Memoirs of a Girl from Berlin: The True Story of a Young Girl’S Strength and Courage and Her Will to Live

By Susanne Lang

Many children of World War II have stories to tell. Memoirs of a Girl from Berlin is the compelling story of one young girls strength, courage and will to survive during the changing political scene of 1930s and post war Germany. Gisela Becker lived through many tragedies and near-death experiences during Germanys harsh Nazi regime and the cruel Russian occupation that followed.

Written in her own words, with the help of her daughter, we follow Gisela Beckers history and memories through some of the worst experiences of war during her childhood. Giselas greatest fear of abandonment became reality many times. She witnessed atrocities that most of us cannot even imagine. People were starving to death, slaughtered because they werent the right nationality or raped just because they were female no matter what their age.

While the people of West Germany began to rebuild their lives, the people of Berlin and East Germany continued to suffer at the hands of the Russians. Memoirs of a Girl from Berlin will take you through a time you hope you will never see yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546219545

Susanne Lang

I am the little girl that my mother was pregnant with when she left Germany on the ship Italia. I was born nine weeks premature in Detroit, Michigan. Life was still hard for my mother. She was in a new country, she didn't speak the language, and she had just given birth to a baby two months early. Her memories of the baby girl who had died just two years prior in Germany were still fresh in her mind. My parents took me home after signing a paper saying that they were taking me home at their own risk. They put me in an open drawer in an old dresser and used it as my bed. I am now in my sixties. I had no intention of ever writing a book, nor am I a writer. But I have felt compelled to tell my mother's story. One day while I was living in South Africa, my mother came to visit. We watched a World War II movie, and after the film I went to bed. My mother stayed up and told my daughter many stories about the war. The next day, my daughter got up early and ran to my room. She asked me if my mother had ever told me any of these stories. I was in complete disbelief. When my mother woke up, I asked her why hadn't she told me any of this. She said, "You never asked." I quickly told her to write down all she could remember. She told me that she had a diary where she kept all her memories. Well, the rest is history. Here I have documented the story of my mother's life. I feel it's a story that needs to be told. There are many young girls that have went and are going through war. They all have their story to tell. This is one of the girl from Berlin.

Book preview

Chapter 1

It was springtime in 1946. I had been lying awake for most of the night, trying to hide my anxiety. You see, I was only fifteen years old and found myself in a barn with a small group of women who were strangers to me. We were going to attempt something very dangerous and forbidden. We all came from the same area, which had till recently been Germany but was now considered Poland. We had been deported as refugees after the war. I was desperate to get back to my grandmother, whom I had left behind all alone. I had promised her I would come back for her, and I was going to keep my word no matter what.

It was still dark as I looked out of the barn where we had slept. It was time for us to rise and make the trip. We quietly walked down to the Neisse River, and when we arrived, we found the river swollen with a strong current. It was nicknamed the Reissende Neisse, meaning a rising river. I felt glad that I could swim. Then the five women whispered to me that they could not swim. They were all older than I was, and now they were looking to me for help.

We knew that if we were caught, we would be shot. I kept thinking that it would have been better to be alone than with five women who couldn’t swim, but it was too late for that now. I would have to take the lead and help them get across. As the sun began its ascent, it provided just enough light to get us started. The only thing I could do was start across and find the shallowest area so that they could walk across to the other side. They held my rucksack, which contained everything I had to my name: my identification, a small amount of Polish money, and a crust of bread.

As my feet entered the cold water, a chill went through me. I quietly took one step after another, my toes feeling for each next step, and before I knew it, the water was up to my chin. When I had made it halfway across, I motioned to the women to follow me. I kept up my pace and found myself on the other side. By now, the sun was fully visible on the horizon, and the daylight made everything clearer. As I stood up, I turned to see how far the women had come. As they reached the middle of the river, I saw a man in a window on the German side of the river motioning to me in an urgent manner to get down and hide.

I crawled on my belly into a field of rye. I heard a loud commotion made by motorcycles, followed by the sound of men speaking, not in German but in Polish. Then I heard gunshots. I put my hands over my ears and closed my eyes. I was terrified to turn back and look.

My name is Gisela Ingeburg Isolde Becker. I have reached the good old age of eighty-seven. As I look out my window, watching the palm trees blowing in the breeze and the birds eating seed out of the bird feeders in Port St. Lucie, Florida, I reflect on my life. What a calm and peaceful life I have now. What a contrast to my childhood. There are few people left to tell their stories of World War II. I have seen so much in my long life. It’s hard not to be cynical about life and have a negative view on things, after the atrocities that I have seen, but I have tried to keep a positive attitude and not allow my past to determine my future.

Let me tell you about my parents.

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Ewald Herbert Becker

My father was born Ewald Herbert Becker on August 16, 1904, in Silesia. He had black, wavy hair, and I loved running my fingers through it.

Silesia, which had upward of four million inhabitants before World War II, was nestled in the beautiful countryside with rolling hills and dense wooded areas. The Oder River ran from south to north and ended up by the Baltic Sea. Beautiful mountains bordered Sudetenland, now known as the Czech Republic. These mountains were called the Waldenburger Bergland. To the north, they bordered the Riesengebirge, and the highest mountain, at 1,600 meters high (5,249 feet), was called the Schneekoppe. Ski lifts went up the Silesia side and the Sudetenland side. One of my friends and I always wanted to ski the Schneekoppe, but it was just too far for us girls to go. We enjoyed the stories of several of our male schoolmates who had made the trip. South of Waldenburger Bergland was the Glatzer Bergland, another mountain range and one of equal beauty. It was a wonderful area to grow up in.

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Herta Lowe

My mother was born Herta Lowe on June 15, 1905, in Wolhynien (today Volhynia). I was told that she had beautiful eyes and gorgeous, thick blonde hair. People said she was one of the kindest and friendliest people they had ever met and she was loved by everyone. Hers was a completely different story. Volhynia was in the northwestern corner of the Ukraine, located between the Prypiat River and the western part of the Bug River. Poland was to the west, Belarus was to the north, and Russia was to the east. No, she wasn’t Russian, but let me tell you how she got there.

Catherine II of Russia was a former German princess married to the Russian Czar Peter III. He was assassinated, and she took over his position as head of the Russian Empire. The Russian Imperial Throne then rested on the shoulders of Catherine the Great. During her reign, she revitalized Russia, which grew larger and stronger and became recognized as one of the great powers of Europe. On July 22, 1763, she proclaimed open immigration to German families and other foreigners who wished to live in the Russian Empire. The people, who decided to immigrate, were given free land in Volhynia and the Ukraine.

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My mother’s ancestors took up the offer from Catherine the Great and moved. It was a tempting offer since they didn’t have the money to buy land in Germany. In Russia they now had land; nevertheless times were extremely tough for the new Russian immigrants; the land was undeveloped and needed a lot of work. They were allowed to maintain their German culture, language, and religion. This they held onto very strongly, as they rarely married outside the German community nor became Russian citizens. The number of German colonists living in the settlements of Russian Volhynia totaled 150,000.

Due to the hard working nature of the immigrants they soon changed the wilderness they had been given into wheat fields that outstripped the productivity of those of the Russians and their livestock grew strong and healthy. These settlers became quite content and lived at peace in their new home. My grandfather became the Dorfschulze (mayor) of the community they lived in. Then World War I broke out in 1914. This brought about drastic changes.

When the German and Austrian troops began marching into Russia during World War I, Czar Nicholas II and his government must have feared the large German population which had now risen to about two million in the provinces of the Ukraine, Volhynia, and Poland. As the troops advanced into Russia, all Germans, including the old, the sick, and children, were rounded up like cattle without any warning, made to leave everything behind, and loaded into boxcars. In my grandfather’s village a horn was blown by a Russian Cossack riding on horseback, announcing that all Germans had to leave by five o’clock that afternoon. The Russian Cossacks were part of the Russian irregular military defending Russia’s borders. The whole village headed for the nearest railroad station which was fifty miles away. Most on foot and those who were fortunate enough to have a horse and wagon took along a few belongings. When they got to the trains, they were crammed into boxcars, with some forty to fifty people in each car. They used straw on the floor of the box cars for some comfort. Destination: Siberia.

My ancestors had lived peacefully for about 150 years as invited guests of the Russian queen, Catherine. Now, starting early in the year 1915, they were being deported.

They traveled in the direction of Moscow, which was about 750 miles away, and then they continued east over the Ural Mountains. Some of the mountains were more than six thousand feet above sea level. Then they traveled another twelve hundred miles to Kostanay, which was seventy miles south of the Siberian border in Kazakhstan. The trip was hard. It was cold, and they had very little food. Many became sick, some even died. Those who died along the trip were buried in unmarked mass graves.

Once the deportees arrived in Siberia, disease wiped out many starving families. Spanish influenza, typhoid, and smallpox were prevalent. The families were living in barracks with very little to eat, so they resorted to begging. The Russians would sometimes give them something though it might be only a piece of moldy bread. It must have been terrible to see babies thrilled to gnaw on pieces of moldy bread. Siberia was a land of very harsh, snowy winters with unrelenting cold.

Still, my grandfather, who was among this group of deportees, had hopes that one day the war would end and they would be set free again. When that day came, they wanted to be ready. My grandfather knew he would need money to travel back to Germany with his large family, so he and his teenage son, Bertold, traveled long distances from the barracks to saw down trees by hand to make planks for building houses. They sold the wood to save money for the journey.

During one of these ventures, my grandfather became snow-blind, a temporary and painful blindness caused by overexposure to sunlight reflected from ice and snow. It had already been three days without food and they were both hungry and weak. Bertold being so weak he had to be carried by my grandfather on his shoulders. Now Bertold became his father’s eyes and grandfather became Bertold’s legs. Eventually they arrived back at the barracks, fortunate to have survived those painfully long freezing cold days.

My aunts, who were fifteen year old twins at the time, now also took on the task of helping cut down the trees along with some of the men from the barracks. This required that they be gone for over a week in the forest. When they arrived in the area where the trees would be cut, one of the men built them an igloo so that they wouldn’t freeze and to keep them safe from the wolves. He instructed them to stay in the igloo all night and not to come out for any reason. He put branches in front of the opening and built a fire to keep the wolves away. The girls huddled together near the back of the igloo, terrified by what could happen. The howling of the wolves made the girls shake with fear, and they held their hands over their ears to muffle the noise. When morning came, things were very quiet; the girls decided to go outside. They pushed away the branches and found the fire had gone out. When they summoned the courage to leave the igloo, they were horrified. Everywhere they looked the snow was red with blood. They wondered what had taken place during the night. They followed a trail of blood, which, to their horror, led them to a boot with a bloody stump of a leg protruding, covered in bite marks. They realized it was the man who had built the igloo for them. They searched for the