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232 33 Awakening From the Nightmare We continuedwalking withshortinterruptions.Iwasnotveryalertand remembered nothing until later in the afternoon when, quite suddenly, the front caught up with and engulfed us. The air was full of gunfire. I was too numb to understand what was going on. The noise grew closer. Fireballs flew through the air. I said “If these are our rescuers, they should not kill us in the process.” Then it became calm. A guard next to us, whom we had not seen before, started to talk to Fritz and to me about the past in a rather friendly tone. He had been active in the theater of a small town, liked Brecht and Weil, and had been annoyed, so he said, at the changes when Hitler came to power. We did not ask him why he was in the SS but realized that his behavior would have been considered high treason a couple of days earlier, now it demonstrated the turning point. More fireballs surrounded us, accompanied by whistling sounds. One of my friends shook my arm and screamed, “Look!” The SS guards who had accompanied us were undressing. They could not get rid of their SS uniforms fast enough and beneath them, to our surprise, they already wore regular military uniforms. They had prepared to be captured as regular soldiers. The next moment they were gone and we were on our own in the middle of fire and shrapnel. We cowered and crawled on all fours to the bushes and, covered by them, we ran to a hill with trees. We were free. It had suddenly become very still.There was no more shooting. A few fires were burning. There were no people to be seen anywhere. Carefully, we moved back towards the main road that we had taken during the last days but we reversed our direction, returning westward hoping to get closer to the front. My perceptions were distorted. With a shout I pointed to another hill where I saw figures in uniform. I yelled, “Get under cover they are shooting.” It was an illusion. Fritz looked there and so did the others and could not see any people with guns. I 233 grew more frightened and wanted to hide. They calmed me and we kept walking. My numbness was gone and I realized that we were free, but perhaps we could again be caught or even shot. We walked until we reached the first houses of a small town through which we had passed as prisoners the day before. White bed sheets were hanging from the windows of private houses and official buildings. After a few American tanks arrived, the town was eager to surrender. The progressing Allied army had bypassed them but the German population was still anxiously awaiting the enemy. As our group of one to two hundred tired and hungry men in rags assembled in front of the city hall, an elderly man with a white handkerchief came out claiming surrender and offering us help. The townspeople offered us food and water if we would leave their town again. The city councilors were still afraid of Nazi retaliation if KZ (concentration camp) prisoners were found in their community. We were ecstatic over our first meal in freedom. Bread, salami, cheese and wonderful water. Our host told us that a group of teenagers had not gone along with their decision to surrender and locked themselves in the historic town tower. They had special guns, called panzerfaust (tank fist), ready to attack the first enemy tanks entering the square. The city fathers were having an ongoing meeting to decide how to convince the kids to give up. They gave us a letter with the seal of the mayor of the town, saying we were free and yet “ordered” us to walk to the border. It started to grow dark and we wondered where we would spend the night. Looking around for a place, we met a group of French prisoners of war. They had found an empty barn filled with hay where they planned to spend the night. They invited us to stay. We walked there up a slight hill. It was dark inside the barn. I threw myself down, and despite feeling stinging bites all over my body, was asleep in a short time. I woke at daybreak surrounded by loud, excited voices in a jumble of different languages, mainly French and Czech. All of us stared at the highway a few thousand feet...

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