EiderstedtIV

       Slowly, during the fall and winter of 1945 the peninsula started filling up with refugees from the East. At one point the main road through Eiderstedt way filled with covered wagons, one after the other, all slowly working their way to St. Peter  where there were large dormitories  belonging to the summer camps. All the farmers had to take in more refugees, some of whom ended up in the entrance hall next to our apartment where they were bedded on straw. They were not exactly received with open arms. Though life in St. Peter seemed peaceful it cannot be said that the locals had had an easy time either since the beginning of the war and their patience was stretched thin. Most had had to take in Hamburgians  after the bombings there, abd food supplies were running low. Once, the entire region had run out of salt. This sounds ridiculous to even mention  but if you are not used to having the taste of your soup or bread enhanced with some salt for weeks on end it can stretch the nerves of the best of us.After all, we had not heard of Mr. Bloomberg, the mayor of N.Y. who is urging all of us to eat less salt.
         Many of these new refugees came from a region in Germany  which was totally different from that of Eiderstedt. Now the locals had to share their homes with even more strangers. Specially the sharing of kitchens created  enormous tensions. Jealousies arose among the housewives. Where does she get the butter, or simply anything that was scarce and rationed and often even with ration cards not available. At that time simply anything was procured on the black market. And now these people with their strange accents and habits had to be accommodated , Frau Tetens complained that they did not even know what a flush toilet was and clogged the plumbing with paper.
       It is true that the locals did not have the experience of being uprooted, bombed out or in constant danger of having bombs rain on them. Just the occasional strafer  swooping down from God knows where shooting at you,  Bit we all have had the taste of nearly a thousand bombers flying almost directly overhead  for at least a half hour en route to Hamburg using the mouth of the river Eider  to guide them until the turned toward Hamburg. The terrain between St.Peter is almost totally flat so that we could hear the  detonations and  the slowly see the sky light up in the distance as the city started to burn. I had experienced one of those overflights and know how horrifying the sound of those planes is. Years later, when I lived in Maine near a Naval Airbase one-just one- of those planes landed on that  airstrip. I was immediately transported back to that night when they delivered their deadly cargo on the third of the four major attacks which flattened Hamburg.  In other words, we all were affected by the horrors of war. Those who believed and listened to Goebbels propaganda still thought we could win that war. Those of us who  listened to the forbidden stations knew better. The Americans had landed and were fighting in the West and the Russians were slowly winding their way toward Germany. Since these new refugees came from the eastern regions, the coast of the Baltic states West Prussia and the Polish Corridor, in short, east of the river Oder, they had not yet had the personal experience of war. It had so far been too far for the Allied planes to reach these regions.
        I had no personal contact with the refugees behind our door and somehow forgot they were even there. They lived their life and we ours. Unfortunately, as it turned out, they were our downfall. Our radio stood on a shelf directly by the door to the hall, A door we never opened, even before the refugees came. Every night at midnight we turned on the radio to the BBC ever so quietly to listen to the latest news. We could barely hear the words but the opening sign of the BBC ere the drumbeats of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. It was the vibrations of the drumbeats that gave us away. So they reported us to the authorities and one day when  I came home, my mother informed me that we had orders to vacate the premises immediately.  She had a swollen leg and couldn't move, which was the reason I had gone into the village to inform the Nazi chieftain, whatever his title, that she couldn't come and peel potatoes . He wanted to shut the door on me but I put my foot  between the door and door-frame and demanded he listen to me. Maybe it was this "courageous: act that prompted him to kick us out.  In any case, all I remember is that everything went pretty fast. Somehow we packed, got the  piano relocated, took what we need and all of a sudden found that again we had too many things.
          The width of the room to which we were moved could accommodate one two seat sofa and the width of a single bed and the length of two beds.There was a small table, an armchair and a washstand.Our clothes we hung into to shared closet of the owners of this small three hundred year old cottage,  Again we were lucky. The old Frisian couple who owned the cottage were glad to have us instead of total strangers. Besides, the wife was the one who had taught my mother to spin.
       Once my mother was installed I took off on my bike to the village north of Husum near the Danish border were I was a substitute organist. There the parsonage was crammed full with refugees of another kind.  Somewhere nearby was an airstrip and a group of pilots and their planes had been relocated to that village. They were young, full of pep and seemed to have no care in the world. They were flying their planes around seemingly just for fun. They had brought wives and girlfriends along and I found myself sharing my room with a very stunning woman of about thirty. I was fascinated watching her put on her make-up, an activity I had never seen. Yes, I had had a lipstick but never used it much,  Hamburgians were rather stuffy in that respect and around the church one definitely did not use lipstick. My mother used powder to powder her nose should it be shiny and that was all. So here I was, housed with this very elegant woman at the very end of the war. How much toward the end we didn't know, but it became clear to everybody, that it could not be much longer. The minister was not hiding the fact that he was listening to whatever station he could get to hear the latest information. And the, all of a sudden, it was all over.