My Mother’s Story In Her Own Words

Capture

Eventually, after what seems to be an eternity, the tank draws up outside a house where a number of Russian vehicles are parked. The officer moves unsteadily towards the door and kicks it open with his boot. Then he motions to one of the soldiers and shouts an order. I am pushed into a downstairs room. Closing the door behind him, the officer advances towards me.

I retreat, stumble against a chair, grab it instead and hold it in front of me. He takes hold of it with one hand and, laughing derisively, flings it aside. With my hands held out to fend him off, I stare at the slanting eyes, the prominent cheekbones, the leering mouth.

Paralysed with terror I watch him approaching very slowly and deliberately. I am trapped, and suddenly he pounces, pins my hands to my sides and pushes me hard against the wall. I scream and kick as hard as I can, when suddenly the door opens to admit a soldier. The officer wheels round and shouts angrily. An argument follows, then he turns and roughly pushes the grinning soldier, who is showing signs of taking over, through the door. He shuts it behind him and locks it from outside.

The air is heavy with fumes of alcohol. Wildly I look round for some weapon, a way of escape, but my eyes refuse to focus, and objects become distorted and unstable as I fight faintness and nausea. The noise outside has increased and now I become conscious of many voices creating a general uproar, of the revving of engines, and then another blood-chilling sound – the piercing screams of a woman in a room above. With an effort I force my limbs to move and find myself facing the window. At the same time my mind registers the fact that I am imprisoned in a room on the ground floor.

It is instinct rather than will-power that propels me towards the window. It swings open easily and I climb over the sill and drop to the ground in the vegetable garden at the back of the house.

Escape

Adjoining the garden is a cemetery, and behind it a track leads through pine woods into the hills. With my heart racing violently and my throat constricted with fear I run towards it. All the noise is coming from behind me, where the Russians appear to be congregating in the road. I have reached the cemetery when a bullet whizzes past my head. I drop to my knees behind a bush. Any moment now I shall be dragged back to the house. I spring up and continue to run across the cemetery. Better to be hit by a bullet and killed than to be recaptured.

Bullets continue to whistle through the air, but most of them ricochet off gravestones that are nowhere near me. I have heard people say that the Russians, when drunk, are trigger-happy and shoot into the air. But any moment now my absence must be discovered and the open window will indicate the way I have gone. There is little hope that I shall get away, but I run and crouch and run on again bent double, zigzagging between the gravestones. Though perspiration is trickling down my back, I feel deadly cold, and my mouth is dry with fear.

I look behind me. I can still see the open window, and unbelievably there is no-one following me. They are still firing in all directions. I have reached the wall when I hear a shout behind me. Frantically, I look up and down the cemetery wall. Just to my right there is a small gap in the stones. I race towards it.

Wriggling furiously, I manage to get my head, one shoulder and an arm through, catch hold of the low-hanging branch of a small fir tree and pull with all my strength. After an eternity, scratched and torn and bleeding, I drop down on the other side where the trees are growing close together and crash through the undergrowth like a hunted hare until, dazed and quivering, I collapse with my breath rasping and my lungs bursting.

Hiding

With my face pressed to the ground, inhaling the sweetish odour of the forest soil, I try to control the grating noise of my breathing that must surely be audible throughout the wood. I am still gasping for breath when I hear the voices of those who have followed me coming closer. Gagged by my handkerchief I flatten myself as much as I can. The sound of voices and of bodies crashing through the undergrowth comes closer, then a stick is thrust close to where I lie paralysed with horror, as I am to do in the nightmares in which for years to come I am to relive this moment over and over again.

For a long time after the voices have faded, I lie motionless, wedged between tree trunks, listening intently; apart from the hum of insects and the drumming of the pulse in my ears all is still. When I am sure that the men must have returned to the house another way, I proceed slowly and cautiously up the hill.

Every bush is a Russian soldier; the brambles and boughs catching my jodhpurs and my sleeves are clutching hands; the pulse still hammering loudly in my ears is the sound of pursuing footsteps. The wood is full of eyes and hands, watching, waiting to pounce. I must get up as high as possible: the Russians in their drunken state will hardly feel like mountaineering.

Up in the Mountains

As the last streaks of daylight begin to fade I decide to climb down and try to find some sort of habitation. The descent is long and tedious, for in my desire to get away I have climbed high. It is quite dark when at last I reach a clearing and see a faint glimmer of light through the trees above a slight incline, and in a few minutes I reach a path leading to the front door of a wooden house.

There is no response to my timid knock; a further louder knock remains unanswered, and suddenly feeling desperate, I begin to hammer on the door. I almost fall into the arms of a burly man when it opens and light spills out on to the path. He glowers at me. ‘What do you want?’

‘Oh please,’ I stammer, ‘can you sell me some food?’ I hold out some money. He looks at it suspiciously: Money’s no good to us.’ Round my neck I wear the gold cross that Mother gave me for my first communion, but it is hidden under my clothes and I am determined not to part with it.

A woman comes up behind the man. ‘What are you doing here?’ she demands, looking curiously at my riding outfit, torn clothes and scratched face and arms.

‘I am running away from the Russians, they caught me down there’ – I gesture vaguely downhill – ‘but I got away.’

‘You’d better get on then,’ she says curtly, ‘we don’t want any Russians here.’

‘But that was yesterday,’ I protest, ‘I’ve come a long way since then. Please sell me some food, I have had nothing to eat since yesterday morning.’ I reach for the doorpost that recedes into blackness.

When I open my eyes I am sitting on a chair and someone, I guess it is the man, is holding my head down to my knees. Then he sits me upright and holds a bottle of Enzian, gentian liquor, to my lips. The spirit runs down my throat like fire. I am in a room serving as combined living-room and kitchen. The woman gathers up some crockery from the table and lowers it into the sink, then she disappears into the pantry and comes out with a saucepan. She places it on the top of the big black kitchen range and begins to stir the contents.

At last she sets a steaming bowl before me, and immediately I start to eat and burn my mouth. It is Polenta, a kind of porridge made of ground maize.

The farmers let Gerda stay overnight in the loft, then they gave her some food and sent her on her way towards Carinthia, where the British were. Later, she met another fugitive.

(He has) a handsome face with a scar from a fencing wound across the left cheek. The expression in the eyes regarding me is cold, cynical and mocking. I remember that the last time I saw this man he was wearing a gold party badge, that he is a fanatical Nazi who, with his wife and two grown-up children, lives in a house not far from us.

‘And what are you running away from?’ he asks.

‘The Russians,’ I gasp.

‘Well, well now, isn’t it lucky that we have met; it really isn’t safe for an attractive young girl like you to roam these hills unprotected.’ When I don’t reply, he continues, ‘You don’t seem to have any luggage.’

I look at him scathingly. ‘You don’t get far in the mountains with a suitcase.’

‘Not a suitcase, but at least a sleeping bag and the wherewithal to prepare some food. But never mind, I have enough for two.’

I have no option but to walk with him, for if I try to run away he is sure to catch up with me. Walking beside me he asks questions to which I reply as briefly as I can. The shadows grow longer and the sun is dipping towards the mountain peaks when we reach a clearing. Taking the pack off his back and lowering it to the ground, he pronounces the place suitable for camping. I hesitate, but only for a moment, then I sit down and watch him lighting a fire and putting some ham into a frying pan. ‘You can share my sleeping bag,’ he says without looking up.

My heart is beating furiously. He puts the pan on the fire and picks up a small kettle. ‘Watch this, won’t you, I’m going to get some water.’ I move obediently towards the fire and with a forced smile tell him that the ham smells delicious and is making me feel hungry. Delighted, he bends down and, cupping my face in his hands, kisses me long and lingeringly. Then, straightening up reluctantly, he promises to be back very soon. Sick and trembling I watch him until darkness swallows him. Hastily I remove the pan from the fire and retreat from the clearing, slowly at first, for fear of creating a noise, but when I have increased the distance between us sufficiently, I begin to run.

The Storm

I am caught in a fantastic world where flashes of light reveal a terrible and ghostly scene. As always, when a storm is trapped in a valley, it continues for a long time with undiminished fury, while I crouch and shiver. When the rain starts I lie down flat and open my mouth for the longed-for liquid, letting it fall on my swollen tongue, but immediately I start to choke. Eventually I manage to swallow without choking and feel refreshed.

It rains all night. Bright forks of lightning flash ceaselessly, followed by the long, tumultuous roll of thunder. Water is beginning to run down my hair and clothes in rivulets. Overcome by exhaustion, I sleep, only to wake some time later feeling frozen and weak. No need to look for water. I lift my arm and suck my sleeve. To get the circulation going I try to run but have no strength left. I doze throughout the day. The rain has stopped in the morning and the wind is drying my clothes, but by nightfall it begins to rain again. The fierce wind and the rain driven by the wind sluice my face, and my clothes feel like icy armour.

I continue to doze fitfully, from time to time consumed by frightful rigours. At daybreak I am alternately burning with heat and shivering with cold. I do not want to but know I must go on.

Starvation and Rescue

Food is what I need to get my strength back. I scrape at a tree trunk with my fingernails and cram the bark into my mouth, but have difficulty swallowing. I force myself to eat as much as possible of it, and begin to gag. From then on I lose all count of time, struggle on and collapse, lying prone for a long time. When night falls, a mist has risen. Suffused with moonlight it flows above the ground like a ghostly river. All sounds are muffled; droplets condense, tremble and fall with a faint plop.

I don’t know where I am, but have by now become convinced that at some time I have doubled back and am once again in Styria. I try to sit up but the motion makes my head spin and I sink back wondering vaguely why I cannot move without pain. After two more tries I am on my feet. Leaning against the tree trunks, I push off like a swimmer and stagger drunkenly forward, aware only of the need to drag my aching body towards the edge of the world.

There below me stretches the ribbon of a road. Beneath my feet, the ground falls sharply away. I lie down to rest and then slide on my back to the edge of the road, where I lie, eyes closed, my body floating apparently separated from my mind. After a long time, the silence is broken by the sound of an engine. The noise grows steadily louder and then abruptly stops. I am dimly aware of the opening and shutting of a door, footsteps and someone bending over me. The next instant I am picked up in a fireman’s lift.

Extracts from Shadow of War, by Gerda Erika Baker, published by Lion Publishing 1990