Into Enemy Arms: The Remarkable True Story of a German Girl's Struggle against Nazism, and Her Daring Escape with the Allied Airman She Loved
288
Into Enemy Arms: The Remarkable True Story of a German Girl's Struggle against Nazism, and Her Daring Escape with the Allied Airman She Loved
288eBook
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Overview
In 1945, Ditha Bruncel was living with her parents in the small town of Lossen, in Upper Silesia. Close Jewish friends had vanished, swastikas hung from every building, and neighbors were disappearing in the middle of the night. At the same time more than fifteen hundred British and Commonwealth airmen were being marched out of Stalag Luft VII, a POW camp in the same region. Twenty-three of these prisoners managed to escape from the marching column—and by chance hobbled into Lossen. One among them, Warrant Officer Gordon Slowey, was the man Ditha was destined to meet and fall in love with.
Into Enemy Arms tells the extraordinary story of Ditha and the escaped POWs she helped save. Together, they embarked on a dangerous and daring flight out of Germany. As they faced exhaustion, hunger, extreme cold, and the constant risk of discovery, Ditha and Gordon’s love for one another intensified, and so did their determination to survive and escape.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781908117632 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grub Street |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 274,364 |
| File size: | 813 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Blitz and Blizzard
MY aunt remembers the moment she first set eyes on my uncle on the morning of Monday 22 January 1945 as clearly as if it happened yesterday. Her name was Ditha Bruncel and she was the nineteen-year-old daughter of hotelkeepers in the eastern German province of Lower Silesia. He was Warrant Officer Gordon Slowey, a thirty-year-old Royal Air Force prisoner of war in the process of trying to escape with twenty-two fellow airmen. To this day Ditha cannot explain what made her venture outside to see someone on one of the coldest winter days she ever remembers when a telephone call would have done just as well. Fate, she presumes in retrospect. However, whatever the explanation, the chance encounter that resulted almost certainly saved the lives of the airmen and dramatically changed her own. It came at the end of a week during which she and the men were pushed to the brink of endurance: she by the frightening prospect of the Red Army's imminent arrival and they by days of exposure, marching and sleeping rough in sub-zero temperatures without adequate clothing or food.
Ditha lived in the farming enclave of Lossen, roughly midway between the historic Lower and Upper Silesian capitals of Breslau and Oppeln, where her parents, Hermann and Hedwig, kept a former coaching inn called the Deutsches Haus. She was an only child whose youth had been stolen by the Nazis. As an adolescent she clung resolutely to her Roman Catholic faith although it was sorely tested a number of times; and in spite of having her mother's good looks and attracting attention from the opposite sex, she had scarcely smiled at a man other than politely, let alone kissed one. Yet she was about to fall instantly in love with an enemy airman.
When she finally went to bed on that late-January Sunday she remembers 'undressing reluctantly, conscious that at any moment during the night the Russians might arrive'. A constant barrage of heavy gunfire and explosions told her that they must be coming closer and although columns of German tanks had raced through the village earlier that evening to reinforce the defensive front line across the River Oder nearby, nothing so far had stopped the relentless advance of Marshal Ivan Konev's two-and-a-half million battle-hardened troops of the Red Army's First Ukrainian Front.
'The weather had turned really nasty,' she recalls. 'The temperature dropped to minus eighteen (Celsius); the wind icy and howling. We must have had six or seven days like it in a row by then.' In fact the driving blizzards and Arctic-like temperatures had arrived like a bad omen almost the same day that the Russian offensive began on 12 January, and then continued unabated since. It is small wonder that some people in the village even started ruefully blaming the war for affecting the weather as the mercury plunged to record lows. They can perhaps be forgiven for not knowing or caring whether it was the intense, mind-befuddling cold or the threatening rumble of artillery, sounding ominously nearer every day that was making them irrational.
By then Lossen and the surrounding countryside lay disguised under successive layers of snow, turning the flat, rural landscape into a featureless wilderness. Even the most familiar landmarks dissolved into the bleak monotony of infinite whiteness. For days on end the snow fell in an unremitting, blinding flurry, driven in places by the biting easterly wind into impassable drifts several feet thick, and sticking stubbornly to the steeply-sloped house roofs and trunks and branches of trees. It froze in small, jagged mounds on the telephone and electrical wires and turned the main road through the village into a stream of brown slush. Nearby the surface of the Oder was frozen into a solid sheet of snow-covered ice several inches thick that brought all river traffic to a standstill.
Ditha confirms that life was pretty bad by then without such dreadful weather to make things worse. 'Nothing was normal any more: the electricity kept going off and that night the lights went out for hours on end; there were no more news bulletins on the radio either, so we had no idea what was going on. We thought it a miracle that the telephone still worked.' Everyone remaining in the village knew that the Oder was all that lay between them and Stalin's vengeful front-line troops. Although crack units of the German army, reinforced by Waffen SS regiments, were making a desperate last ditch stand along the Oder the situation was all but hopeless and the wholesale evacuation of the German population from Breslau and much of Lower Silesia had started two days earlier. So too had the hasty emptying of Stalag Luft VII, the eastern-most POW camp for captured airmen, where my uncle was languishing with over one thousand six hundred other British and Commonwealth prisoners after almost five years behind barbed wire. Not surprisingly they had been looking forward with mounting excitement to the prospect of being liberated by the advancing Russians and were intensely disappointed on being spirited away at the eleventh hour.
By contrast the fate of German civilians left behind was ominous. They could expect nothing less than the wholesale destruction and loss of their property as well as indiscriminate killing and rape when the Russians overran them, if what they had heard on German radio reports and from terrified, fleeing refugees could be believed. Ditha says that morale could not have been lower. In that richly agricultural region of Hitler's crumbling Third Reich, where in better times the granaries and dairies overflowed, people had barely enough to eat with shortages even of staples like black bread and cabbages adding to their despondence. 'Deliveries had either stopped altogether or become very erratic; we'd had no soap or toilet paper for weeks and even women having their periods had to make do without something as basic as sanitary towels.'
BEFORE going upstairs to bed Ditha tells me she asked her father: 'How long do you think it'll be before they come in, Papa?' As a First World War veteran of Verdun, Hermann was only too familiar with the crunch of artillery but Ditha recalls he avoided hazarding a guess.
"Difficult to say. Judging from the amount of armour and troops we're sending forward I'd say that they're trying to prevent the Russians crossing the Oder," he answered. He gave the impression of being extraordinarily calm. She had asked him a few months earlier what they would do if the Russians overran Silesia, stay or leave?
"Stay, of course," he had insisted. "We've waited so long to be liberated from this maniac Hitler, the sooner the better."
"But Stalin's just as bad, Papa," she challenged.
"Agreed," he said, "but you've no idea what it's like to leave with only what you can carry and nowhere to go. No, whatever happens we'll stay and take our medicine. Germany's been digging its own grave ever since Hitler came to power."
After undressing by the dim light of a candle, Ditha laid her clothes over the back of a chair by her bed so that they were close at hand in case she had to get up in a hurry during the night. Although she was exhausted by anxiety she only dozed fitfully, too alert to fall deeply asleep while the guns roared outside and the air vibrated to the continuous crump of explosions. In the early hours of the morning she abandoned any pretence of sleep, sat up in bed and struck a match to relight the candle on her bedside table. The soft light of its steady flame cast an almost dreamlike, yellow glow around the room and she recalls 'childhood memories flooding back as I looked across at treasured relics, too precious ever to part with: my two lovely dolls and a doll's pram that Papa spoiled me with when I was only three, and a little wicker settee and matching armchairs from a Christmas before Hitler turned our world upside down.' Her voice trembles with emotion as she recalls the moment. 'I looked around and wondered whether if it came to a battle over Lossen, would any of it survive? Miraculously, a photograph of the little settee, with me sitting in one of the chairs when I was four, did survive and I still have it to this day. But that's all.'
She forgets exactly how long she sat there but thinks it must have been at least a couple of hours. 'All sorts of things were rushing through my head; I couldn't really make any sense of them.' Among this chaotic jumble of thoughts she wondered what the next day would bring. Hardly surprising, she even asked herself whether there would be a next day at all. Then suddenly the guns fell eerily silent and in the ensuing quiet she felt strangely uneasy, overcome by a sensation that made her skin prickle as if it were crawling with ants. She was familiar enough with the usual manifestations of fear to know that this was something different but she had no idea what. 'Rather than sit there doing nothing I decided to get up and tidy my room.'
Climbing quickly out of bed she wrapped herself tightly in her dressing gown before pulling open the heavy wooden shutters of her bedroom window, straining to look out through the double panes of thick glass after first scraping away the thin coating of frost on the inside with the ends of her fingers. All she could make out in the morning darkness were the snow-covered silhouettes of the Roman Catholic church and neighbouring manse on the other side of the main road, directly opposite the hotel. For once the road was quiet with no sign of any military traffic. A barely visible, telltale chink of light from the blacked-out, first-floor landing window of the manse told her that Father Helmut Richter, the village's Roman Catholic priest, was also up. No doubt he too had been kept awake by the resonant booming of the not-so-distant artillery fire, which now started up again as suddenly as it had stopped with a succession of loud crashes like overhead thunder reverberating around the room.
Like her parents, Ditha wanted nothing more than an end to Hitler's regime but the prospect of the Red Army's imminent arrival filled her with an unsettling mixture of hope and dread. 'I suppose this was what was making me feel so weird. I was excited and happy about the idea of being rid of the Nazis but can't say I was at all optimistic about the thought of living under the Russians.'
As she tidied her room she suddenly remembered that Frau Moll, the wife of a wealthy landowner with an extensive estate in the village, had telephoned her during the previous week to ask if she would teach her children French. 'With the Russians on our doorstep, I remember thinking that the timing of her call was somewhat bizarre. But everyone was behaving pretty strangely by then. I promised to think about it and let her know in a day or two.' Guiltily she realised that almost a week had passed and she had not given Frau Moll an answer. On the spur of the moment she decided to get dressed and go to the Moll family schloss to discuss the teaching proposition.
In the bathroom she looked at herself in the mirror and recognised the anxiety she felt in the dull reflection of her dark-brown eyes. She had her mother's delicate frame and trim figure with an alluring oval face framed in a bob of brunette, almost black hair, whose bounce and shine she longed to restore with the luxury of shampoo. Her youthful skin was smooth and radiant, and she could not have cared less about the almost total absence of make-up as the war dragged on into its sixth year, since she rarely wore it. Anyway, she remembers thinking to herself grimly, it would 'probably be better to look as plain as possible when the Russians arrived'. She adds: 'By then we'd heard of appalling atrocities being committed in East Prussia as well as Silesia; it was really terribly frightening just waiting for them to come.'
After pulling on a warm, woollen, navy-blue dress and slipping into a pair of calf-length, black leather boots she went down to the kitchen. Her mother was already up, also restless after a fitful night worrying. She had brewed a pot of tasteless, ersatz coffee made with roasted barley that had been a feature of life ever since rationing began in 1940. 'We usually laced it with chicory to make it more drinkable,' Ditha recalls. When her daughter arrived in the kitchen, Hedwig immediately poured away the substitute coffee and reached into a cupboard for a jar of what she called 'brown gold'.
"We might as well drink it now, before they get here," she said glumly, ladling a few mounds of real coffee grounds into the pot from the jar, one of her last from a pre-war stock she had laid in. The distinctive coffee aroma was a luxury and Ditha breathed it in heavily as she waited, recalling 'just the smell was manna from heaven'. Eventually Hedwig filled her cup with a stream of the delicious black brew and then handed her a plate with a meagre offering of toasted black bread spread thinly with rendered goose fat. Ditha savoured the coffee but toyed with the toast.
"What's the matter, darling?" Hedwig asked her with genuine concern.
"I don't know, Mama, I didn't sleep at all and I've got this strange feeling that I can't explain," she answered with her usual frankness.
"It's probably the noise of the guns; it's enough to make anyone feel uneasy," observed her mother, adding: "Come on now, finish your breakfast; you eat like a bird as it is."
Apparently it was true. Ditha tells me that she never had much of an appetite, except for treats like ice-cream and chocolate, and wartime rationing followed by severe shortages of almost everything remotely appetising had done little to change that. But on that particular morning she was unable to stave off 'a funny feeling' that made her even less inclined to eat than usual.
NORMALLY she left to go to work without bothering with breakfast. That routine had ended abruptly a week earlier when she took the train to Oppeln for the last time. Following the onset of the bitterly cold weather she struggled to the station in the dark, cursing the difficult conditions underfoot and the biting cold that numbed her face. 'But it was the loudness of the booming gunfire in my ears the moment I stepped out onto the platform in Oppeln that really sent a shiver through me. It gave me a feeling I find very difficult to describe; nerve racking may be the best way.'
Nothing she had heard in the days before could compare with the long rumbles that then filled the air with frightening regularity like pre-execution drum rolls. At the office where she worked as a secretary and French interpreter for the State-owned railway company, the Reichsbahn, nobody could concentrate on work. Like her colleagues, Ditha sat silently at her desk preoccupied by the noise of the explosions, which were then becoming threateningly frequent, conveying a sense of imminent danger that had been completely absent in the days before when they were distant, dull blasts, audible only from time to time.
During her forty-five minute lunch break 'an inner voice' told her to pack her desk and go home early.
"I've just got to go over to head office," she lied to the other girls she worked with as she left hurriedly for the station. The platform was crowded with women and children clutching suitcases and bundles of possessions, obviously fleeing to the west, and her train was late. 'Come on, come on, I kept saying to myself, praying for it to arrive. Eventually it did but I had real difficulty finding even standing room. Every carriage was filled to overflowing with frightened, tearful refugees. Nobody said very much; I think they were too upset. I remember being very relieved when I disembarked in Lossen forty minutes later.'
The blizzard conditions had started three days earlier and she walked the short distance home in heavy snow surprising her parents who were not expecting her back until evening. 'I don't know why but something told me I had to leave,' she explains. 'The next day I discovered all train services from Oppeln had been suspended so I was lucky to get out when I did.' She had no way of knowing it at the time but the city was being encircled by the Russians, who trapped tens of thousands of defending German troops and decimated them as they tried to escape, giving Oppeln itself a ferocious pounding. 'I never heard anything more from my Reichsbahn boss or any of the people I worked with.'
AFTER abandoning her job, she helped her parents preparing for the worst. Although Hermann was determined that the family should stay in Lossen, on his instructions they had already packed suitcases with their favourite winter clothes and precious mementos in case of being forcibly evacuated. Father Richter had allowed them to bury family valuables in the cemetery, where he had also hidden the church silver and gold. Military traffic through the village was as heavy as ever but many civilians had fled and those who remained stayed indoors out of the cold.
There was no reliable information about how close the Russians were to crossing the Oder and overrunning Lower Silesia but as Ditha remarks sarcastically, 'a sure sign they weren't far away came with the sudden exodus of all the good old Nazis from Lossen', joining the multitude of refugees heading westward. Further confirmation that they were getting closer came on 21 January when Ditha heard that the German supervisor and catering staff at a camp in Lossen for French forced workers engaged on railway track maintenance had left the previous day, presumably on orders from above. She was employed by the railway company as the Frenchmen's official interpreter and knows that they were jubilant about the promise of imminent liberation.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Into Enemy Arms"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Grub Street.
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Table of Contents
Preface,
Acknowledgements,
Lossen as Ditha Remembers it in 1945,
Chapter 1 Blitz and Blizzard,
Chapter 2 Seeds of Hate,
Chapter 3 Defiance Takes Root,
Chapter 4 Depression and Despair,
Chapter 5 Confronting the Gestapo,
Chapter 6 An Urgent Summons,
Chapter 7 Thwarting the Manhunt,
Chapter 8 Operation Gardening,
Chapter 9 Behind Barbed Wire,
Chapter 10 March and Escape,
Chapter 11 Waiting for the Russians,
Chapter 12 Joining the Flight,
Chapter 13 The Long Journey Starts,
Chapter 14 Fears of Betrayal,
Chapter 15 The Joy of Being Free,
Chapter 16 Separation and Reunion,
Chapter 17 Enemy No More,
Postscript,
The Escape Route,
The March from Stalag Luft VII,
Sources,
Notes,
