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This rare slice of autobiography
comes from Helga Zirkel, Swiss by birth and now married to an
Englishman, who was one of a family of four born near the Lithuanian
border and brought up in Königsberg, the pre-war capital
of East Prussia. She had the good sense to keep her diaries,
when all else had been lost, which has allowed her to describe
many moving and often scarifying experiences, fleeing before
the Russian advance in the winter of 1944-45 and ending in the
British Zone, before her family's repatriation to Switzerland.
Born in 1924, it was only
when Hitler came to power that Helga realised she was different,
not German. Her father, who ran a profitable business producing
cheese and butter, discouraged her from using the Heil Hitler!
greeting, her Jewish school friends disappeared and when
the Fuhrer visited Königsberg in 1938, Helga was trapped
into giving him the bunch of violets that were meant for her
father.
At the start of the war,
she joined the fire-watch at her school. Although Swiss, she
had to do her war service and worked as a waitress and train
conductress in 1943 before starting her medical studies at the
university. Finding boy friends presented no difficulty, but
she lost no less than five of them, killed on active service
on the eastern front. A more unusual experience was meeting Hermann
Fassbach, who was working on the V2 at Peenermunde and who quickly
talked of marrying Helga without bothering to propose to her.
During an air raid on Königsberg,
she was trapped in a bunker and only just emerged in time, leaving
63 others to be suffocated. She survived, to continue her hospital
work in primitive conditions, caring for the wounded returning
from Russia in cattle trucks. When the Russians broke through
the German lines, the family scattered and Helga was given a
phial of cyanide by her mother to be taken in preference to rape
by a Russian.
There follows a gripping
account of Helga's retreat to the West in a temperature of 25
degrees below zero, armed with a rucksack and a suitcase dragged
on a sleigh, in the company of carts and animals crawling over
frozen land and lakes. At one point, the ice broke and she lost
her case and sleigh. For three weeks, she went without a wash
or even taking off her clothes. They passed a village which the
Russians had occupied, leaving the evidence of dead and naked
raped women and an old man nailed upside down on the door of
a shed. In the market square at Kolberg, the SS had hanged deserters
from lamp posts and trees. Eventually, Helga jumped on a train
to Stettin and took another to Greifswald, ending a journey of
350 miles. Then she collapsed from malnutrition, pleurisy and
pneumonia and woke up in a well-kept hospital to find her mother
at her bedside. Helga took a month to recover and when the war
ended she and her mother cadged a lorry lift to Hamburg, which
had been bombed flat, After a three-day queue outside the Red
Cross, she found her father, old, fragile and scarcely recognisable.
A new hard life then began
for them as refugees in an empty radio station. Helga's next
objective was to reunite the family, which involved travelling
south on a broken bicycle, jumping on lorries, making new friends
and arriving in Mainburg, near Munich, to find both her sisters,
Astra and Christel. All three returned to Hamburg to discover
that Astra was expecting a baby by an Austrian who had disappeared
from the scene. Then Helga's brother Hans turned up with his
story of another agonising journey from Königsberg with
his school friends. At long last, her father arranged for the
family to have Swiss passports and they moved to Switzerland
to begin a new life. But as they did not speak the Swiss dialect,
once again they felt like foreigners, only this time they were
in their home country. Throughout the many dangers she faced,
Helga never lost her humour or her balance, and her multifarious
experiences offer an unusual perspective on the second world
war,
Helga is priced at £11.50,
and is available from the publishers: Virona Publishing, 24 Putnams
Drive, Aylesbury, Bucks HP22 5HH.
© 1994 The
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