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.