Hitler's Forgotten Children (4 page)

Nor does she dwell on what must have been a traumatic period in my life the following year. In the summer, my mother laconically recorded that I (and presumably Dietmar) had been sent away to a children's home, more than 250 kilometres away at Lobetal, near Berlin. How did we get there? I do not know: her diary is silent on this, as on so much else. All that she wrote was that:

Mummy is ill – meanwhile Ingrid lives from 5 August to 1 November in a children's home in Lobetal. There she suffers from mumps – but not too badly.

My mother's illness, I learned decades later, was in fact a nervous breakdown. Perhaps it was the collapse of her marriage and the burden of looking after two small children. Perhaps it was the strain of living under Soviet occupation; the constant fear of arrest or – worse – rape by the Red Army. The first entry in the notebook for 1947 shows that she had made up her mind to escape – and that she had enlisted my father, though they were still estranged, into her dangerous plans.

1 May 1947. Daddy takes both children to the children's home in Lobetal. Mummy wants to cross the border illegally.

I cannot pretend that I was ever close to my mother, nor can I claim to have ever really felt from her the sort of love that a child should take for granted from a parent. Gisela also plainly knew this; another terse diary entry in my mother's handwriting noted that I was always much fonder of my grandmother. ‘Granny is loved over all others, often more than Mummy. She gets on with the children very well.' But even so, I have to acknowledge that the decision to make a bid for freedom was immensely brave.

The border between what would, less than two years later, become the German Democratic Republic and the British zone of occupied Germany was both political and physical. It was, of course, forbidden to leave the Soviet zone without a special permit, and these were far from easy to obtain. Even writing the idea of crossing illegally in her diary could – had it been discovered – have led to interrogation, imprisonment in the Silence Camps, or worse.

In addition to this, the journey to the border was as arduous and complicated as it was dangerous. Bandekow might have been less than fifteen kilometres as the crow flies from the Elbe river, which marked out much of the boundary with the British zone, but there was no way to cross it. My mother had already made a secret trial run and must have discovered that the nearest bridges at Lauenburg and Dömitz had been blown up by the retreating German army in 1945. The nearest bridge left intact was 150 kilometres further south at Magdeburg.

With the country's railways still in chaos and with private cars (let alone the petrol to run them) a rarity, getting to Magdeburg would have been a challenge for a healthy adult, travelling alone. My mother was far from well – and she would have two very young children to drag with her every step of the way: it must have been a daunting prospect. Encumbered by Dietmar and me, she could not carry anything with her: the three of us would make the trek in whatever clothes we had and – if successful – would arrive in the safety of British territory with nothing more than the clothes we stood up in.

The near-impossibility of getting simply from one place to another in 1947 is clear from the convoluted escape route my mother carefully wrote down in the diary. Tracing it now on a map, the first part of the journey took us east, not west: ever deeper into the Soviet zone and away from the sanctuary we sought. We began on 30 June, travelling – I think – by horse and cart, twenty-five kilometres to the little town of Lübtheen. Here, my mother found a hotel to put us up for the night and in which we could await the arrival of her co-conspirator the next morning.

I have no idea how my father managed to get papers to cross from the American zone into Soviet-controlled territory, nor how he obtained the car into which the four of us crowded that morning. All I know is that the thirty-kilometre journey, eastwards to the city of Ludwigslust, was the last time our family was together.

The reason for heading so far east was waiting for us in the station at Ludwigslust. Both the platform and the train which would take us back westwards to Magdeburg must have been very crowded. That summer more than ten million refugees and released prisoners of war were on the move: like us, many were desperately trying to find a route out of the Soviet zone. Somehow – I was never told how – we had precious train tickets: my mother's diary records only that the train was so crowded my father had to push the two of us into her arms through the train window. She makes no mention of the fact that he did not make the journey with us, staying behind on the platform to (so I like to imagine) wave farewell to his wife and children.

Magdeburg was more than 150 kilometres south, and the train journey took all day. When we finally arrived, it was evening and we must have been both tired and hungry. Finding food could not have been an easy task: Magdeburg had been heavily bombed in 1945 and by the time we arrived it was still a city of ruins and ruination. And although it was in the Soviet zone, our Soviet-issued ration cards were not valid there. Alone with two small children in a strange and devastated city, my mother took the only available option: she found a black-market trader and handed over sixty marks for a few pieces of bread.

There is no information in my mother's diary about where we stayed that night. In the chaos that was Magdeburg, it seems unlikely that we would have found a hotel: it says simply that we stayed in the city all the next day, changing accommodation in the evening to be closer to the next stage of our path to freedom.

We had, first, to get a train out of Magdeburg, heading north to the village of Gehrendorf. Here the little river Aller was the boundary
between east and west. On the other side was the hamlet of Bahrdorf, safely inside the British zone. All that lay between us and sanctuary were the slow-running waters of the Aller. But there were no boats and no bridges: the only way across was to wade. So that was what we did.

It cannot have taken too long, for the Aller is small at the best of times, and in the height of summer would have been reasonably shallow. Nonetheless it must have been challenging for a fraught young woman with two young children in the heat of a midsummer's day. She must have been scared, hoping not to be seen by Red Army border guards and praying that neither Dietmar nor I would cry out and give our position away. The only record I have is what my mother later set down in her notebook:

The temperature is very high. Ingrid is very brave and overcomes the strenuous walk without complaining.

Finally we reached the sanctuary of the other side. We crawled up the bank and after a long trek through No Man's Land, we reached the British zone. We were free.

My mother could not have known it – though, given the urgency and determination inherent in her succinct account of our flight from east to west, she must have sensed the Iron Curtain beginning to fall – but we had made our getaway just in time. By September 1947, the borders between the Soviet Zone and those of its former western allies were closely guarded by a new influx of NKVD troops; it was not long before orders were given to shoot would-be escapers on sight.

What did freedom look like to Gisela von Oelhafen that summer's evening? What did it mean to her to have reached safety after two years under Soviet occupation, and to have escaped with her children from Moscow's iron rule? I wish I could ask her now.

A day's hard travelling later, we arrived in Wunstorf, a little town just west of Hanover and the penultimate stop on my mother's journey to her family home in Hamburg. I say my mother's journey quite deliberately because she would make the last leg of her trek alone. Her diary entry – terse as ever – recorded the very different fate allocated to Dietmar and me: ‘4 July: To Loccum, children's home.'

She had taken us out of the Soviet zone and into the less dangerous territory of the British sector. But that is as far as her maternal protection extended. No sooner had she spirited us away to safety, than she sent us away. My second night of freedom ended in the surroundings of a home for unwanted children.

I would spend the next six years, lonely and isolated, in the care of the church. In fact, my new life began exactly as the old life had ended: cold and frightened.

‘Dear Mummy, please take me home for ever.
I'm longing for you and Granny and Aunt Eka.'
L
ETTER TO MY MOTHER
FROM THE CHILDREN
'
S HOME

M
y first real memory is an orange. I have snatches of other, possibly earlier, recollections – lying, cold, under a blanket on the floor of a train; a line of camp beds in a long room and a rat running over my feet – but the first actual memory I know to be true is of the orange. I am at a long wooden dining table in a big room. There are a lot of people, grown-ups and children. I know that many of the adults are homeless men and women who have been invited here for the day; the children, though, live in this building. Each of us is given a plate with fruit on it, including a single orange as a special treat.

I know where and when this memory comes from. The year was 1947 and I was almost six years old. The room with the long table was in the children's home to which Dietmar and I were dispatched. It was Christmas Day.

The home was run by the Protestant church and was called Nothelfer, which, literally translated, means ‘help us in affliction'. There were sixty-five boys and girls living there, all under the age of ten. Some were displaced persons – children who had lost their parents during the war or in the chaotic mass migrations of the immediate post-war months. Dietmar and I were different: we had two living parents who knew where we were but who, for reasons best known to themselves, had sent us to be cared for by others.

We were physically as well as psychologically isolated. Nothelfer was on Langeoog, a small island in the North Sea ten kilometres from the coast of mainland Germany and 200 kilometres from Hamburg. To be fair to my parents, I don't think they had intended to send us so far away: when we first arrived in July, it had been situated near Hanover. But at some point in the subsequent five months those premises were closed and we were moved up to Langeoog.

Given its location, it was hardly surprising that Nothelfer was cold. I can still feel the wind whipping up sand from the island's long beach, seemingly stripping the skin from my legs and arms.

The home was staffed by sisters from the religious order and at times the regime could be harsh: physical punishment was part of our daily routine. If we were disobedient, if we wet the bed, if we broke the cardinal rule forbidding us to slide down the sand dunes, we were spanked. One by one we had to line up and pull our pants down and one of the sisters would beat our bare bottoms with a stick.

We would stay here for four years. From time to time our parents made the journey out to the island to visit us. Their visits were rare and they never came together, always alone. My father had moved from the American Occupied Zone into the British sector, and was building himself a new house in the Westphalian spa resort of Bad Salzuflen. Although he and my mother were separated, they had not divorced (and would never do so). Occasionally they spent a little time together – generally when Dietmar and I were allowed out to
visit one of them – but my mother had begun to make a new life for herself in Hamburg.

Immediately after sending us to Nothelfer, she had returned to her family's home in the city, a large three-storey building in an exclusive neighbourhood. Number 39 Blumenstrasse had three floors and a basement, and large gardens that ran down to Rondeelteich – one of the big lakes in the heart of Hamburg where people went boating, sailing or swimming.

There she lived with her mother, my Aunt Eka, and a housekeeper-cum-cook. Initially, they also shared the house with British Army officers who had been billeted there at the end of the war. Their presence was, ostensibly, the reason why Dietmar and I had been bundled off to the children's home: according to my mother there was not enough room for us all.

Whether or not this was actually true (since the position didn't change when the soldiers moved out), it did enable her to start a new life, unencumbered by either husband or two small children. She enrolled at college and began training to become a physiotherapist: once qualified, she turned one of the ground-floor rooms into a surgery where she worked with a growing clientele of patients.

She also took advantage of her essentially single status to find a boyfriend. Neither Dietmar nor I would ever meet this man, but within two years she gave birth to a baby boy, whom she named Hubertus. He was not, I am certain, my father's child, but he was formally registered as a von Oelhafen.

I cannot, in all honesty, say that my father's visits to Langeoog meant a great deal to us. Whether this was because of his age or his stiff and disciplinarian nature I do not know: what I do recall with awful clarity is the heartache of being apart from my mother, and the loss I felt after her occasional trips to see us. I missed her terribly.