One Last Summer (2007) (29 page)
What is the point of wearing a uniform or trying to fight when every German knows the war is lost? All I want to do is look for Erich. I have written letters to Berlin, but received no answers. The only news is of terrible battles everywhere.
I have to stop writing because the corporal came to tell us that they have caught Gabrielle and Anna, who ran away yesterday. They lived in a village not twenty kilometres from here and they tried to get home. Was that so criminal? I think most of us would go home, if we had homes left to go to.
TUESDAY, 10 APRIL 1945
Yesterday we were ordered to go round the local farms to look for work. There is no more talk of stands or fighting, yet still they won’t discharge us. Before we went, we had to dig Gabrielle and Anna’s grave. When we finished, the officers lined us up to watch their execution. They forced both girls to kneel next to the grave before shooting them in the head and kicking their bodies into the hole. Then we were told to cover their bodies with earth. They didn’t even give us a blanket to wrap the girls in. I closed their eyes: it didn’t seem right to bury them while they were staring up at us.
Gabrielle was only seventeen, Anna eighteen. Shot for deserting an army that can no longer fight, only send its women soldiers to look for work on farms. To think that Hitler once said he would never allow women to fight because our place was in the home.
I felt like a beggar going from place to place pleading for work, all the while wanting to head north, but even without the risk of being killed for desertion, it would be useless to try. The refugees from there say the entire countryside is one large battlefield. A farmer’s wife has given me work for the next two days. In all this mess there are potatoes to be planted and hay to be raked.
Frau Strasser doesn’t know if her husband or two sons are alive. Her daughter was killed in a bombing raid on Cologne two years ago; she was eighteen. I hope that her sons and husband return, although I think even she holds out little hope of seeing her husband again. The last she heard was in December when he was defending Königsberg, and everyone knows that Königsberg was flattened by the Russians, who killed every German in the city. I think of Brunon. Was he there?
THURSDAY, 12 APRIL 1945
New refugees arrived last night. They told us there is heavy fighting in the south. Hanover has fallen and the Hartz mountains have been overrun by the Americans. It is bitterly cold.
Still they refuse to discharge us. Every day begins with a parade and a warning that deserters will be shot, not that anyone will try again after what happened to poor Gabrielle and Anna. We aren’t sure who will reach us first, the Russians or the Americans. I am afraid of both. I have been hoping rather than waiting for a letter, but nothing has come.
I am so desperately worried about Erich. Some refugees say that the Russians haven’t left a single building standing in the whole of Berlin, and that they burned all the survivors – soldiers, civilians, women and children – while they were still alive. I hope Erich and Mama von Letteberg escaped before the worst happened and that they are safe. I know that while Papa and Mama von Letteberg still live they will take care of my son.
MONDAY, 30 APRIL 1945
All of us were sent to the Kreigs Helfer Dienst. They told us that we were urgently needed in Augsberg. We stayed in barracks last night but when we reported to the aircraft factory this morning the foreman said bitterly. ‘Now, as the Tommy stands before Augsberg, you come to help?’
That was that; we had to travel back. The trains had stopped but a lorry came to pick us up. We divided what food we had left amongst ourselves; we can’t even be sure of staying together.
The lorry drove most of the night then stopped next to a camp. We were warned not to go near it but we could see people there. Or what were once people. They were grey, walking skeletons. I thought of Irena, Marianna and Karoline, and threw what little food I had over the wire. The skeletons fell on it like vultures. A guard shouted at me. I shouted back that he should be ashamed to treat human beings that way. Afraid that we’d all get into trouble if the guards came after us, the girls hustled me away.
And now … now I am truly a beggar without even a barrack roof over my head. If it wasn’t for my amber necklace and the keys, papers and diary I am careful to keep hidden in my rucksack, I would begin to wonder if I had imagined Grunwaldsee and my life in East Prussia.
TUESDAY, 1 MAY 1945
All the women in my unit were finally discharged. We walked to the nearest village and I was offered a room and food in exchange for work by a farmer’s wife, Frau Weser. She gave me a bedspread to make myself a civilian dress. It is not wise to wear uniform when we could be overrun at any moment, and I have no other clothes.
Everyone in the village hung white flags in their windows after our soldiers left yesterday, and there is an uncanny quiet in the street. The retreating units blew up all the bridges in the area, but at last the bombing has stopped. The first American tanks have passed through and they are not man- or baby-eaters. I am wearing my bedcover-civilian dress and they didn’t give me a second glance, or, at least, no more than any other woman. The village was not touched, but no doubt the infantry soldiers will arrive soon. If they are like the Russians I will climb on to the roof of the church and throw myself off.
Frau Weser told me that I can stay with her until the trains start running and the roads open again. I am sick with worry about Erich, Papa and Mama von Letteberg, Irena and the girls – and Claus, too – but it is useless to try to get to Berlin until the fighting has stopped.
WEDNESDAY, 2 MAY 1945
It is hard to believe it is May. This time last year we were planting the fields in Grunwaldsee, but now it is cold and snowing. Everything seems to be upside-down, even the weather. The Americans came into the village yesterday afternoon and requisitioned thirty houses, but the soldiers are not so bad. They searched every building for weapons and guns, but they did not plunder, loot, rob or rape like the other foreigners who are streaming through. No one seems to know who they are or where they have come from.
I went to church on Sunday, a useless exercise, but Frau Weser expected me to go. One of her sons returned in the afternoon. I could not watch their reunion, not when I remembered Paul, Wilhelm and even Claus.
Afterwards we all went to the funeral of a communications girl who had been killed by a low-flying plane in Wegele. At least she has a grave and a place for her family to mourn her, which is more than Paul and Wilhelm. Like everyone else who does not belong in the village I live from moment to moment, trying not to think about the past or the future. It is only times like now, when everyone is sleeping, that I dare to remember.
I hated writing in the logbook; the paper was so thin and rough. Now I am in Frau Weser’s house, I have dared to pull out my diary and I have fastened the pages from the logbook into it. I have changed so much since I wrote the first page. I look at it and wonder where that silly, giddy girl has gone.
Frau Weser’s son insists it is true that Hitler is dead. When I think about how he executed Wilhelm and the others, and all the people who have died because of his war, like Paul, I hope that the Führer is dead, and there is such a thing as hell so he can burn in it for ever.
Although I no longer believe in God and have quite given up praying, I sometimes sneak into the Catholic church when it is quiet and light a candle, just in case there is a ghostly afterlife and Papa, Mama, Wilhelm and Paul can see me.
Sometimes I light an extra one in the hope that I may find Erich, Irena and the girls. But it is a hope, not a prayer.
FRIDAY, 4 MAY 1945
The war is over. At nine o’clock tomorrow morning the fighting will stop in Holland, North Germany and Denmark. All weapons will be laid down. The Americans have left and de Gaulle’s French troops have taken over. Frau Weser has three billeted in the farmhouse. Two are all right, the third is vile. I go everywhere with Frau Weser to make sure he doesn’t get me alone.
SATURDAY, 5 MAY 1945
One of the decent French officers billeted in the farmhouse told us about a camp in Dachau for Jews and political prisoners who opposed the Reich. I had heard of Dachau even before the war. Frau Weser didn’t believe his description of what went on there but I recalled the camp I had seen with the grey walking skeletons and I knew he was telling the truth.
I thought of Irena and the girls, and also Ruth and Emilia. Are they in Dachau? I cannot forget sitting uselessly in the car in Allenstein, watching while Georg herded Ruth, Emilia and all those other Jewish children on to trucks.
The officer who told us about the camp is a Jew. He offered to take Frau Weser and myself to Dachau to see the conditions there for ourselves. Frau Weser wanted to prove him wrong, so we both went. The journey did not take long, and I found myself outside the gates of the same camp I had seen when I was with my Luftwaffe unit.
How can I begin to write about the horror? Not even the little I had already seen, Wilhelm’s words or Sascha’s description of the prisoner of war camp had prepared me for what I saw.
The French officer showed us bloodstained torture chambers. I thought of Wilhelm and almost collapsed. I cannot imagine any man inflicting or enduring the pain of those instruments. Shocked and still shaking, I began to cry, not loud, noisy sobbing, but the quiet weeping that chokes and prevents you from talking.
He showed us shower heads that sprayed gas; baths that had been filled with boiling water; mixing machines where people had been crushed alive, and the bunker. Prisoners were locked in a two-metre wooden box for fourteen days or until they died of exhaustion. I saw the crematoriums that people were pushed into, some when they were still alive.
The people were the grey walking skeletons I had thrown food to. I found it impossible to believe that anyone who had been starved to that extent could still be alive. One of them spoke to me and asked if I was the girl who tossed bread over the fence and shouted at the guard. I could not tell whether it was a man or woman, but he said his name was Samuel and that the Americans were looking after them now. There was enough food and medical supplies, but people were still dying.
I told him that I had only done what any decent person would have. He said that my shouting that the guards should be ashamed of themselves had saved his life because he realized that there were still people – and pretty young girls at that – who were prepared to treat Jews as human beings. It was strange because, after everything that has happened, I don’t feel like a young girl, let alone a pretty one.
For some the help came too late. The stench was horrendous. It hung around the skeleton figures. The American troops assured us that they will continue to look after the survivors until a better alternative can be arranged.
Neither Frau Weser nor I could speak on the journey back. The lump in my throat grew bigger and tears continued to well into my eyes. How could anyone do those dreadful things to a fellow being, even an enemy? The guards had to be animals – no, not even animals. No animal would treat one of their own kind the way those camp inmates were treated.
One American told me that the Russians have found even worse camps in Poland. Places where tens of thousands of Jews were gassed every day. Was that what Wilhelm saw in Poland and Russia? Was that the horror that lay behind his ‘curtain of lies’?
Did Sascha know about them? He told me men were dying in his camp, but he talked only of starvation and dirt. Was the neglect deliberate? Was that why we were never given food for him and his men? Are the camps the truth behind the Jewish resettlement?
So many people must have known about them: the guards; the transport drivers who transferred the prisoners; bystanders like me in Allenstein who sat and watched Jews being rounded up and taken away; other soldiers who fought in the East alongside Wilhelm and Paul.
At least my brother and his colonel tried to do something to stop it. The rest of us stood by and did nothing. I had my suspicions; why didn’t I ask questions? We all should have, but we remained silent, and for that I believe the entire German race will be damned by all thinking people. Wilhelm was right. What a dreadful legacy we have bequeathed to our children.
THURSDAY, 10 MAY 1945
Today we heard that Field Marshal Keitel surrendered to the Allies. It is finally over. Germany is no more, and I, along with millions of others, have lost almost everyone I love and everything I had, including my country.
So many people dead and so much gone. Tomorrow I will walk to the nearest town to find out if I can register somewhere in the hope of finding Erich, Irena, Mariana and Karoline. Surely now that it is over they can’t stop me from looking for them. Someone else must have survived – they must! I am terrified of not finding my son, of discovering that every single person I knew and loved is dead.
FRIDAY, 25 MAY 1945
I have just returned from the American prisoner of war camp – again. I have visited there every morning for the last two weeks, yet they still won’t give me the travel warrant I need to leave Bavaria and look for Erich. I have begged and pleaded with the clerks, and told them that I sent my four-year-old son to Berlin in January.
Their reply is always the same. If I cared about my son I should have never have sent him away from me, much less to Berlin. I am too upset and angry to explain that I had no choice. That if I’d kept Erich with me, he would have been murdered by the Russians along with all the other refugee women and children.
This morning I asked if they had a list of camp survivors in the hope that I might find Irena’s name on it. After what the SS said about changing the girls’ names, I know it is useless to look for them. If such a list exists the Americans say they haven’t a copy. Then, thinking of Papa and Mama von Letteberg and Greta, I asked if they had the names of survivors of the bombing of Berlin. Again the answer was no.
Frau Weser could see how devastated I was when I returned to the farm. She gave me a bowl of chicken broth and consoled me with the thought that tomorrow is another day.
But I can’t help wondering if I will ever see Erich again.
MONDAY, 28 MAY 1945
Finally I received my discharge papers from the Americans. It is official, I am no longer under suspicion as former German military personnel, and, in theory, free to go wherever I want. But, as the Americans refused to give me a warrant as well as my discharge papers, I cannot use a train.
While I was arguing with the clerks, a very thin man tapped me on the shoulder. I didn’t recognize him but he recognized me. It was Samuel Goldberg, the camp inmate I had met in Dachau. He still looked ill, but better than when I had last seen him in the camp.
The American doctor at Dachau had warned him that he wasn’t well enough to leave his bed, but Samuel said he couldn’t wait any longer to begin the search for his family. He ran a printing shop in Hamburg before the war, and lived in the suburbs with his wife and three children. He and all his family, including his parents and brothers and sisters, were sent East in 1941. He knows that his parents and brothers are dead, but he was separated from his wife and three children in a camp in Riga in 1942 and has hopes that they may have survived.
The Americans gave him papers that entitled him to food, lodging and transport, for himself and his companions in any town or city in Germany. When I told him that I was looking for my son, parents-in-law and sister-in-law, he offered to take me with him. I couldn’t believe his kindness. We are leaving early tomorrow on the first train north. Samuel intends to start looking for his wife in Hamburg. He doubts that she will have been able to make her way back so soon, but other Jews who knew them might have, and he hopes they will have news of her and his children.
And Hamburg is much nearer Berlin than Bavaria. But is Erich still there?
TUESDAY, 29 MAY 1945
I am still at Frau Weser’s, wounded and angry. The horrible French soldier was very drunk when he returned to the house late last night. He and some of his comrades had spent the day looting Hitler’s house at Berchtesgaden. He had a pillowcase stuffed full of women’s clothes and tried to give it to me. I knew what he wanted in return and refused, but he wouldn’t leave me alone. I tried to fight him off and screamed for help, but Frau Weser and her son were in the barn looking after a sick cow and the other soldiers were out. When I smashed a vase over his head he shot me in the leg.
Frau Weser and her son came running when they heard the sound of gunfire. The bullet passed through my leg, ruining my only pair of stockings, home-knitted ones that Frau Weser had given me. My leg wouldn’t stop bleeding, so Frau Weser’s son went to fetch the doctor. He was out but his brother, also a doctor, had just returned from Berlin where he had been working in a military hospital. I asked him, as I ask everyone who has come from the north of Germany, if he knew Papa and Mama von Letteberg.
Miraculously, he had known and respected both of them. But he had the worst news. Papa and Mama von Letteberg are dead. They were killed when a bomb fell on their apartment block. He had heard that their grandson had been dug alive from the rubble, but he didn’t know if Erich was injured or what had happened to him. I cling to the thought that at least my son was alive two months ago.
I cannot put any weight on my leg but Frau Weser’s son gave me a stick to lean on. Samuel agreed to delay our departure for one day, but tomorrow we are definitely going north. I will visit the displaced persons’ camps and offices in Hamburg with Samuel. If I find no trace of Erich, Irena or Greta there, I will go on to Berlin, even though it is in the hands of the Russians.
SUNDAY, 30 JUNE 1945
Yesterday, I left Hamburg. Samuel and I registered our families with the Red Cross there, and they told me that Erich had been placed in a Catholic orphanage in Celle.
I couldn’t wait for a train, so, ignoring Samuel’s advice, I stood at the side of the road and begged lifts from army lorries. A British corporal drove me to the door of the asylum although it was out of his way.
When I explained who I was, one of the sisters took me to Erich’s bedside in the orphanage infirmary. He has diphtheria and is very ill. The sister in charge told me that he hadn’t opened his eyes in two days. She could see that I wouldn’t leave him, so she offered me a job as a cleaner in exchange for food and a makeshift bed on the floor of the attic dormitory where the older girls sleep.
I cannot stop thinking about Samuel and the expression on his face when I left him to climb into a lorry full of strange men. We have been as close, if not closer, than family these last few weeks. It was very hard to leave him. We promised to keep in touch, but how will we manage it, when neither of us has a home or even an address?
It was heartbreaking going from displaced persons’ camp to camp with him. Records of survivors are only just being made and they are not in any kind of order. I checked them as best I could for Irena and the girls, and asked every survivor we met if they had seen them but they all said the same thing. The German relatives of the conspirators were kept in separate accommodation in the prisons and camps, and no ‘ordinary’ prisoner or camp inmate saw them.
Conditions in the orphanage are dreadful but the nuns work very hard to keep the place functioning. What little food there is comes from charitable donations from the British troops. Although every adult does their best to keep the place clean, it is impossible given the huge number of children here, and so many more arrive at the door every day.
Mother Superior told me that she is sure that most of the children who are brought in by Germans are their own, but she hasn’t the heart to turn them away as they are all starving. Food is in such short supply that every German is hungry. At least once and sometimes twice a day, a British, French or American lorry turns up with a dozen or more small children that the troops have found in the bombed-out ruins. The children are sleeping three and four to a bed in the dormitories, so it is little wonder that so many have caught diphtheria and measles. As if that isn’t enough, one of the sisters diagnosed scarlet fever in a new arrival this morning.
If – no,
when
Erich recovers, I must get him out of here. But where can we go without any money or friends to help us?
SATURDAY, 18 AUGUST 1945
At last Erich is strong enough to leave his bed for a few hours at a time. He is painfully thin and very weak, but the doctor has assured me that, given good food, rest and care, he will survive without any permanent ill effects. But where can I get good food when I haven’t any money? I will take him out for a short walk this afternoon. It is warm and sunny, and perhaps the fresh air will do him some good.
SUNDAY, 19 AUGUST 1945
I am so angry I can barely hold this pencil for shaking. It was so obvious, once I was told about it. Why didn’t I think to ask the Mother Superior any questions?
I simply assumed that Erich had been brought to the orphanage by strangers, but yesterday evening, when I was sitting in the orphanage kitchen, talking to the sisters about our families, I said that as soon as Erich was well enough I would begin to look for my sister and sister-in-law.
Then one of the nuns told me that I didn’t have to look far for my sister if her name was Greta von Datski. That she was alive, well and working for the British as an interpreter less than twenty miles away.
The nun told me that Greta had brought Erich to the orphanage after Mama von Letteberg’s maid had taken Erich to her in the last days of the war. Greta had told the Mother Superior that she couldn’t look after herself, much less a child, and there was no one else left to care for Erich as the rest of the family had all been killed.
How could Greta have done it? If I had found Marianna or Karoline I would never have abandoned them in an orphanage.
Mother Superior saw how angry I was and tried to calm me. She said that life had been very hard for everyone in the weeks immediately after the war ended. She asked if Greta was my only sister and when I said yes, although I have a very good sister-in-law, she insisted that I should be grateful to Greta for taking the time and trouble to get Erich to safety, not cross with her for abandoning him.
When I reminded her about the diphtheria, she told me there was no way Greta could have foreseen that Erich would contract it. She finished by saying that life is too short to harbour bitterness or grudges and I should never forget that Greta is my sister and the only one of my immediate blood family to survive beside myself.
Although I am not sure how Greta will greet me, I have resolved to go to the address she gave the Mother Superior. Even if Greta cannot or – more likely – will not help us, it is possible that she will have some news of Irena and the girls.
This is not the first time I have written that Irena is far more my sister than Greta ever was or could be, and I have a feeling it will not be the last.
MONDAY, 27 AUGUST 1945
As I feared, Greta didn’t want to know me or Erich, but she did ask a lot of questions about the family jewellery. She told me point-blank that she didn’t believe my story about the Russians taking it from me, and insisted I empty my rucksack.
I refused because I was afraid that she would take the deeds, keys and copy of the land grant to Grunwaldsee. Who knows when the Russians will leave East Prussia? I hope it will be soon so we can return. When we do, the deeds and keys will belong to Irena’s children, not to Greta.
I am always careful to keep the amber necklace that Masha and Sascha gave me hidden beneath my blouse, so I had no qualms about pointing out that I had lost all of my own jewellery as well as hers, Mama’s and Irena’s, which only made her more furious.
Greta is renting a large sunny room on the first floor of a fine house belonging to Frau Leichner, the wife of an officer who was an architect before the war. Herr Leichner disappeared at Stalingrad and Frau Leichner was very interested when I told her about Manfred. Like so many women all over Germany, she is still hoping that her husband will return. I didn’t have the heart to tell her about the bodies of soldiers I had seen lying in the forest and at the sides of the roads when I fled from East Prussia.
Frau Leichner took to Erich right away, and he to her. Her own son died of whooping cough two years ago and, after hearing Greta order us out of her room, and shout that she could do nothing to help me or Erich, as she had enough problems keeping herself (I think the whole house heard Greta), she offered me a small room on the third floor in exchange for my help with the housework.
The room is very small, and only has a single bed, but there is a fireplace, and, when winter comes, I can forage in the woods for fuel. Frau Leichner offered to look after Erich for me in the afternoons so I can find work to pay for our food.
I know everyone is looking for work and there is very little about, but a room of our own means Erich and I can begin to live a sort of normal life again. Everyone was kind to us in the orphanage, but it was still an institution. I only hope I won’t regret my decision to leave.
Greta was furious when Frau Leichner told her I was moving in. She accused me of having no shame, and said it was demeaning for a von Datski to scrub floors and clean up after other people. When I asked her how honest work could be demeaning she went into her own room and slammed the door.
I look on this move as a temporary measure. One day – soon, I hope – we will return to Grunwaldsee, but until that happens I will continue to look for Irena and the girls.
If she is alive she will have nothing to give me except her love, but I am certain that she will give me and Erich a better reception than the one Greta gave us.
MONDAY, 8 SEPTEMBER 1945
I thought it would be difficult to ignore Greta as we are living in the same house, but it has been surprisingly easy. She is out at work all day, and often doesn’t come in until late in the evening or early in the morning. She dresses in expensive clothes; her suits are tailored from British woollen cloth; her stockings are American nylon; her perfume, silk blouses and cosmetics French.
When Frau Leichner complained that she often wakes the household by coming in at all hours, Greta insisted she is needed to interpret at dinners and parties.
She certainly has a lot of boyfriends, and every one of them is an Allied officer, but she doesn’t dare to close the door of her room when they visit her. Frau Leichner has threatened to put her out in the street if she tries, and there is such a shortage of rooms Greta knows she won’t find another one as good – if she found one at all.
She works for an English major, Julian Templeton. To Greta’s annoyance, he has been very kind to Erich – and me. He brings us tinned food and sweets for Erich. He had a daughter who was the same age as Erich, but she and his wife were killed in a bombing raid on London. He offered me a job cleaning the house that his unit has requisitioned on the outskirts of the town. The money he has agreed to pay me will make a great difference. I will be able to buy good food for Erich and pay our landlady to take care of Erich when I work there in the afternoons.