“As he journeyed alone toward the monster that is death, we could do nothing to help him, nor the others still alive; all the words of strength on our lips melted away, our love not great enough to bind them to life, and our hope not enough to will them to live.”

“We had seen too many horrors already, and we could see and hear more explosions all around us as the war continued, very close to our hiding place; machine gun fire and the sounds of grenades – all very frightening.”

“With our collective shock, what we saw seemed to be frozen into a state of suspended animation. Indelibly etched into our memories in terror, forever! My life was in slow motion, it was as if I was no longer in my body and this was a rather bad dream! It is almost impossible to describe with words what I saw, but I will try. This very experience is the one that has continued to shake me awake during the dense night of my lifetime.”

“We had the air war overhead, which was frightening, but we were, in a way, getting used to it. Now, however, we could hear – and at night, see – the flashes of explosions reflected in the dark sky. We could feel the ground vibrate under our feet. The war was getting closer!”

“I quickly got used to being picked up by my mother, and taken to the air raid shelter near our home. Although frightening, this was a great adventure to me as a child, for in the shelter I played with the other children and we felt safe there as we were surrounded by grown-ups; although now the grown-ups were more worried than they had been in the past. There were greater feelings of anxiety and fear in the older people, which we children also felt, and it unsettled us all.”

“I do recall hearing a conversation in our home in Strausberg, between my mother and my father, where my mother sounded very angry that my cousin had let the Rödels down by having to be dragged out of Oma’s house, crying for his mother and shouting that he did not want to return to the war in Russia.Like a great many other soldiers throughout that period, he died in Russia on 5 May, 1944. He was just twenty years of age, and is buried somewhere in that country.”

“But the public did not know the truth about what happened to the people in the trucks; they believed the stories from the government, who said that these people, known as Untermensch (non-people or ‘lower people’), were simply moved to open spaces in the east and settled on farms, away from Germany, so as not to ‘contaminate’ the German race. This is an example of people not wishing to know the facts behind the rumours in which were whispered between trusted friends. The general belief was that the rumours were rubbish anyway, for how could a civilized country do such things? Our leaders would never allow anything bad to happen to these people; after all, we were not barbarians! And so nothing was said, or done, and the public developed a collective blindness to the truth.”