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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 boundarybetween 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