Nothing Has Been Forgotten

As we approached the site where the former Stalag Luft once held thousands of prisoners, we saw an open field just northwest of Barth. In the midst of the flat land, a grouping of trees  stood around a large rock and a kiosk. The trees were planted in a large triangle. On each corner of the triangle were smaller triangles of blue spruce representing the Americans, lime trees representing the British, and birch trees representing the Russians. The effect was one of tranquility and beauty.

The metal letters on the plaque on the large rock, which Helga had found and had transported to the site, says:

“This plaque is dedicated by the citizens of Barth and the Royal Air Force Ex-Prisoners of War Association on 28 September 1996 to commemorate all those held prisoner here at Stalag Luft 1, sited here from July 1940 to May 1945: Members of the British Commonwealth and United States of America Air Forces and their Allies from the occupied countries and the Soviet Union.

Nothing has been Forgotten”

To the south of the rock is the field where the barracks that held my father stood. Now it is just a densely growth of tall grasses and a few trees. But from pretty much anywhere we stood, you could see the steeple of St. Marien Kirch (St. Mary’s Lutheran) in Barth. My sister and I liked to think that my father could look at that tall steeple everyday and think that God was in charge. We hope that it gave him and all the prisoners encouragement.  Later that day, we visited the church and walked through the walls of the ancient city.  

Next to the rock is a kiosk with facts about Stalag Luft 1. For instance, there were 8,346 prisoners of war in Stalag Luft 1 in February 1945, a majority of which were Americans. Take a look at the photos. One thing that interested me was: “The construction of a prisoner-of-war camp in the immediate area of a military property, like the Flakschool (you’ll hear more about this in my father’s diary coming up) in Barth, is a violation of the Geneva Agreement on the Treatment of Prisoners of War from 1929.”

We enjoyed being there with Helga and Greta and her son Claus. The west side of the camp bordered a tributary of the Baltic Sea. I wonder how many prisoners thought they could steal a boat and paddle to Denmark just some 70 miles away. I’m sure the Baltic Sea had an effect of the weather. The wind was fierce, and it was cold there even in October.

As we walked around, we heard a low flapping and whispering noise. It was the return of the cranes. We watched them eating bugs from the fields that our father once looked out on.

Making Friends in Germany

Before I went to Germany – because I had read so many books on the horrors the nation had committed during World War II – I was apprehensive.  I didn’t know what I would find or how I would feel about the Germans, although I had been there in 1968 as a clueless 21-year old. What we discovered is that the Germans are people just like you and me. They are kind, generous, fun loving people. (And they like their beer – we did too.) And, as we soon learned in Berlin, they are very upfront about what the Nazis did to the world, but that is another story.

What became one of the highlights of our trip was meeting two German women: Helga Radau and Grete Haslob Koch. They came to greet us the morning of October 1, 2013 at our hotel. Helga had grown up in East Germany; Grete had lived in West Germany all her life. Both women experienced trauma in World War II. We realized Allied and German soldiers were not the only people who suffered from the war.

Helga Radau is the director of Barth museum documenting the history of the town under the Nazi regime. Barth was founded around 1255 and eventually resided in East Germany when the country was divided in 1945. It rests so far north you could paddle to the Baltic Sea from its shores. The museum, titled, “12 years out of 750, Barth, 1933-1945,” features exhibits on Stalag Luft 1(see map above). It also includes exhibits about the concentration camp in Barth (we learned that not one person survived this camp – that gives me chills) and some manufacturing facilities.

When we met Helga, you could tell how passionate she was about the museum. And for good reason. When she was four years old, the Russian army arrived in Barth on May 2, 1944. At the time, the German guards at Stalag Luft 1 had run off, and the war in Europe was about to end. Her mother, father, grandmother and great grandmother lived in the center of town. The family also housed a couple of refugees from Eastern Prussia.

Daily Russian soldiers would break into homes to steal, kill civilians and rape German women. One day all the young women in the house were hidden in the loft of the house, but not her grandmother or great grandmother. Suddenly a Pole and a Russian saw the ladder and went upstairs. The Pole took Helga and would have killed her if had not been for the arrival of a group of Yugoslavian members of the Royal Air Force who were former POWs at Stalag Luft I. They prevented her death and stayed with the family for some days. It was the first time Helga tasted chocolate. She has never forgotten these terrible times, but she is grateful to the POWs and has spent years maintaining contact with the many of the 8,345 POWs (number in February 1945) housed in Stalag Luft I. 

  

And Grete’s story is equally heart-wrenching:  “My father (Heinrich Haslob) went over to the United States in 1923. At first he worked with his two uncles in New York. They had a butcher shop in a great market hall. He married my mother (a German) in 1926, and they had their wedding dinner at the Waldorf Astoria. My sister was born in 1929. 

"He started his own business with a friend on Jamaica Avenue in Long Island. The business did very well, and they expanded the shop. Then his mother in Germany became very ill, and he sailed back to Germany to visit her. In Germany, his parents owned a general store in a small village close to Bremen. Due to her illness, she asked him to move back to Germany to take over the family store.  My father promised her he would come back. My mother wanted to stay in New York because they had a good apartment with all the things that make life easy.  In Germany there was an old house without central heating or indoor plumbing. But she followed her husband with their little daughter, and they returned to Germany in 1930. 

	“With the money my father got from the sale of the business (in the U.S.) they brought  the house in Germany up to date with central heating, indoor plumbing and so on. That same year (1930) his mother died, and just two years later his father died. So I did not know my grandparents, as I was born in 1938. In September 1939, the war began, and my father was called up to the war in 1941. When the war began, he was not able to come home very often and then only for a few days at a time, so he remained unknown to me.”  Here is Grete standing with her father, sister and mother.
Haslob returned home in March before the war ended in May (with photographs and journals, many of which are now in the Barth museum), and his family begged him not to return to the prison camp. When the war ended and the Germans ran away from the camp on April 30, 1945, he was never seen again. The family never knew what happened to him. After the war, Barth was in the Soviet-controlled portion (East Germany) and not until the wall came down in November 1989 was Grete able to travel to Barth in search of her father. She asked the local residents, but no one knew anything about him. She did learn that several unidentified people had been found dead shortly after the liberation of the camp and were buried in the town cemetery.  Grete continued to return to Barth whenever she learned of groups of  ex-POWs visiting the former campsite. During one visit she was told by an American ex-POW that her father had been shot and killed in the days after liberation by an  American POW. He told her that her father had encountered the POW in town, and words were exchanged. Her father made the remark, "I will be home before you are" and with that the POW pulled a gun and shot him. Helga said this wasn’t true. Grete still has hope that she will someday learn what happened to her father.

On a visit to the United States in the late 1990s, Grete met an Red McCrocklin, who remembered her father as a man always smiling. He respected and admired “Henry, the Butcher” as the POWs called him, even though they were on opposite sides. He had given Red a German dictionary, which enabled him to speak the language; a couple of times this saved his life. Grete (as a small child below in front of her father) was grateful to meet someone who knew her father. My father talked about “Henry, the Butcher,” as well.

These two German women were so generous to us. They were delightful and interesting. The time spent with them was overwhelming because there was so much we wanted to know. Grete had brought her son Claus with her; he had never been to Barth and wanted to see where his grandfather had been in the war. They took us to the museum. We ate lunch together, toured the site of the former prison camp and ended the day with a wonderful meal at our hotel. It was a day of mixed emotions, learning about each other’s perspectives and remembering the sacrifices for freedom all of our families had made. 

Finally, Barth, Germany

My sister Nitalynn and brother-in-law Bruce Sigman and my husband Richard and I left Arkansas very early on the morning of September 25, 2013. We flew the largest airplane I had ever seen from Chicago and found Air Berlin to be more modern than any American airline. Crammed in with 400 other people wasn’t too bad, but travel these days is only for the determined. When we landed the next morning, we took a bus to the fancy Berlin train station/mall and from there a train to near Leipzig. The tracks ended for repairs, and we had to take a street car to the central train station near our hotel. Let’s see: that was more than 28 hours traveling by five different modes. I thought of my father flying the “Nita-Lynn” from Long Island, New York to Miami to Puerto Rico to Trinidad to Belem in the Amazon of South America to Brazil. Then they flew across the Atlantic to Dakar, East Africa on to Tunisia and finally to Cerignola-Stornara, Italy in so many days. Our trip was nothing.

I had been in Leipzig in 1968 when it was a dark, drab East German city. Today, it is vibrant, and we enjoyed exploring its museums, monuments, restaurants and stores – mainly absorbing the German culture (Currywurst, anyone?). Richard (and Bruce one day) attended the International Motorcross of Nations in Teutschenthal for two days - our reason to be in Leipzig.

One of the astounding facts we learned is that prayer meetings in St. Nicholas Church there eventually led to the downfall of divided Germany in 1989. Life in East Germany, as we discovered in the Stasi Museum (secret police), was harsh. We also went to a concert at Bach’s church, St. Thomas. As I sat there listening to a wonderful concert, I wondered about the audience. How many of them had parents in the Nazi party?  Or later, in the East German secret police?

Now we can finally get to go to Barth. On Monday, September 30, we woke excited. After all these years of saving and planning, we would go to Barth where our father had spent 13 months of his life. We boarded a train, changed in Berlin, and ended in Stralslund where we rented a car and had an exciting drive (not many speed limits in Germany) to the Pommernhotel in Barth. We learned later that the hotel was on the road where the freed POWs from Stalag Luft 1 had walked to the airport during three days in May 1945 to be flown to France and England. Our father had walked down this street (as it turns out several times).

We also learned that we were lucky to get a hotel as it was crane season (see the cranes in the field) in Barth. That’s right, the birds, and people come from all over to see then fly through Barth. That night, we celebrated being in Barth and eagerly anticipated the next day meeting Helga and Grete and seeing Stalag Luft 1.