John Stieber - Against the Odds - Survival on the Russian Front 1944-1945 [2nd Edition]

My father appointed an ex-colleague of his, Herr Oskar Soukal, to act as guardian for Erika and me and asked him to look after all financial matters. He had moved to Germany before the outbreak of the war and lived with his wife, Grete, in the small town of Mücheln, in central Germany, where he was manager of the Stöbnitz sugar factory. The Soukals were long-time friends of my parents and I always called them uncle and aunt.

At school none of the students had a radio of their own and we did not see any daily newspapers. Since the press was saturated with National-Socialist rhetoric, it looked to me like confirmation of the outlook in the school that these carriers of propaganda had no place with us. Our only information came from radio bulletins, which Dr Prüss read out to us on the state of the war – on some occasions the school met in the assembly hall to hear an announcement by Hitler over the radio. It was actually prescribed by law that one had to listen to all speeches by Hitler.

If it had not been for these news bulletins, I would not have noticed that there was a war on. Food did become rationed, but our diet was legitimately supplemented with vegetables, fruit and honey produced on the school farm so that nobody really felt the pinch. One factor that affected me personally was that all normal contact with Ireland by mail ceased when the war broke out. The only communication possible was via the Red Cross. A special form was used and I was permitted to write a maximum of only twenty-five words once a month. I came to bless the German language with its long, composite words, which sometimes allowed me to fit a whole comprehensible sentence into one or two words.

From the time I arrived at Gebesee I was obliged to become a member of the Jungvolk, the junior section of the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth), and I enjoyed the activities very much. One of the teachers, Dr Nahr, who held the rank of “Bannführer”, was in charge of our unit and was therefore “one of us.” Once an outside “Bannführer” came to inspect our unit, but we pelted him with snowballs and he never returned. We were certainly not typical of the average Jungvolk unit in Germany, of which many must have been led by people with strong National-Socialist views. However, I never saw anything objectionable in the basic Jungvolk pursuits of athletics in which we had to work up to specific standards, and I still remember the Morse Code that I mastered so long ago. We did have to memorise some dates concerning the rise of Hitler, but that was only a minor detail and, even if we did practise marching in formation, that was no different from what I had done with the Lifeboys in Carlow.

All in all, I stayed in Gebesee for only eighteen months. In that time I had learned carpentry and how to build model aeroplanes. I became a family representative, I helped out on the farm during peak harvesting and, generally, enjoyed every minute of my stay. I also had no difficulty passing my exams.

Each holiday offered me something special. In Karlsbad, I played tennis with my aunt and went to concerts and operas. In Harzburg, I was able to progress in the art of the Spanish Riding School. I spent more holidays with the Goedeckes and went skiing with them in Thuringia. Erika and I were usually together and we spent Christmas with our guardian in Mücheln.

It was no wonder that I was so unashamedly happy, and had not become downcast because the war seemed to be dragging on without an immediate end in sight. It was different for my parents and they suffered severely to be separated from Erika and me. It was not until after the war that I discovered how hard they had been hit and I felt guilty when remembering how happy I had been without thinking what the absence of their children must have meant to them.

In November 1940, my class transferred to Haubinda, the intermediate-grade school near the town of Hildburghausen in Thuringia, where a whole new range of interesting and exciting experiences was waiting for me.

Haubinda lay about sixty-five miles to the south of Gebesee and was beautifully situated in an elevated position at the edge of a long stretch of Thuringian woods. The main school building, of timber frame construction, rose to a height of four stories and was topped by a clock-tower that could be seen for miles. All classrooms and main function rooms were located there, as well as one family of boys. The accommodation for the main body of pupils must have been the most attractive of any provided in the Lietz Schools and was a specific idea of the founder himself. Dotted along the edge of the wood, but within a ten-minute walk of the school, were idyllically situated detached houses, one being provided for every family. Each house was different and all were of timber-frame construction. Twelve to fifteen pupils lived in each house together with their “family parents”; the younger boys usually slept two or three to a room while the senior boys had single rooms. There were one hundred and twenty boys in Haubinda, all between fourteen and sixteen years of age. The headmaster, Dr Willi Damm, was a small man, alert and enthusiastic in his ways. I think he was less strict than Dr Prüss, and always had a twinkle in his eye, but he was an excellent educationalist.

My family father, Herr von Papenhausen, was the teacher for gym and general sports. He was a wiry man who displayed a fantastic agility in the gymnasium. I was one of twelve boys who lived with him and his wife in the Kirschberg Haus (Cherry-Hill House) called after a nearby cherry orchard. Although my house was the furthest from the school, I did not mind, and loved to walk to my lessons along the pleasant woodland paths. In winter I sometimes used my skis to go back and forth, or maybe took time to make a detour if it was a particularly nice day. The crunch of hard snow under my boots or the swish of skis after a fresh, powdery fall were the only sounds that could be heard in the stillness of the snow-covered landscape.

Our daily routine was identical to the one we had in Gebesee, but in Haubinda we had the additional opportunity to learn pottery, and copper work in the “arts and Crafts” sessions. I joined the music guild, because I had not played the violin since leaving Ireland and was beginning to get rusty. Frau Zeilinger, the wife of one of the teachers, gave me lessons and soon brought me up to a standard at which I could join the school orchestra.

The facilities for sport were excellent. Apart from athletics grounds, we had a soccer pitch, a swimming pool, a rifle-range and a tennis court. There were several ponds on which we could skate in winter, and the hilly terrain gave excellent skiing and tobogganing opportunities. I thought ice-skating a bit dull until I managed to encourage other boys to start playing ice-hockey, but, to me, there was nothing to beat the exhilaration of a high speed ski-run down the side of a hill. In the woods at the back of our school we had natural bob-sleigh runs provided by the beds of small streams running down the hills. We turned snow into ice by spraying it with water and altered the shape of embankments to convert these into fast bends. The most popular toboggans in use were ridden by one person lying on his stomach and steering with movable runners at the front. We also used a large five-man toboggan with a steering wheel.

In Haubinda I gradually began to feel the pinch of food rationing. Being at an age when a boy’s physical development is very fast, I was not getting enough food to still my hunger. Although the weekly ration of bread, at five and three quarter pounds, was satisfactory, I got only twelve ounces of meat and nine ounces of fat. This ration of fat also included that used in cooking. It is small wonder that I did not get enough calories to replace those burned off during all my activities. The farm provided us with plenty of potatoes, fruit and vegetables, which were healthy and filling, but barely lessened my gnawing hunger.