The Willow Wren by Philipp Schott (free ebook reader for iphone txt) 📕

“Papa, did you walk from Grimma?” I am sure the tone of wonder was clear in my voice. Not only was Grimma fifteen kilometres away, but with Papa’s stiff leg and his attire the mental image was absurd. Nonetheless, I knew that there were no trains from Leipzig to Colditz on Sundays.

He chuckled. “No, my son, I was able to get a car. The driver will wait with it at the café on the market square for as long as I need. I can stay a few hours at least.”

There was a long moment of quiet as it seemed nobody knew what to do next. We had not all been together since early December, which seemed like a very long time ago. Interactions with Papa had always been somewhat formal and usually took place in the context of the deeply embedded routine back home in Leipzig. Here in Colditz we were unmoored from these routines and consequently stood there, looking at each other with pasted-on smiles, unsure of what was desirable, permissible or appropriate to do next. Mama snorted quietly and turned her attention to Oskar, who was beginning to fuss. Papa stood just inside the doorway for a few moments longer until, having apparently made up his mind, he declared, “It is Sunday and it is a lovely day, so we shall take a walk.”

“All the little ones need baths, but you can take Theodor and Ludwig,” Mama said without looking at him.

And so the three of us set off.

“May we go to the castle, Papa?” I asked.

“No, Ludwig, no children are allowed there. That’s where they keep the most important enemy prisoners. Even I would need a special pass. We can look at it from below though.” He led us out into the main market square, nodding briefly to his driver as we walked past him and offering the Hitler salute to a pair of SS officers walking the other way across the square. “The best view is from the bridge,” he explained. This was not far, so within a couple minutes we were standing at the east end of the bridge, looking back across the centre of town and up at the castle, which loomed over everything from its vantage point crowning a high rock outcrop. The castle was a confusion of white buildings of varying sizes and shapes abutting each other at odd angles. Each building had numerous small barred windows, and each was surmounted by a sloped red-tiled roof. Square towers jutted out from some of these buildings and the whole thing was encircled by a windowless white wall about a quarter of the height of the tallest buildings within.

“See how large it is? It has 700 rooms. Currently about 500 enemy officers are kept in there and we have about seventy men guarding and supervising them. The walls are two metres thick; the cliff faces, as you can see, are shear and there is only one way in or out. And even if by some magic trick a prisoner managed to get out, he would find himself in the very middle point of the Reich, 650 kilometres from the nearest border!”

“Has anyone escaped so far?” I asked in a cautious tone. The thought of so many enemies so close by was a little bit frightening, but more in the way of a scary story than a true threat. I wondered whether some of these men were looking out of those windows right now, seeing us on the bridge looking up at them.

Papa hesitated briefly. “No, it is absolutely escape-proof. It is the most secure prison in the Reich and probably in the world.”

Later, after Papa left and I described our viewing of the castle, Mama told us a story about her encounter with Allied prisoners in the First World War. She explained that some French officers were being held in a prisoner-of-war camp in Weimar, where she grew up. She would have been between ten and twelve years of age at the time.

The German and Allied governments had concluded an agreement in 1916 that permitted each other’s officers to leave their prisons to go for walks, so long as they signed a document promising on their honour as officers that they would not take advantage of this privilege to make an escape attempt. Imagine this! Such was the trust in an officer’s sense of honour at the time. And imagine such a thing being a priority for negotiation between bitter enemies in the midst of the slaughter of millions! In any case, a preferred walking path for the French officers in Weimar took them past Mama’s house. She would make a point of watching for them and going up to greet them across the garden fence using correct and polite French. Mama was very proud of the fact that she learned French as a child. Thuringia, which Weimar was the capital of, had been an ally of Napoleon a hundred years prior, and a cultural connection to France had remained, at least among the intellectual elite, which Mama fancied her family belonged to.

As far as she knew, no officers on either side ever broke their promise. All of them returned to prison after their walks and then in some cases would go back to working on plans to escape from within by tunnelling or hiding in laundry trucks and so forth. This was apparently permitted under the code of honour. It perhaps goes without saying that such a civilized agreement was not in force during the Second World War. More’s the pity.

Chapter Seventeen

June 6, 1944

A history enthusiast will recognize this date immediately. On June 6, 1944, the American, British and Canadians landed in great force on the beaches of Normandy, France. I have no specific memory of this day. It was a Tuesday, so it would have been an ordinary day at the KLV-Lager. I mention it here to allow you to place the events in my little life