Summer 1944. So we spent the last year of the war in Sonneberg in relative safety. There were frequent air raid warnings there too, and while many Sonneberg residents remained calmly in their apartments, we always ran into the basement, which offered little protection, but this escape had become so second nature to us that we would not have felt safe anywhere else.
The school was kept running literally until the last day, but there were only female teachers and a few old men who had taught our father and who now stepped in for the young teachers, most of whom had remained on the “field of honour” or had been taken prisoner. Some of them were over 80 years old and they risked speaking openly and even made us doubt the final victory.
In the meantime, we too had refugees from the East billeted in our grandmother’s apartment. One was a lovely, old noble lady with her daughter. The two of them had once seen much better times in East Prussia. But they had had to leave all their possessions behind, their husbands had disappeared in Russia, and now they lived in a room with a few old pieces of furniture that had belonged to our grandmother. They never complained, although we knew that they often went to bed hungry. They knew a farmer in the Sonneberg area who they could have gone to to hoard. And what could they have offered in exchange?
During the summer of 1944 we spent every free minute in the forests around Sonneberg looking for black berries and especially raspberries. We knew a particularly good spot on the railway viaduct near Mengersgereuth where they grew in abundance. In the evenings we were covered in scratches from the thorny bushes, but a litre of raspberries was enough to fill us up, and when I see today what my growing son gobbles down every day, I always ask myself how our mother was able to feed us in those days.