[The following is taken from a memoir of Irmgard A. Hunt, who grew up in the mountains under Hitler’s Eagles Nest during the Second World War.]
We ate Mutti’s [German: Mom’s] last sandwiches as night fell and the train moved through the darkness without lights, in order to be shielded from any enemy pilot who might be overhead. I was awakened once by the silence of the stopped train and heard explosions that seemed quite close. No one said a word until we moved again; then someone stated the obvious, that we had luckily not been hit. I thought how mysterious trains were at night and remembered a scary conversation I had overheard a short while before.
My mother’s friend Sophie and her husband, who was home on leave, stopped by Haus Linden one evening and Mutti and Sophie quizzed him about his experiences on the eastern front. Reluctantly – no soldier was supposed to reveal anything about the front – he began to tell a story of trainloads of women rolling through a railroad station guarded by his unit, in Poland perhaps. The women on the train were so desperate to relieve themselves that they actually did so out of the train windows, regardless of the armed onlookers or the bitter cold. He said that thousands of people came through in cattle cars, but at least this one offered a sight that made the soldiers laugh.
That was all he said about the secret trains except that he would make any sacrifice to spare Mutti and Sophie such a sight, let alone such a fate.
Source:
Hunt, Irmgard A. “A Weary Interlude in Selb.” On Hitler’s Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2005. 144. Print.
Further Reading:
No comments, yet...