – apples, pears and many others – and there was a vegetable plot where we grew food. Despite the war raging around us, the most traumatic event for me in those blissful months was lightning striking our beautiful pear tree and splitting it in half. Luckily, one half continued to bear fruit. On the front of the house, growing up trellises, were grapevines, and I could reach out of our bedroom window and pick grapes.
Every time the big farm sent deliveries of produce to the market, their lorry would drop off a large wooden box in the entrance hall to our house (which was never locked) at six o’clock in the morning, full of tomatoes, celery, swedes and potatoes. I can remember the lovely smell of the fresh tomatoes and the taste when I helped myself to one.
My father had arranged the deliveries before he left, and we always had money to pay for them and to pay the Polish family for their help. We had a bank account in Poniec, a thriving town with shops that could supply most things. Because we lived a few miles away from the town, we always had plenty of cash in the house.
While Father was still with us we had a supply of meat from his hunting. He went on organised shoots, and came back with rabbits and pheasants for us.
Sometimes we were all invited to a local farm for the ‘schlachtfest’, or slaughter festival. It was the three or four days of the year when the farmer would employ slaughter men to kill the cattle and pigs that had been reared for their meat. Of course, we never saw the gruesome reality of the kill, but the whole event was turned into a big celebration, with spit roasted pigs and huge barbecues of steaks, chops, and sausages. There were tables laden with potatoes, salads, bread and butter, and lots to drink. We sat at trestle tables and benches, tucking in to the food, and then we children spilled around the farm, laughing and playing games together. There were demonstrations of sausage making, and the grown-ups would order the meat and sausages they wanted to buy. The supplies would last us for weeks.
We kept our own goat, which provided us with milk, and we also had cows’ milk delivered from the big house. We made our own butter, the grown-ups sitting around passing the churn from one to another as their arms became tired. We grew sugar beets and boiled them in the small back kitchen to make a syrup, which we used to sweeten things. The smell of boiling beets is another powerful memory. It was a very self-sufficient, happy life. I have since learned that we were incredibly lucky. In Europe’s big cities food was scarce and rationing severe. But if you lived in the country, as we did, things were relatively easy and we always seemed to eat well.
We lived in our large and comfortable home for eighteen months and life seemed almost normal. At one point I developed a growth behind my left knee and I was taken in the carriage from the big house to the nearest hospital, in Poniec, to have it removed. It has never troubled me since, but for several weeks I was in a plaster cast from my thigh to my toes, because the scar had to be stretched to prevent me having a permanently bent leg.
We even had a birthday party for my grandfather’s eightieth on 1 November. Eva was able to come, and Thekla and Uncle Willi (Aunt Hilda’s husband), who was on leave. We had a wonderful day and in the afternoon the Boetels family came down from the manor house to have a birthday tea with us. Eva being there made the day even more special for me as I loved it when my elder sister was around.
Life was very happy, and Christmas was approaching with all the excitement and celebration that it brings. But unknown to me, our cosy little world was on the brink of collapse.
A FEW DAYS after my grandfather’s party, Eva was asked to report to Weimar, a city about 150 miles south of Hamburg. She was to meet up with the woman who was in charge of the evacuation of BDM girls to that region and receive further orders.
It was sad to say goodbye to Eva again, especially after we had had such a wonderful family celebration. She recorded in her diary that grandfather’s birthday was ‘a very special day’ and wrote of our house near the brick factory as ‘home’, although she had never lived there full time. With the destruction of our flat in Hamburg it was the only home any of us had.
Eva went at once to Weimar as instructed, and there she was told to report that day to Tabarz, a small village near the city of Gotha, a few miles further south, in the region of Thuringia, which is renowned for its beauty. There was a home there for children sent to the countryside, the equivalent of British evacuees. She went straight away, travelling by two trains, and when she arrived at the station at Tabarz she was met by four of the ten-year-old girls who would be her charges and one of the women who worked at the home.
She described her new post in her diary:
The house is situated in a very beautiful road looking out on to woods. There is a lovely view over the Thuringian countryside. I am in charge of a group of ten-year-old girls. They are very young and still like to play, and it is easy to get them interested in things.