On the night of 30 April, Demmin’s fate was sealed. Apart from a handful of advance troops, no Soviet unit had managed to make it across the Peene. The tanks, armoured personnel carriers, antiaircraft gun carriages, trucks and vast quantities of military equipment transformed the town into a seething army camp. Hundreds of soldiers, checked in their march of victory, swarmed out in search of watches and jewellery, schnapps and women, fun and lust and violence.
They found the ammunition depots; they found the schnapps distillery. Some of them swallowed anything that burnt their gullets and smelt of rotgut. Their feeling of triumph at the imminent victory over the Nazis was heightened by the general May Day merriment. That night, the first houses in Demmin went up in flames.
Deep in the undergrowth of Deven Wood, in among the firs and bushes, Marie Dabs spent the night out in the open with her children, Otto and Nanni, and a few other displaced people. She remembered the happy Sundays of her childhood, when she had strolled through Deven Wood with her parents in a white knitted dress and floppy hat. Now all they had were the clothes on their backs. Even the big suitcase containing the children’s photo albums had been left somewhere along the way. Only that morning she’d been in her fur shop on Demmin’s main shopping street; right up to the end she’d refused to believe that all that was in jeopardy, already as good as lost. She hadn’t realised that she’d swallowed the lies fed to her by party, government and army officials—swallowed their words and made them her own. Now here she was with what little was left to her, on a dank bed of moss in a dark wood.
It was a cold and dreadful night that we spent on the bare forest floor…I had one of my fur coats with me, and my eiderdown, so I was able to cover up the children. In the distance we heard the screams of women being tortured and raped, and saw the first glow of fire above the burning town.
The fires spread until morning, destroying large swathes of the old town. The closely built half-timbered houses with their wooden window frames, rafters, workshops and sheds fed the flames all through the night, and the fire ate its way from house to house and street to street. There was no water in the pipes. People with a few buckets of water to hand tried to protect their houses by laying wet towels on the windowsills and roof beams—damp cloths to hold back a sea of flames.
The fire brigade didn’t turn out, because it couldn’t, or because it wasn’t allowed to. Afterwards there was much dispute over what or who had started the inferno that was to scar the old provincial town forever. Some suspected that arson—even medieval-style torching and pillaging—had been carried out at the behest of Soviet military leadership as punishment for the brief skirmishes when the town was captured. Others believed that isolated fires had been started by the Soviets in the houses of well-known local Nazis and got out of control. Others again wondered whether it had actually been the Soviets at all, given that burning down the town served no military purpose.
Luisenstrasse and Luise Gate after the fire
When Ursula Strohschein and her mother stepped out of the cellar into their yard outside Luise Gate in the morning, after a night broken by screams, they sensed that a few smashed windowpanes would not be the last of it. They thought of the angry commissar who had searched their house—and of the strange black circles the Russians had painted on the doors.
Peering apprehensively onto the street, we saw Red Army soldiers engaged in a curious exercise. They were plunging long-handled brooms wrapped in rags into enormous pails and hastily daubing the walls of the houses. To our astonishment we saw a red sky over the market square. Fire!
Soon their house, too, was on fire. Soldiers armed with carbines looked on as Ursula and her mother carted blankets, clothes and food out of the house, through acrid, billowing smoke. In the yard, they loaded everything onto a wheelbarrow. They found a loose, shapeless tracksuit for Ursula, and a peaked cap, which she pulled down over her ears.
The blazing heat propelled them along. They ran through the Luise Gate into Turmstrasse and away, leaving behind them the fire, their house and their past life. They slid and stumbled over the cobbles, pushing their swaying wheelbarrow. Flames leapt out of the houses, licking at their skin and hair. The fire hadn’t yet got past the town wall and into the alleyways where the houses were smaller and built in brick. Ursula and her mother knocked at the door of their old washerwoman, who gave them the key to her summerhouse. There they hunkered down. Russian soldiers came by and rummaged through their suitcases. Ursula hid at the bottom of a mound of bedclothes.
‘Day and night we saw fire and thick clouds of smoke,’ she would remember in years to come. The fire raged for days. In the old town it claimed whole streets, including the main thoroughfares. In the smaller, connecting streets, most of the half-timbered houses with wooden roof trusses went up in flames. Further out of town, towards the station, the River Tollense and the town common, some buildings were hit by the fire while others escaped—but half if not three-quarters of the houses in Demmin were completely destroyed.
Most of those who had decided to stay in town and make it through the Russian invasion as best they could now had to flee the fire. There was no time to pack. People took refuge in the surrounding woods or escaped to the meadows by the rivers, to fields and pastures. Many sought shelter in nearby villages: Eugenieberg, Lindenfelde, Pensin. The more fortunate found a place to sleep in a barn or hayloft. Others spent the nights in the half-finished anti-tank ditches they had dug themselves only a few days before. Yet others slept by the canals, between bales of straw, or on the bare earth of the oilseed fields.
• • •
Those who fled the town saw a devastating sight when they turned to look back. Beneath a sky reddened by flames—and behind columns of smoke and dense grey-black mountains of clouds—the church tower of Demmin had vanished. The hundred-metre-high red-brick tower, with its windowed turrets and filigree spire—once a reassuring symbol of home for everyone who lived there and a prominent local landmark—had disappeared, shrouded in smoke. Marie Dabs, who had lived all her life within sight of the tower, wrote in her memoirs: ‘Our beautiful tall church tower—all our childhood, the first thing we saw when we returned home from a journey—was no longer to be seen.’ Although it was hidden, she still felt its power. But the comforting pull of home and familiarity had given way to the dark pull of impending disaster.
The first of May had started like any other bright spring day. But Karl Schlösser, who was at home with his family, saw nothing of the sun. Night had descended on them in broad daylight. Dense smoke billowed from the burning houses in Frauenstrasse, darkening the sky. Karl’s grandfather came down the stairs. ‘We must all get out of here,’ he said. The roof beams and rafters had caught fire. Together with their grandparents and great-grandparents, Karl and his younger brother fled the house with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Only his mother, Magdalena Schlösser, packed some provisions—and a handful of razor blades. The night the Soviet soldier had assaulted her, she had formed a resolve.
They set off at a run, past the red-brick school building that hadn’t yet caught fire, down the dirt path to Swan Pond, and along the bank between the willows. The streets were full of people fleeing the flames. They crossed the railway lines at the station and slipped through a small wooded thicket surrounding the Uhlan memorial. On the other side was the town boundary, and beyond that the open fields, where they stopped to rest amid the furrows and clumps of grass. For the moment they felt little more than relief at having made it out of town—away from the burning houses, the looting soldiers and the panic-stricken people, away from all the screaming and raging and groaning. All they could see when they looked back was a column of smoke rising above the fir trees.
Then Karl saw his mother standing before him. In her hand she held one of the razor blades she had packed before they took flight. ‘We’re going to heaven now, to join your father!’ Magdalena Schlösser was planning to kill them—Karl, his brother, their grandparents and great-grandparents—and then herself. There, in the middle of the field, she wanted to put an end to their nightmare. Karl’s grandfather shouted at her, grabbing her arms and wresting the razor blade from her hand. He saved the family’s lives. None of them ever mentioned the incident afterwards. But they had escaped a fate that was hurtling towards the people of Demmin with terrific force.
• • •
In a letter to Werner Kuhlmann written in December 1945, his parents’ former maid, Else, informs him of the events that took place in their house on 1 May. Her letter is vivid and detailed. Werner Kuhlmann had clearly been without news of his parents since being taken prisoner by the British. ‘I am afraid that a cruel fate has befallen you since then,’ Else wrote. ‘I am afraid the time has come to tell you the sad and awful truth.’
At seven o’clock in the morning, Dr Erich Kuhlmann had come to her in the cellar and told her what had gone on in town since the previous evening. He placed a small parcel on the table. ‘For you, Else.’ Then he said a brief goodbye and went back upstairs. Else picked up the parcel and put it to one side. It was poison—she was sure of it. Herr Kuhlmann had often intimated that if the worst should come to the worst, this would always be a possible way out for them. After she’d washed in the laundry room, one of the other tenants came downstairs with his suitcases and told her that Erich Kuhlmann had shot himself, and that his wife Maria and their daughter Ilse were lying dead in one of the bedrooms. By then the roof was on fire, too.
I was all confused. I ran upstairs […] but was met by such thick smoke that I couldn’t see a thing. Why I didn’t go in the bedroom is a mystery to me. Herr Jeschke told me that your mother and Ilse were lying dead in bed, hand in hand.
Else packed a few things and rushed out of the burning house. Later, when she came to open the small parcel Erich Kuhlmann had given her in farewell, she found that it contained not poison, but the couple’s wedding rings and a few parting words from her now deceased employers. Their son was lucky to hear from Else; if it hadn’t been for the dissuasive powers of her future husband, she, too, would have poisoned herself soon afterwards.
• • •
Since struggling up at dawn, frozen stiff after their night in the undergrowth of Deven Wood, Marie Dabs, her children and the three others accompanying her had been wandering aimlessly about the outskirts of town. They tried their luck at the house of Dr Emil Melzer, an old acquaintance who had taken in a number of refugees and whom they’d bumped into on their way to take shelter at Deven Farm. In the garden of his house they came across a refugee woman, shovelling earth. It seemed to them a strange time to be doing that kind of garden work. Marie recognised her as one of the women who’d waited for the Russian invasion with them in the farmhouse attic. Unsuspecting, Marie asked the woman why she was so grimly intent on her work. The answer was so horrific that she would never forget it:
‘This is the last of the three graves I have dug for my children! I shall be going soon too. We’ve had a dreadful night. There are many more women and children in the house, lying in their own blood!’
They went in and found the doctor and his wife about to leave. The couple seemed close to madness. They had a packet of poison with them; they too had made up their minds to put an end to it all. Marie Dabs began to realise something of what had gone on in town that night while she’d been shivering in Deven Wood. It stirred a deep dread in her, but at the same time she felt a strange pull. Suddenly she, too, found herself able to imagine the previously unimaginable. ‘I asked them to give us some poison as well, but there was only enough for the two of them, and they went on their way.’ The corpses of Dr Melzer and his wife lay on the edge of Deven Wood for days.
Marie Dabs and her small party kept going, leaving the outskirts of Demmin for the open countryside, until they arrived at the nearby village of Eichholz, where her father owned a plot of meadowland and a poultry farm on the Trebel. She had previously arranged to meet him here in the event of a Russian invasion, and found when she arrived that he had already taken in several other refugees. He put his daughter and her party up in a hut made of bundles of thatch, together with the Wockersins and their twelve-year-old son. Like the Dabs, Herr Wockersin ran a fur business in Demmin. He had always been a man of few words and rather aloof, seeing them as competitors; now, in extreme plight, he remained reserved and silent. After one night with Marie Dabs and the others, the Wockersins strapped three bulging rucksacks on their backs without a word of explanation and went off in silence. ‘When my father brought us a small pail of milk early the next morning, he told us that the Wockersins had walked into the Trebel.’
In the space of only a few hours, Marie Dabs had encountered several people about to commit one of the most extreme acts a human can. Even she, inveterate optimist that she was, came close to succumbing. The dark mood that was dragging so many into the abyss had taken hold of her, too.
• • •
In the days between 30 April and 3 May 1945, Demmin became the scene of an unprecedented wave of suicides. People went to their deaths in droves: young men and women, staid married couples, people in the prime of life, the retired and the elderly. Many took their children with them: infants and toddlers, schoolchildren and adolescents. The victims could not be easily categorised. Hundreds were refugees from Pomerania, East and West Prussia and elsewhere, but there were also hundreds from Demmin and the surrounding area. Blue- and white-collar workers died, clerks and tradesmen, doctors and pharmacists, housewives and war widows, shopkeepers and policemen, managers and accountants, pensioners and teachers. Among the dead were a butcher, a carpenter, a cartwright, a charwoman, a tax clerk, a mechanic, a manager, a chef, a hotelier, a joiner, a chemist, a postman, a post office assistant, a retired postal inspector, a well-digger, a turner, a dentist, a seamstress, a tax inspector, a cattle dealer, a midwife, a retired customs clerk, a notary, a forester, a roadmender, a prison warden, a farmer, a smith, a former headmaster, a paver, a barber and a mayor. Dozens of unidentified bodies were also buried in the mass graves dug in Demmin’s cemetery in early May—people whose names and backgrounds remain unknown. Those who went to their deaths were of all ages, classes and professions. The suicides of Demmin represented a cross-section of small-town German society. It was as if the death urge had suddenly gripped them all.
• • •
Some people decided to go this way alone. Elise Ramm, an elderly widow, hanged herself in her flat. Former chief post office clerk Albert Wollbrecht drowned in the River Tollense, aged almost eighty. Charlotte Höffler, an accountant, died in a summerhouse on 1 May.
Many married couples and families, though, committed joint suicide. Elderly couples killed themselves together, like sixty-four-year-old cartwright Franz Höffler and his wife, Gertrud, who hanged themselves in their flat in Mühlenstrasse, or master barber Ernst Hoffmann and his wife, Hertha, both seventy-four, who drowned themselves in a canal by the gasworks. Some killed themselves along with their parents or grown-up children: mechanic Ernst Hirrick died with his wife, Käte, and their twenty-year-old daughter, Gerda, in a canal by the sewage works; chemist’s wife Käte Müller was found dead in her flat in Anklamer Strasse together with her seventeen-year-old daughter and seventy-year-old mother. Even large families were wiped out at a single blow. In Bahnhofstrasse, on 1 May, forty-eight-year-old teacher Paul Heinrich Behnke killed his entire family—his fifteen-year-old daughter, Irmgard Johanna, his two-year-old son, Hans, his wife, Irmgard Gertrud, and himself. That same day, another entire family gave up the struggle only a few streets away: young cook Hermann Halmich and his wife, their year-old child and its grandmother.
A particularly unusual case of collective suicide took place in the house of sixty-six-year-old furniture manufacturer Oskar Günther. On the morning of 30 April, about twenty people were gathered in his house in Baustrasse—his sister, his daughter, his daughter-in-law and a host of other friends and relations, including a forester called Gustav Sembach. The Soviet soldiers came, the looting and rape began, and the sea of flames crept steadily closer. After two days, Oskar Günther, his wife, Elsa, and her sister Hedwig poisoned themselves. Neighbours reported that the Günthers’ daughter had hastened their deaths by slitting their wrists with razor blades. Their bodies were burnt along with the house, but not before their friends and family had fled from Baustrasse, some of them making for a couple of summerhouses north of the old town. Here, another bloodbath ensued. Sembach the forester took his rifle and shot Günther’s daughter-in-law Gertrud and her four-year-old daughter. He then shot his wife, Paula, and elderly merchant’s wife Charlotte Richter and her daughter. When he was the only one left, Gustav Sembach put a bullet in his own head, but it did not immediately prove fatal. He was to live almost two months more before succumbing to his injuries.
• • •
Considerable numbers of women and children died in Demmin. At the time of the Soviet conquest, most young and middle-aged men were at the front, in POW camps or buried in soldiers’ graves. The women had been left behind in Demmin with their children or stranded there while fleeing westwards. For days, they were at the mercy of the conquering soldiers’ frenzied violence. Almost all reports describe the rape and abuse that were a constant and ever-present threat to women of all ages: soldiers who broke into flats and cellars in the middle of the night and shone torches into women’s faces; soldiers who raped a young girl several times on an asparagus patch; soldiers who assaulted a sixty-four-year-old woman on the street, in front of her daughter and grandson.
A young medical student, Lotte-Lore Martens, who was evacuated from Demmin’s eastern outskirts by Soviet soldiers on 1 May, describes in her memoirs the moment when horror gave way to a feeling of doom. After asking relatives in Campstrasse to look after her father, who’d been an invalid since the First World War, she set off with her mother in search of new lodgings for the family. But the way into town was blocked. ‘My mother and I had just reached the corner of Augustastrasse when we saw a huge crowd rushing towards us like an avalanche.’ They had come up against the mass of people fleeing eastwards—away from the prowling Soviet soldiers and the flames of the old town. Swept along by the crowd, they headed the same way, up the hill past the cemetery to a rise outside town, above the Tollense valley. From this vantage point, Lotte-Lore Martens saw clouds of smoke rising from the old town, and was reminded of Rome burning under Nero. But it was another sight that left her reeling: a never-ending line of women, running not so much from the fire as from their own fate. A desperate procession in broad daylight.
With the smoke came hosts of raped women, some of them still heavily bleeding, staggering up Jarmener Chaussee in a trance, trailing a child—or two or three or sometimes four—by the hand. Sooner or later, they all turned off right, towards the Tollense. There was no stopping them. Mass psychosis. They went to their deaths in the water.
Of all the different ways of committing suicide, drowning was the most common in Demmin. Because the town was on a peninsula, at the intersection of three rivers, no one in Demmin was ever more than ten minutes’ walk from a waterway. The marshland and reed beds along the rivers began just behind the houses; muddy paths led through the waist-high reeds to the willows and birches at the water’s edge. The current was weak, sometimes barely noticeable, and the river was shallow. You had to be determined to drown in those waters. Some people carried rucksacks so full of stones that they could barely be tied shut, and the straps cut deep into their shoulders. Others bound themselves together. Children were pulled along by strings and ropes, knotted around their wrists. Small babies clung to their mothers as they waded into the water.
As well as the three rivers, there are dozens of canals, ditches, pools and reservoirs scattered about the countryside. These, too, were sought out by the suicidal. People drowned themselves in the straight, narrow canals alongside the Peene or by the commons—or in the canals by the sewage works and the gasworks and the public baths. On 2 May, a middle-aged woman was found lying in Swan Pond. By the afternoon, a mother with her three-year-old son had been discovered there too. In a number of cases, the survival instinct prevailed despite desperate attempts to die. This led to scenes such as those observed by Lotte-Lore Martens from her lookout point on the hill above the Tollense: ‘Some women could swim, though their children couldn’t, so the women ended up surviving. Can they ever have got over what happened, I wonder?’ On 1 May, a three-month-old boy died in a canal by the gasworks. It was his mother who reported his death to the authorities. Seven-year-old Dieter Zorr, who drowned in the Peene by the sewage works, was likewise survived by his mother.
Anyone with a rifle or pistol was better off. Like the teacher Gerhard Moldenhauer, Paul Behnke, another teacher, shot first his family and then himself. But only very few civilians had thought to prepare for the Soviet invasion by providing themselves with firearms. Some got hold of poison—prussic acid or Veronal. This was an obvious choice for the Österlins, who kept a chemist’s shop on Bergstrasse and died on 30 April, and for veterinary surgeon Dr Melzer and his wife. In some cases, however, the poison—depending on the dosage, and the individual’s constitution—proved insufficiently effective. This was particularly tragic in attempted family suicides where only the weakest—the children, that is—were killed by the poison, as in the case of the fifteen-year-old daughter of a ship-broker and his wife, or the four-year-old daughter of a pastor. An even more uncertain way to die, especially when it was done carelessly or in panic, was to slit one’s wrists. From the very first day, people came to Demmin Hospital with severed tendons and veins, their arteries still intact. They were left with withered hands and telltale scars on their wrists.
Many had no choice but to hang themselves. Single people did it alone; others went to their deaths together—married couples, elderly mothers with grown-up daughters, even entire families, like that of a Reich Labour Service leader named Büchner. A master blacksmith’s widow who lived at 1 Schwedenwallweg hanged herself on 1 May, along with her two daughters and grandson. Only a day later, a turner and his wife and the forty-three-year-old wife of a labourer hanged themselves in the same building; within twenty-four hours, almost all the occupants had died by hanging. One woman who tried to hang herself in a tree after poisoning her three children and burying them in the countryside was cut down three times by Soviet soldiers. Elsewhere, the enemy soldiers rescued people from rivers or bandaged bleeding wrists.
Deven Wood
There were scenes of desperation and despair throughout the town and the surrounding area. There were dead bodies all over the place—hanging in houses and streets and green spaces and floating wherever there was water. The oaks and copper beeches of Deven Wood, on the western edge of town, had always made it a popular destination for families and walkers. Now people were going there to poison themselves in the shade of the trees. It was the same at the other end of town, in the sparsely wooded slopes that bordered the cemetery. One man even went to the cemetery to shoot himself, while his wife and mother-in-law poisoned themselves in the same spot. A woman was found poisoned on the grass in a meadow. An elderly man was found dead on a motorboat by Drönnewitz Field. There were corpses drifting in the Tollense and the Peene, among the debris from the dynamited railway bridges; there were corpses in the tributaries, canals and ponds. Some people sought out the seclusion of their summerhouses outside the northern wall of the town, and hanged or shot themselves there. But those who didn’t throw themselves in the rivers mostly died in the familiar surroundings of their own homes.
A particularly striking aspect of the reports is the number of suicides involving children. Like the adults, these children were shot or drowned, hanged or poisoned, or bled to death from slit wrists—but with the exception of a few who were old enough to kill themselves, it was their mothers and fathers or sometimes their grandparents or other family members who slipped the noose round their necks, put the poison in their mouths or slashed their wrists. For those who died by drowning it must have taken enormous strength to drag their babies and children along with them and press them down under the water until they no longer felt any resistance. A six-week-old baby boy and three little girls, aged five, three and three months, died in the Peene, by the railway bridge. A young mother killed herself and her two children, aged three and four, in a canal. A woman from Tilsit killed her three sons in her flat before going on to kill herself.
Of almost two hundred nameless dead buried in Demmin’s cemetery, more than a third are young boys and girls and babies. There were, though, rare cases of survival. A mother who died after slitting her wrists was survived by her daughter. Another who was planning to drown herself and her four children was dragged away from the banks of the Tollense by her fifteen-year-old son.
• • •
Trapped in Demmin at the worst possible moment, Irene Bröker survived the first wave of Soviet troops on 30 April unharmed, but had no idea of the horrors she was yet to witness. There was no escape from the disaster that had befallen Demmin. When the fires and lootings and rapes began in the old town, women and girls came flocking to the house by the cemetery, but Soviet soldiers soon drove up in trucks, looking for them. Bröker had several lucky escapes from rape, saved by ruse, or the intervention of her companion Dr P. It was an uncertain time, she said.
Nobody knew what would happen next. We had no rights and nothing to bargain with. We heard no news. I slept in a different place every night.
Irene Bröker spent the nights in constantly changing hiding places to avoid assault. She slept in hedges of brambles and behind rabbit hutches, in a concrete trough in the attic, and in the shelter beneath the compost heap. During the day, she had two-year-old Holger too look after, so she never had the opportunity—or the courage—to leave the house by the cemetery, and saw nothing of what was going on in the streets and parks and rivers of Demmin. Then one day they were visited by the old Soviet soldier who had discovered them in their makeshift shelter. He took Dr P. with him, saying that he was needed for a special task. The doctor returned that evening with grim news:
Dr P. told us that about 600 people, many of them children, had walked into the Peene. He’d had to help fish them from the water and lay them out in long rows. All day long, bodies had kept washing ashore.
It took days to pile up all the bodies and take them to the cemetery to be buried. Once it was done, Dr P. had to help clean up the riverbanks and streets. Every evening he returned with the same bleak look on his face. Irene Bröker, meanwhile, spent the days searching the garden and fields for things dropped by looters: things they needed, like forks and spoons. One morning she went out into the garden and froze, seeing the horror with her own eyes for the first time. Beside the garden fence lay the body of a woman who had killed herself and her two small children. Irene Bröker saw only the children’s shoes and stockings. She didn’t dare go nearer, or touch them. ‘No one will ever know exactly what happened,’ she wrote later. ‘The three dead bodies lay there till evening. Then somebody must have given them a makeshift burial under cover of darkness.’
But the three nameless bodies didn’t rest for long. The next day, Russian soldiers came into the garden to root around in the ground with long, sharp-ended sticks, knowing that many Germans had buried their valuables in their gardens before taking flight. The earth over the dead woman and her two children had been churned up, exposing the bodies. Irene Bröker saw their pale faces, streaked with dirt, and painstakingly covered them with earth again. It was the same story the next day.
At last I came up with the rather horrible idea of leaving the children’s legs sticking up out of the earth. That way, there were always four little legs in shoes and brown stockings, peeping out as a ‘warning’ to foragers. We were very much upset by this macabre sight, but there were no more soldiers digging there after that.
Irene’s head was spinning. She had lost all sense of time. Her husband was missing, her parents lost along the way. A strange town was smouldering in the distance, and all around her was violence and looting. She heard Dr P.’s muted reports of what he had seen, saw those little legs sticking out of the earth, felt helpless and uncertain. She had no idea what was going on or how it would turn out. There was just her and little Holger—no hope for the future. Irene Bröker was physically and mentally robust, but she felt herself losing her grip. She, too, began to think it might be better to kill herself. The tablets were still there, in the watertight pouch around her neck. Her fingers rose to her throat when she thought of them.
Once she had made up her mind, Irene waited. When no one was about, she went into the kitchen and dissolved the tablets in two cups. Then she took a spoon and tried to feed a little of the liquid to her son. ‘He pulled a terrible face,’ she said, ‘but it was time for his meal so he gulped at it bravely.’ She felt a quiet desperation. A woman came into the kitchen unexpectedly, grabbed the cups and tipped the poison down the drain. But Irene Bröker stuck to her resolve to die and take Holger with her. ‘When the woman was gone, I decided to hang myself in the attic. But the thought of seeing my little boy dangling there, struggling, held me back.’
In the end, then, her suicide attempt failed, not because of her fear of death or her respect for life, but because of her vivid imagination. Without it, she might have shared the fate of many others in Demmin.
The next morning, little Holger slept late. At this point in the narrative, Irene’s tone changes: she sounds more grounded again. The days of numb desperation were over. The Soviets set up a provisional administration department, and the Germans in Demmin reconciled themselves to living alongside the enemy soldiers who stayed on. Before long, Irene Bröker was making plans to return to her hometown—although she did sometimes wonder whether she wouldn’t have been better off buried in the cemetery in Demmin. Writing about her experiences, she said: ‘All this sounds very far-fetched! But anyone who lived through that time in Demmin will understand.’