That night, as we sat exchanging stories with Hellie playing around our feet, we discussed what the future would hold for us. I suggested I could register with the Soviets as a former soldier, but Gudrun wouldn’t hear of it. At the very least I would be incarcerated and interrogated, and it would only take one informer to betray the fact that I was Fallschirmjäger and I would be put up against a wall and shot, if I was lucky! The only alternative was to remain incognito and find some means to buy or barter food. I needed a job!
The following morning, back in disguise, I made my way north, keeping to the quiet streets and zig-zagging to avoid the police stations I knew to be in this area. As I plodded northward the bomb damage became less and there were, in consequence, fewer hiding places to take a break. I took to resting in parks and cemeteries—anywhere to ease my aching back and sore knees.
I was playing a long shot. I had served in Crete and North Africa with a fellow paratrooper by the name of Bernhard Schumacher. A really nice man, quiet and unassuming, he didn’t seem to be Fallschirmjäger material, that was until the action started—then he became quite a different character. We became close friends, the sort of friendship that develops between two men who have been through heavy fighting together, secure in the knowledge that the one would risk his life for the other.
Berni, as he was known, had once told me that his father was a ‘fixer’.
“I know, you told me before he was a builder.”
“I don’t mean that sort of fixer.” He smiled and winked. “He also fixes other things.”
He then made me promise that if ever I needed help of any sort, I would look up his father at his builder’s yard in Eschengraben, just south of Pankow.
Berni had been captured by the British in North Africa, so I wasn’t sure how his family would react if I turned up, but that was my goal: to reach the Schumacher family to see if there was anything they could do to help, or even suggest an alternative to giving myself up.
The distance to Eschengraben was roughly four kilos, so at my current rate of shuffling progress of about two kilos an hour, and allowing for stops, I should make it in around three hours.
I was making good progress when I turned left into Raumerstrasse from Schliemannstrasse and straight into a Soviet patrol coming towards me on the same side of the road. They were too close to allow me to take evasive action, so I did the only thing I could do. I continued to walk towards them until they were almost on top of me, then pressed myself back against a doorway to allow them to pass.
My heart sank when I saw the long khaki cloaks swaying as they marched. Guardsmen! Elite soldiers. The best of the best. They were a small squad of four with the senior NCO leading them, marching one pace to their right. He was everything you might expect from a guards’ sergeant. Tall, broad and with features hewn from solid granite, I swear you could have chopped sticks on his face and he wouldn’t have flinched. He stopped his squad level with me, and without a word, they formed an arc around me, their rifles ‘easy’ but held in such a way that they could be brought into instant use. I wondered what the chances were of using my pistol. It was currently tucked into my trousers behind my back. I estimated it as close to zero.
The officer approached and scrutinised me. I saw his eyes narrow slightly as he did so.
“What is your name, and where are you going?” he asked in passable German.
“Horst Manteufel, Kamerad, I am looking for a mobile bakery, I am starving, Kamerad,” I stuttered in my best old man’s voice.
“Where have you come from?”
“Georgenkirch Strasse 23, Kamerad. Do you or your men have any spare food?” I gave him the address of one of the bombed-out apartment blocks I had passed in the back streets near the Volkspark.
“Your papers!”
“Destroyed in the bombing, Kamerad. I lost everything … my wife was in the apartment when it was bombed … I have lost everything.” I allowed my voice to break. Was I mistaken or was there a trace of sympathy, fleetingly, on the granite face?
“The nearest mobile bakery is at the junction of Lychener and Stargarder, by the laundry, and while you’re in that area, go to the police station on Stahlheimer and get yourself registered.”
I spluttered my thanks, accompanied with many bows, but he and his guardsmen were already halfway down the road. I stayed for some time, propped up against the door, unable to move as I fought to get my emotions under control. It had been a near thing. Had my disguise worked or had I been given the benefit of the doubt by the big guardsman? I suspect it was the latter.
Needless to say, I avoided both the bakery and the police station and ended up in Eschengraben in the early afternoon. The builders’ yard was easy to find, but I hovered near the gate for some time, wondering whether throwing myself on the mercy of an entirely unknown family was really such a good idea. In the end the memory of Berni exhorting me to get help from my father if you need to, he’s a fixer, won the day, and I unlatched the gate and walked into the yard.
It was a typical builders’ yard: bricks and wood in neat piles alongside a sizable workshop, and an old Magirus Deutz three-ton flatbed sitting in the corner and looking very retired. A handcart
