[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. In particular, the following takes shortly following the conclusion of hostilities.]
The shortest way to school took me through the refugee camp, Lager Anzebach. When room in private quarters had run out, the camp had been crudely clawed out of the ground and erected on an open place near the entry to the salt mines, and its dreariness depressed me each day. The long, brown one-story wooden buildings teemed with listless, thin, pale people who never smiled and rarely answered my greeting. On rainy days I saw the white faces of women and children pressed against the windowpanes.
Our pastors were organizing an assistance project for the camp, and I volunteered immediately, convinced that my actions would have a great impact and bring me much gratitude. I was teamed up with Claudia Hepke, the daughter of refugees from Königsberg in Prussia, now living in a part of the former Speer house, and we were assigned a family.
On a wet afternoon we made our way between the deep puddles and mud to the door of “our” refugees. A bent old woman wearing a black babushka around a blank, haggard face unstuck the door and let us in cautiously. Her husband sat on the one chair in the room. One leg of his pants was pinned up, for there was no leg for it to cover. It was dim inside, and it took us a while before we saw a little girl, perhaps four years old, sitting silently on the bare mattress of the lower bunk bed. She stared at us with a look emptier than that of her grandmother.
The two old people looked at us wearily, and when they finally understood that we had come to talk to them and try to help, they nodded and shrugged at the same time. The little girl, her blond hair stringy and unkempt, her dress ragged, sat there in the dim room and rocked her upper body – just like Hildegard – slowly back and forth. The moment we spoke to her she started to wail. She needed a dress and a comb and treatment for lice. The three of them needed everything, but mostly something to get rid of the large cockroaches that plagued them at night. The old man could not make it to the outdoor toilet during the night, and so they needed empty cans or a chamber pot.
Once they started to talk it was as if floodgates had been opened. They told us in their heavy Silesian dialect that the mother of the little girl had been raped and killed in front of her by Russian soldiers during their flight west from Poland. The old man had been a coal miner, and he cursed Hitler and the rest of the world and could not understand what he had done to deserve this.
Claudia and I left in shock, trying to figure out something, anything at all, we could do to help these people.
Source:
Hunt, Irmgard A. “Survival Under the Star-Spangled Banner.” On Hitler’s Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2005. 230-31. Print.
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