Cover design: Christian Friese
Photos in text: Christian Friese
Execution Dieter Zacharias
ISBN: 9783756297313
Production and publisher: BoD Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt
Commissioned special edition
© 2022 All rights reserved by
Christian Friese
3876McAlpine Road
V0R 1L4 Cobble Hill
Canada
The work may be reproduced in whole or in part only with the written permission of Christian Friese; this applies to all print forms as well as to digital media.
For several years at school and after I left school, I scribbled the daily happenings around me and inside my head onto the pages of a pocket calendar. This pastime became a necessary routine for me. When I had to give this up because adult life demanded more serious attention, I made a promise to myself: “I will not forget these tumultuous times. One day I will write it all down, for myself and for the children”. Some years ago, when a complicated broken ankle necessitated a period of rest, I saw my chance and started to write in longhand with a mechanical pencil and an eraser, until my German recollections were complete.
So it was until Dieter Zacharias who lives in Germany came onto the scene. As a little boy he often visited the Friese chicken farm with his father. Since we strangely disappeared from one day to the next, he often wondered what had become of the Friese’s. He found me in July 2021 by cleverly using the internet and we happily exchanged our stories. It came to light that he had recently researched and published a chronicle of his birthplace ‘Gülpe’, a village near my childhood home of Rathenow – Brandenburg. He offered to translate my recollections from the original English version into the German language, add photos and present the tale in book form in both languages.
The telling of these experience and memories are as I recall them. At the time of my writing, Liselotte who worked with our family during the war years, was still alive. She helped me immensely in recreating these days.
Christian Friese
The Friese Family 1953
Heinz Friese leaves for Africa
I saw the light of day on the 17th of September 1938 in the hospital in Rathenow. I have been told it was a warm and a sunny Sunday. The time was 1.30 p.m.; the birth was natural and normal and the weight adequate. No other statistic or information is available.
My father tells the following story:
When he was finally allowed into the delivery room, I had been cleaned up and swaddled and lying in a basket on my back, so he could see my face. Then to the amusement of all in the room he said to me: “Jüngchen, mach mir keinen Ärger” – Little guy, don’t give me any grief.
My father was not a funny man but that bit of humour must have been very successful since he told it to me often.
The day of my baptism came on the 6th of October 1938. One of my mother’s brothers, Onkel Heini (Heinrich Assmann) was appointed godfather. I never got to know Onkel Heini well enough to say anything about his inside, but from the outside he was a very direct and sometimes impolite person. His standard telephone greeting was: “Ja?” He wanted me to have his name since he was the godfather, but my parents had already named me, Christian Karl Felix (Felix after ancestors on my father’s side). So, when the priest asked the godfather what this child should be named, he answered with defiant assurance, Christian Karl Heinrich. My parents, actually my mother I have been told, were furious, and Onkel Heini was evicted from the small party that followed. As a result, my baptism paper reads Christian Karl Heinrich, and the civil registration, Christian Karl Felix. This mix-up created complications and a certain amount of bother when I later was sent to an unfamiliar school away from home.
Ilse and Christian
Possibly my earliest recollection is a physically painful one. I had a small cut on the inner side of my left ankle. To clean the wound Ilse, a young helper in the house, found, I am told, what was carbolic acid to clean the wound. It burned the skin and flesh and was extraordinarily sore. I remember the small white enamel tub my foot was soothed in afterwards. I remember the exact location in the kitchen, the white floor tiles. I still have the very distinctive burn scar – if you ever have to identify my body look at my inner left ankle.I was, I have been told, two and a half years old.
Other random early memories include sitting on a potty and not being allowed to get off until I had done something. Again, I see distinctly the brown, curvaceous receptacle and pushing myself backwards around the room getting under the feet of the adults. Outside against the left side of the barn was a pile of river sand where my brother and I often played. In the main part of the barn was a black private car (Opel P4). I remember playing in it but not actually seeing it on the road. My mother never got a driving licence and my father was away on war business. I remember certain outfits like a knitted, beige, tight-fitting sweater with knitted matching tights that came right down over my shoes and a matching knitted cap. I see myself playing outside on the sandy part of the street dressed in a finely checkered sleeping tricot of colors orange and blue. At the back it had a bottom flap held up with three buttons. I do not remember ever using that flap.
Behind the barn
Bernhard & Opel P4
I do not know where I slept in those early days. I also only vaguely remember my older brother, Bernhard, being around. I recall the incubator in the barn. I loved the barn: so much activity, always warm and so many hiding places.
My parents related two incidents that happened on the same Sunday and must have happened around that early time. Bernhard was missing. They looked for him everywhere without success. Then my father saw bubbles coming out of the depth of the very muddy and dirty duck pond very close to the house. He jumped into the waist-deep water and searched, again without success. Apparently, my brother was eventually found hiding in the car in the barn. When that excitement was over, it was discovered that I had vanished. After a frantic search and loudly calling my name, I was discovered hiding under the kitchen table with a freshly baked cake.
Upstairs in the house lived my father’s parents. I do not remember much about them then. I don`t think they played with us. They must have come down to eat with us though, as there was no kitchen upstairs. One clearly remembered morning, Opa came running down the stairs shouting: “Oma is dot, Oma is dot” (Berlin slang, Oma is dead). I had never seen Opa in anything but civil servant outfits, ironed trousers, white shirt with a stiff detached collar, a vest with a pocket watch and a looped gold chain. Jacket and tie I guess depended on the occasion and the weather. But there he was in a white night dress that exposed his white spindly legs to halfway up his knees. On his head was some kind of a white skull cap. I think my best effort to describe my reaction to this was then, and is still now, perplexed wonderment. Later that day my mother asked us to pick some flowers. There were lots of wild violets in bloom. She went upstairs with us and we put our little bunches into the folded fingers of Oma. Oma lay there, although unnaturally white, she had a surprisingly calm and composed bearing about her. It was not a scary experience in any way.
Grandma and Grandpa Friese
The next day a fairytale hearse came: two black beautiful horses, the hearse black with red tussels hanging down at the opening of the hearse housing on either side. It was the most fairy story sight I had ever observed. I was not allowed to watch the bringing down of the body and the loading of the coffin into the hearse, but I remember distinctly the magnificence of the scene when the coachman took the reins and the horses obediently and proudly took off. Oma died on the 27th of March, 1943. I was four and a half years old.
Looking back, one of the astonishing realities was that I was fully aware of my parents and all the other adults being against the war and dead against the Nazis and Hitler. But all talk was highly secret because if they found you disloyal to Hitler and the party, you would be shot or at least sent to a concentration camp. I remember being fully aware of that secrecy and I suspect it gave me a certain confidence and even boldness stemming from belonging to a secret plot.
I knew exactly what information was clandestine and who you must not talk to because they might report you. One of them was my father’s halfsister’s husband, Uncle Georg Druse, an officer in Hitler’s army. When I say I felt a certain boldness, I have to add that at the same time the adults had made me very scared of Uncle Georg. I viewed him as a cruel, cold monster - a disguise the devil might take. Fortunately we saw very little of him. Another person not to trust was my Opa, living upstairs. But with him it was more a question of his contrariness and of his not really understanding what was going on. Nobody really knew what went on in his head.
The code was in general: Do not talk to strangers and we all knew it; we grew up with it. A comical aspect to it all was that on billboards and other public places there were placards with inscriptions such as: Feind hört mit – Psst (The enemy listens – don’t talk). These proclamations were put out by the party to stop citizens from revealing secrets to the enemy, and we were another enemy, the enemy within. I knew it at five years of age.
In April 1944 the city was heavily bombed by Americans. It was the first time that the war had any direct impact in our region. I do not remember that event, but an urgent consequence was that from then on there was absolute blackout. No light was allowed to escape into the darkness of night. All rooms with windows that might be used after dark were curtained and shuttered. I remember those evenings as cozy and intimate affairs. I see us - my mother, Lieselotte, Bernhard, Alfred (my cousin) and myself - in the corner of the “gute Stube” (the good room) under a heavily shaded standing lamp. My mother in an easy chair knitting socks or gloves and, to our awkward amusement, a woollen natural-colour bloomer. Lieselotte also sitting in a chair, forever darning socks with the help of a darning mushroom. Us children sitting and lying on the carpeted floor reading or playing a game. My favourite activity was drawing an aeroplane flying over some houses shooting down and cannons shooting up at the plane. Then pulling or cutting the paper into small pieces to make it into a jigsaw puzzle. I must have drawn a hundred versions of that scene.
Christian, Bernhard, Rita, Alfred, Lieselotte
Another very obvious display of the hidden goings-on: in all the years in the house in Rathenow I never had a bed to call my own. Upstairs in the house there were five rooms: a living room with a small room adjoining (after Oma died Opa moved into that); a nice size bedroom also with an adjoining small room (my mother and Bernhard moved there), and a small separate room that became Lieselotte’s room. I was left out. In those years Germans were unfamiliar with big beds like Queen and King-sized beds. The arrangement for husband and wife was two identical single beds pushed together with separate bedding. The headboard would be a single unit covering both beds. The obvious consequence was that I slept very happily and securely in my absent father’s bed. This arrangement went on for years. Even years later, when my father was back, I often slept in between them on the crack between the two beds. The Germans call that the visitors’ crack (Besucherritze). It is not a comfortable space.
On my mother’s bedside table stood a shaded night light and a small radio. Compared to today’s small radios it was quite bulky. The radio was used for Nazi news only and other propaganda. But at midnight, hidden under the blanket with minimum light allowed from the bedside lamp, the radio would get set to the Voice of America news. My mother had learned to speak English when she was in America as an au pair. This was treason, and the station had to be changed after every listening just in case somebody with Nazi sympathies stumbled across that station. Of course the volume had to be very low and often that was not so easy. The radio would make all kinds of hissing and squeaking noises before it found the right wavelength. Again and again I watched my mother in this ritual. I clearly remember my mother looking at me sternly and putting a finger on her lips to show me that I must not talk when I first woke up to that activity. Again, I was quite comfortable and actually enjoyed that complicity.
Food was only available on ration cards though I am sure there were lots of black market dealings as well. I have a picture in my mind of us sitting around the dining table in the living room in the evenings, dim lights, on the table bread and some spread to put on the bread, and a plate with a flattened chunk of butter. The butter was divided into unequal parts by grooves allocating each housemember their share. I felt special getting the biggest piece because I was the youngest and I would make deals: I’ll give you some of my butter if you give me some this or that. I think it was Lieselotte who was my most active trader. Also, living on the land and being surrounded by chickens, we had a good supply of provisions. As well Opa had quite a big vegetable garden behind the house, all fenced and well-tended by him. So we really never went hungry.
My father was conscripted in 1941. He really did not want to be a soldier so, with his farming experience, he asked to serve in essential services producing agricultural necessities. I guess our farm was too small, for he was assigned a job with a large duck-producing farm by the name of Bölts Ducks. I believe it was sometime in 1943 that he was ordered to join the army as a regular soldier. Although he now had to wear a uniform and had his own gun, he still managed to avoid combat by looking after the army’s livestock, which consisted mostly of pigs. He was with a battalion that operated in Romania and Albania. It was right at the end of the war that he was consigned to a fighting unit, but even then he never actually fired a single shot. I wish he had told us more about his experiences of that time. Of course I knew nothing of all that then. All I knew was that he was not at home because he was a soldier fighting in the war.
Soldier Heinz Friese
In the meantime the farm activities and in particular the incubating continued with my mother in charge. She had a helper, Mr. Fiankowski, an older very nice man - too old to be conscripted. I remember him walking around, in the last days before the Russians came, with a broad white band around his arm. Opa also wore a white band in the last days. It means, “I give up”.
There was also Schura living in the barn and helping on the farm. She was a wild-looking, big Russian woman. I don’t know how she came to us and what happened to her. She was rough but very nice. I find myself smiling when I think of her.
And then there was Lieselotte. She must have been about fifteen and was sent to us by the authorities to do her “compulsory year” (Pflichtjahr). All girls of a certain age and not going to school had to help the cause by performing assigned work stints. Lieselotte fitted very well into our family culture and became quite indispensable to us all, especially to me.
Lieselotte with two dog puppies
There was the odd troop movement past our house on our country street, soldiers marching, trucks and tanks. It was so rare though that we would run to see it. The radio downstairs was set on a local station that sent out constant information on enemy movements and propaganda in between. When aeroplanes were heading in our direction there would be a certain beep-beep alarm warning on the radio. When planes came near Rathenow the city siren would come on, wailing up and down, up and down, for ten minutes or so. It was surprisingly loud and always frightening. To this day when I hear that sound my heart contracts.
I had started school sometime in 1944. I started with the traditional “Schultüte” (school bag). The Tüte looks like an ice cream cone but is much larger, made of decorated cardboard; it is some fifty centimetres high. There are assorted presents inside, mostly related to school, like a set of coloured pencils, a blackboard with the special pencil to write on the board, and an attached sponge to clean the board. There were also toys and candy. I remember a wooden truck sticking out at the top. Somewhere there is still a photo taken by a very good friend of my parents, Herr Oberstudienrat Specht (all that just means Senior Teacher Specht). I am sorry that I neglected to carry on the tradition with the children and grandchildren. Of course now there would have to be something like an iPad inside the Tüte.
There are not many memories of that time, but let me relate two. Our class teacher was an elderly man, a good teacher and very strict. He was greatly respected but not loved. On his left hand he was missing the three fingers between the little finger and the thumb. His favourite method of admonishing you was to grab your right cheek between the little finger and thumb and squeeze. He had an unexpectedly strong grip. If you were being punished, he would hold you like that with his left hand and give some good slaps on your other cheek with his right hand. He was also fond of carrying a menacing ruler- corporal punishment was part of keeping good discipline. I had my share of that discipline over the years. Was I damaged? Personally, I do not think so.
Christian 1944 – first day at school
The other lasting impression of that first year was my first reading book. It had typical big writing and pictures that I loved. One of the little stories was of a colourful rural scene with a stream lazily meandering through a lush meadow. Hans, a little boy, was playing by the water. He saw a white, blue and red boat with a sail being carried along in the middle of the stream. He was in love with the boat immediately. He ran along in step with the boat going down the stream, hoping it would come near enough to catch. He tried to snare it with a stick he found. At last he could not follow anymore and had to let the boat sail away. The caption at the end of the story was: Hans sees one cannot have all the things one wishes to have. A little story that made a big impression. I would say that this was my very first conscious reality check that you can’t have everything, just as the caption says, and that you must be content with what you have got and what you get along the way. I so intensely identified with Hans and the whole (for me) attractive scenario that I have never forgotten it. Over the years I have recited those words many times to myself.
I think I also saw the first movie in my life at that time. It was some children’s story, probably Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen. I still see myself sitting quite close to the screen. At one point the young girl in the story looks at us in the audience and says that we should call her when the bucket standing under the running water tap is getting full. So when the water reaches the top, we the children, start to shout for her. She doesn’t come and the bucket overflows. The water is now running seemingly straight into the audience. I was so near and so engrossed that I lifted my feet up and looked at the floor to see the water. The whole experience left me quite shook up and I think a little confused and frightened.
Whenever the city siren went off, school would be dismissed. Most children lived in the city and they just ran home. For me the arrangement was that I would wait at the entrance of the school gate and somebody, mostly Lieselotte, would come on my mother’s bicycle and pick me up. We would race home with me on the bicycle carrier. I still feel something like guilt that I do not remember anything of what happened to Bernhard, my brother, and Alfred, my cousin, at those times. They did go to a different school and I think they had bicycles. Alfred was Tante Paula’s, my mother’s sister’s son. They lived in the city of Hanover, which was one obvious target for bombing raids as it had also a lot of industry. Children in these big centres were sent to the countryside where they were less likely to be bombed. Alfred was my brother’s age and was at school in the same class as Bernhard. He came to us in 1942. Erna, Alfred’s sister, also stayed with us for a time. I still see her going back and forth on the swing by the duck pond singing one tune after another. My mother was especially intrigued by all the songs she knew.
A quite exciting distraction for me at that time was a military march with a brass band leading a rather small group of soldiers. This would happen every Sunday morning on a street near our church. As I remember it, we came upon that march quite by chance after one Sunday Mass. I insisted on watching this parade as often as I could and would be very disappointed if I missed it or if it just wasn’t on. The band played marches of course. The time was probably in the autumn of 1944.
I have no recollection of Christmas 1944. Christmas tree? Presents? I doubt it. After the Christmas holiday we went back to school and probably went until the beginning of April. But the atmosphere and the talk became more intense by the day, by the hour. Because of the Voice of America broadcasts, my mother was very well informed about what was really happening. Germany was surrounded and invaded on all sides. It must have been obvious that all was lost. All activity from here on was concentrated on surviving the impending disaster. The big dread, the overwhelming fear was that the Russians would come to us, while the most ardent wish and the most desperate prayer was for the Americans to come. It was true for everybody, not only for my mother with her American experience. The Russians had the most fearsome reputation. They were primitive barbarians, cruel and uncivilized, and they would be out for revenge for what the Germans did to them in earlier years of the war. I became more scared of the Russians than I was of the Nazi officer, Onkel Georg.
I cannot recall any terrible events happening in January or February 1945. There were many alarms of enemy air activity, but no bombs fell near us. The only strong recollection that comes from that time was the constant talk of the Volkssturm (People’s barrage). In a desperate attempt to stop the enemy, Hitler had ordered all men up to 60 years of age to be formed into units, the Volkssturm, to defend their local territory. Everybody was outraged. They had no training, no army clothing, and no weapons. Men older than sixty were taken in. I later learned and saw for myself that boys from age sixteen and many younger were forced into the Volkssturm.
The frantic activity probably started in late February. Bombing raids by Americans became a daily routine. The radio would report so many planes flying in the direction Berlin, they were expected over corridor Rathenow at 10.30, etc. We would all go out of the house and would sit or lie in the storm ditch next to the road. Soon you would hear the powerful steady droning, and more often than not you would see the twenty or thirty planes in formation, way up high, flying right above us. After the first wave of planes there would be a long gap, followed by another bunch, and maybe another after that. You knew when they flew in that direction they were loaded with bombs. Then what seemed to me after an hour or so they would come back, flying in the same formation at the same height. But you knew they had dropped their load and now were harmless, and we would stand in the street and count them. To me it was particularly interesting and fascinating when there was blue sky with white clouds and the planes would be in and out of the clouds.
A few times after the planes had passed on their way to Berlin, it would be raining silver balls of fine strings of metal. As I recall it would happen only when there was complete cloud cover. You only heard the planes, you never saw them. The game then was who could collect the most balls. We still had enough of these metal shavings to decorate our Christmas tree at the end of that year. These balls I learned, were intended to confuse the German radar facilities
By the middle of February it must have become pretty clear that the Russians would be coming to us. My mother probably had heard on the Voice of America of the Yalta conference between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, where they divided Germany into occupational responsibilities. The Americans would stop at the river Elbe, some 25km from us as the crow flies. Around mid-March to mid-April we actually heard quite clearly the heavy thunder and booms coming from that front. I remember sitting with Bernhard on the entrance wall to our farm and listening with great curiosity and attention to the dull thuds coming from the north-west. The big hope for the adults was that something had changed and the Americans were coming after all. Not so.
The area around Rathenow is very flat and the nearest thing to a hill is the Weinberg which was quite visible from the farm. One morning, to our utter surprise and puzzlement, there were huge grey balloons hanging in the air above that hill. I was very keen to go there and see them from close by. I never made it. I learned that they were part of the air defence of Rathenow. They were filled with gas that would explode. I never understood the full workings of this to this day, am puzzled by what they used as material. They were unnaturally large and quite menacing in their unknown purpose. We could not see them all but counted 12. Why were they still in place so close to the end of the war?
Another extraordinary defence structure were the “Panzersperre” (tank barriers). Again they appeared seemingly by magic. The next time I went to town they were there. Two appeared in our street, some three hundred metres apart, as you came into the city. They were built between the houses on the left and right of the street. In the middle of the barricade was an opening just big enough to let a car through but not a tank. To erect the barriers, deep trenches were dug across the street, and then two lines of enormous poles were vertically secured and buried in the trenches with about two metres sticking out. The poles, the size of which I had never seen before, were obviously freshly cut and stripped of bark. I was most impressed with the strength and power these beams radiated. I understood the purpose of the barricades but could not see that they would really work. On one side of the street was a solid line of brick-built agricultural barns. But the other side was sprinkled with separate houses that were encircled by large gardens especially on the sides and the backs of the dwellings. You could see this from the street. So tanks could easily drive through the fences and gardens behind the houses, and come back to the street the same way. That is exactly what happened later. The barricades turned out to be a complete failure. Still, how did they manage all this so late in the war?
There was very little private motorized traffic on the roads, and the cars and trucks still going would have been modified to run on wood gas. Somewhere on the vehicle you would see what looked like a large, upright water tank. On the bottom of the tank there would be a door through which you fed wood onto a very hot burning fire. To feed this fire with oxygen there would be a hinged, small round metal flap that would open to the inside as the fire sucked in air from the outside. This flap would open every few seconds and then fall back, closing with a definite and distinctive ping. To this day I would recognize this sound. Somehow this technique produced a gas that would run the vehicle. We called this apparatus a “gas cooker” (Gaskocher).
There now were many air attacks on the city but not actual bombing raids, where big planes dropped many bombs at a time, like carpet bombing. Maybe the Russians did not have such equipment. There were small planes flying low and shooting; maybe they also dropped the odd bomb. One night, very late, we watched as one of those small planes was caught in a searchlight over the city. I had never seen such a strong and wide light beam; the way it pierced the darkness was celestial. I suppose if angels had appeared floating about in that illumination I would not have been surprised. As it was, the plane was fully visible, dodging and weaving as it tried to escape the light and the occasional cannon fire that followed it up. To me it seemed a very long time before the plane managed to escape, seemingly untouched.
Another time, we watched three planes in a dogfight in broad daylight. Again they were weaving and dodging up and down and all over the sky. There must have been quite a breeze because with all this manoeuvering close by we should have heard more engine-whining and I guess shooting. In the end one plane caught fire and tumbled head over heels down. Another plane must have come down, as we saw a parachute floating down with a man hanging underneath. Mr. Fiankowski was sure he was Russian. All this must have happened over the open fields behind the last farmhouse (Ruthenberg) on our rural street. For me it was an open-mouthed, breathtaking spectacle, more nail-biting than frightening.
Probably at the beginning of April one German officer with a small group of soldiers moved into our house and barn. The officer stayed in the house in the large empty bedroom downstairs, while the soldiers stayed somewhere in the barn. The very curious anticlimax for the time was that they seemed to have nothing to do. They casually sat around in their rolled-up sleeves. They had no big weapons and no vehicles. All of them seemed older than most soldiers I had seen; maybe they were Volkssturm who somehow had full military uniforms. Since there was all this leisure my mother persuaded them to build a bunker for us.
As it happened, we had dozens of square concrete fence poles stacked behind the barn. They were quite suitable for making a very strong roof. So out in a field maybe three hundred metres away from the house, parallel to a grove of trees, the soldiers dug a hole some two and a half metres wide and four metres long. It was just deep enough that most adults could stand up in it. The fence posts were long enough to cover the hole from side to side, and there were enough poles to lay them across double. When the construction was finished, it had to be camouflaged. The soldiers first put a layer of straw from the barn over the top and over the sides of the bunker. Then they shoveled the soil that came out of the hole back onto the roof and onto the sides and shaped the roof structure so that it sloped gently up one side, over the roof and down the other side. They had saved the grass sods and replanted them on the roof and sides. When all was done it looked so natural and fitted so well into the surroundings, I would say it was quite undetectable from the air. The only possibly suspicious irregularity were the two entrances. The soldiers were very pleased with their construction and assured us a bomb could explode on the top and we would still be safe. The soldiers left soon afterwards. I think my mother was quite sad to see them go. They were cheerful and extremely helpful all round.
A highly secret activity was undertaken probably sometime in the middle of April. On one side of the main open space in the barn was a dark, somewhat mysterious chamber. Access to this grotto was a rectangular hole in the wall approximately one and a half metres high by two metres wide and two metres off the floor of the barn. The size inside was approximately three metres by three metres and the whole space inside was painted black. It was intended to be a dry storage silo. I don’t remember it ever being used for anything at that time. My mother decided to use this as a hiding place for all valuables like the good crockery and cutlery, clothing, a sewing machine and such. But nobody except the few around were to know about it.
There was quite a bit of traffic in and out of our place, neighbours helping neighbours. A constant drop-in visitor was our neighbour Otto Hunold; he was always referred to as the old-fashioned Hunold (der Olle Hunold). You always felt he was prying. I remember him hanging around when the soldiers built the bunker. We were instructed to divert Olle Hunold; under no circumstances was he allowed into the barn. Also Opa was not allowed to know what was going on, but he was easier to distract. I guess it must have been only my mother and Lieselotte who did all the work. We kids also helped quite a bit.
The stuff to be hidden was put into boxes and I remember especially into pillow cases. By the time all was packed there was a big heap of it. Stacked in a corner of the barn were a lot of big bags of barley. These bags were brought to the access hole of the silo. A bag or maybe two were opened, poured into the silo and spread out evenly. Then the packed goods were handed to a person in the space. I can still see the person in the chamber putting her hands out to receive the goods. The person in the silo was standing lower than the person handing the goods standing on the barn floor because the silo floor was lower than the barn floor.
When all was distributed nicely, they poured more barley into the hole and spread it until all the articles were well and evenly covered. Also on the farm we had a big stack of new bricks - my father had many ambitious plans. The bricks were now laid tightly and uniformly over the barley so when it was finally all set up there was a complete false floor in the silo. Now the rest of the barley was emptied into the hole. At the end of this operation both Lieselotte and my mother were white with all the dust from the loose barley. The hiding place was never discovered by the Russians. I was not present, or aware, of when they unearthed all those treasures again. What is remarkable is that the Russians must have used the barley for their horses but never stumbled on the floor below.
Also around the same time a type of mass-migration was taking place right in front of our eyes. Out of the blue, hundreds of people making up a very long column passed by our house. They were using all kinds of transport as in horses, donkeys and cows to pull wagons loaded with people and stuff. Those were the well-off ones. Most were pulling handcarts filled with disheveled belongings and maybe a child or two on top. Some carried nothing but a battered suitcase or just a bag. We were informed that these were “Black Sea” Germans fleeing in front of the Russian advance. I did not understand it then, but in retrospect they had come hundreds, maybe more, kilometres on foot. How did they survive all this? How did they feed themselves? It is almost too big to grasp. To my recollection they moved quite fast and with grim, silent determination in spite of their worn-out and shabby appearance. We had put buckets with water out by the roadside. Many made urgent use of this little respite, but it was always hurried so they would not lose their place in the trek. I sat on the wall and watched to make sure the buckets stayed full.
A really bad thing happened one day when a column passed. To confirm the saying, “boys will be boys”, somebody - must have been my brother or Alfred - had a diabolical idea. They wanted to secretly give bicycle riders a flat tire. So we put drawing pins through a small piece of cardboard right through to the flat top of the pin. These little pieces were then placed with the inside up into the bicycle path, and the cardboard was hidden with a thin layer of dirt. This bicycle path was on the other side of the main cobblestone part of the road. I do not remember ever seeing any bicycles stopping and looking at their tires. When we saw the refugees coming, we diligently removed the pin traps.
Sitting on the wall attending and watching the weary travelers, I noticed a woman pushing a wheelbarrow with goods and a young child on top. The wheelbarrow was different from the ones I had seen. It had longer handles, was deeper and generally larger and had a solid, single, wood wheel in front. She was pushing this barrow on our side of the road on the sandy part usually used by horse wagons. When she was right opposite from where I was sitting, maybe five to six metres away, I saw her stumble and wince. She stopped, lifted up her leg, felt under her foot, removed something from under that foot, looked at it for a puzzled moment, then threw it away, picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow and resumed her walk. She was barefoot. After she had gone a little way, I curiously went to pick up what she had thrown away. It was one of the cardboard pin traps. I do not know how it got there; we had laid them on the bicycle path on the other side. To this day I feel guilt and remorse about that.
In between all of what had become anxious and frantic activity, while enemy alarms sounded often and the sound of distant explosions came frighteningly nearer, German soldiers once more occupied our yard. It may have been just for a day, as I am sure they did not use our house. The purpose of their hurried stopover appeared to be to organize themselves. They came with trucks loaded with ammunition of all kinds. I remember the chains of bullets, obviously for some kind of rapid-fire gun. But the most interesting and at the same time fascinatingly awesome, were boxes of anti-tank rockets (Panzerfaust meaning tank fist).
We had heard all along of their lethal ability to literally drill themselves through the armour of a tank and explode. The might of this weapon was often used in propaganda. From somewhere we had learned a song praising the Panzerfaust: “In the left hand the grenade. In the right hand the panzerfaust. Bolsheviks you just come!” And there it was. They were neatly packed in flat wooden slatted boxes. I think there were four to a box. The bullet part itself was egg-shaped, approximately twenty centimetres long and fifteen centimetres at the widest part, with quite deep vertical grooves.
This head was attached to a pipe close to one metre long and eight to ten centimetres in diameter. The pipe was loaded with some kind of rocket fuel. To fire it you held the contraption over your shoulder, aimed and released the trigger on the shaft. I never saw it fired, nor did I hold it. Again, how come they had all this firepower so near the end?
But, and it was a big but! After the trucks had gone there was a lot of packing material left, among it the empty Panzerfaust boxes which had branded into the wood an unmistakably large emblem of a Panzerfaust. The adults decided they had to get rid of that incriminating evidence. They could not burn it as it could be a smoke signal, there was no time to bury the wood, and burying or hiding it somewhere might be considered very suspicious if it was found. So the decision was to drown the wooden boxes in our pond adjoining the yard. I suspected at the time that it would not work. Some boxes were thrown into the pond with the open side up and then were loaded with stones and bricks. The problem, which I had precociously anticipated, was that it was very difficult to load a box evenly so that when it was heavy enough it would just sink. Instead I thought it would turn over, dump the load and float again on top of the water. That is exactly what happened. I do not know what happened to those boxes in the end.
A mild, last-minute panic was about a shotgun my father must have owned and that had been forgotten somewhere in a cupboard. I watched my mother handing it and some shot to Mr. Fiankowski to get rid of. He wrapped it in some cloth and then something like a raincoat in preparation to bury the gun. I recall my thoughts: “But it will still get wet and then it will not work anymore”. I never heard about that shotgun again.
The Russians were expected to attack and enter the city anytime now. I suspect my mother had some doubts as to whether the preparations were good enough and whether we would be safe. In the barn in front of the Opel P4 motorcar under the straw there also was a three-wheeler pick-up vehicle called the Tempo. It had a cabin big enough to just fit two people and quite a spacious open loading platform behind. Herr Schwarzlose, an electrician and a friend from a neighbouring village, Hohennauen, appeared one morning. He had come to teach my mother how to drive the Tempo. I don’t know how they did it, but they managed to get the car out of the barn, somehow had petrol and got the engine started. My mother did not have a driving licence, nor had she ever attempted to drive a car. We children were very excited, jumped on the back of the Tempo, and had the best fun and laughs as my mother tried futilely to make the car go smoothly, change gears and steer at the same time. The attempt to become an emergency, last-minute new driver was given up when my mother reversed hard into an electricity pole. Everybody was amused, even my mother. It was likely the last lighthearted moment for months to come, especially for the adults. The failed idea had been to pack up the vehicles with provisions and things and drive to somewhere safe, wherever that might have been.
In all this frantic chaos a last Nazi power play took place. We had gone to Mass on Sunday. I once more admired the heavy beams as we passed through the tank barriers. It was a beautiful sunny morning and unusually quiet. I had not noticed anything extraordinary on the way to church, but on the way back, we saw many large swastika flags hanging out of windows. I was especially impressed with the flag protruding from our upstairs bedroom window. Lieselotte must have organized the display while we were at church. I soon found out it was Hitler’s birthday and if you did not salute the Führer, even at this late hour, you might pay with your life. Although for me confusing, it was a magnificent sight. It was the 20th of April 1945.
At this point I want to pause to evaluate the situation as I remember it. The weather was magnificent. Nature was green, colourful and succulent. The air raids by the Americans on Berlin had stopped some time ago; so had the rumblings from the other side of the Elbe River, and the raucous noises from the Russian advance still seemed some distance away. Electricity was mostly available and the radio had not stopped with the military updates and the constant propaganda. Propaganda would be something like: “The brave men of the X platoon have halted the enemy at Y bridge in spite of overwhelming enemy numbers, etc.” These last days seemed to have an eerie normalcy about them. But of course the air was thick with dreadful anticipation, the calm before an unknown and possibly cataclysmic storm. Although we were only two kilometres outside the city limits, we really had no idea of the troop movements or of the preparations for the defence of Rathenow.
It was many years later, after the unification of Germany, that I learned that Rathenow was to be defended to the last man. I have asked myself often what I thought and how I felt at that time. I do not remember being actually afraid; confused, mistrustful and expecting a doomsday, absolutely - yes. I think I was just too young and lacking the imagination to be afraid of all the possibilities. Also I trusted my mother to protect us. She seemed to manage very well without panicking. Finally, the fact that I was in on much of the secrecy and the plotting gave me and all of us a sense of belonging and an eagerness to help. Looking back, I see myself curiously watching and fitting readily in with all that was happening. As the youngest by three years and really not creating any trouble, I think I became a bit of a pet for the adults, a bit of sunshine.
On the 25th of April at 5.30 a.m. the city siren started howling. For half an hour it stayed on an even wavelength. It was the agreed - upon announcement that the Russians were at the city gates and that the defence of Rathenow was beginning. Somehow I knew that the Russians would be coming from the opposite side of the city and that our side would be an escape route.
I seem to remember that the fighting racket started quite slowly and was sporadic. We of course got up immediately, probably jumped up and in the semi-darkness started the trek to the bunker. Quite a few trips had to be made to bring bedding and provisions. By mid-morning we were well settled in our hideout. Sometime during the morning Lieselotte’s mother and two sisters arrived and stayed with us. So our group now consisted of my mother, my brother Bernhard, our cousin Alfred, myself, Lieselotte, her older sister Uschi, her younger sister Rita and her mother, Mrs. Schultz – eight people in all. The bunker was full. Not all the provisions, pots and pans and other utensils fitted into the bunker.
Not far from our shelter, maybe fifty metres, there was a corn drying shed. It was a narrow, quite high and long wooden structure encased all round with fencing wire with a solid sheet metal roof. It was half filled with corn cobs which must have come from last year’s crop. It always looked to me as if the next wind would blow the structure over, especially because the whole building was about a metre off the ground, supported by a few posts. In order not to expose our camouflaged shelter to aerial detection, all the immediate unnecessary utensils and other equipment were stored in the space under the shed. To my utmost surprise and delight I found a big pot full of boiled eggs. Although ours was a chicken farm handling thousands of eggs, we were definitely rationed as far as eating eggs was concerned. I quietly sneaked two or three eggs and consumed them when nobody was looking. I remember having some trouble getting rid of the shells so nobody could trace my sinful deed. Looking back at all the stuff under the shed, we must have been very well supplied for a long siege.
Sheep at the maize storehouse
A moment of pure pleasure and happiness came about when we discovered a fox family near the corn shed. There were five or six little red foxes playing innocently in the sun. They were tumbling and tripping over each other in the grass. The playing was cute but the little animals themselves were perhaps the most adorable creatures I have ever seen. Something happened and they were gone. We found the entrance to their den but we never saw the little pups again.
In the meantime the war racket became rapidly louder and more threatening. By the afternoon the smoke over the city was hanging thick. Often we saw actual flames shoot up into the air. At one point we saw a few aeroplanes quite high above the city and out of their bodies dropped what looked like a string of appropriately sized black turds. It was for a while as if they were drifting lightly in the air. But then, as they disappeared from view, a series of explosions confirmed that they had been bombs. It was the only time I actually saw bombs falling. The noise generally was deafening. Especially loud and frightening were the rapid blasts from the Stalin orgel (Stalin organ – the name given to a Soviet multiple rocket launcher). In the bunker the noise was somewhat dampened.
Sometimes in the dark of the evening our neighbour Otto Hunold came with his wife and one daughter. We tried to accommodate them in the bunker but they left again. It was just not big enough. Opa didn’t come either; he must have stayed in the house. I guess it must have been late evening, maybe night, the intensity had died down somewhat, and we all needed to get out of our crouched position in the fortification. Once outside our eyes were immediately drawn to the red sky over the city. Naked flames were clearly visible all over. It must have been incomprehensible horror for the adults. I just remember being as it were mesmerized; I don’t think I felt anything. I was stupefied and I just didn’t grasp the significance of the situation.