Hitler's Forgotten Children Read Online Free PDF Page A

put pen to paper on five occasions: two to record the effect of measles on me, one noting the happy news that I was no longer afraid of our family dog, and two more in which my slowness to speak (‘She doesn’t make complete sentences, her maximum is three or four words’) is observed and preserved. There was, as my mother must have known perfectly well, a very good reasonwhy I might be slow to get my childish tongue around German words. But there is no mention of this in the pages of the notebook.
    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