Conversation with Pop
August 2, 2020:
“The rule about school in Berlin during the war, was every kid had to go to school until age 16. If children had relatives in places where there were no air raids, children were sent there. For children that did not have safe places to go, the government sent the remaining children away to schools. Boys went to one and girls went to another. First, in 1942-43, I remember the first school I went to, when I was 12. It was on the island of Usedom. It took two days by boat from Berlin. We took a small river boat from Berlin to Stettin, now Szczecin in Poland, and then changed to had to change to a larger boat that went through the lake to the ocean. There were about 30 kids and two teachers on the boat. We stayed overnight in Stettin.
Usedom is on the northern peninsula of the Baltic island north of the Szczecin Lagoon estuary of the Oder river. We ended up in a small vacation village called Sinovaich. I remember the school was next to where the Peenemünde Army Research Centre was that built the V1 bombs. Of course we didn't know that then, but I remember the barbed wire. The school was a kind of hostel, there was no heat, so I was sent back to Berlin for the winter of 1943.
Then for 1943/44 school season I went to a school in Kobylin, in the district of Krotoszyn, south of Posen, in central Poland. Posen is the town my great-grandfather Maximillian Reichard was sent to, from Alsace. He was a minister or something. I was in a small village called Koppelstadt (now Kobylin in Poland). The school was in a two room monastery. The boys stayed in one room, the monks in the other. I remember the church was used as a grain storage, and we boys would climb up through a window and down into the grain. Irmel was sent to a girls school in Posen.
In January 1945, the Russians began an offensive march through to Posen, and we boys had to flee with just what we could carry in our rucksacks. We grabbed what we could carry and walked down the road to catch a freight train that took us to Dresden. We couldn’t use regular train stations. The teachers had a map of where we could go to catch a freight train, about 10 or 12 kilometers down the track.
When we got to the freight train, it was full of people fleeing the East. On the car we boarded, the car was half full of furniture, the people must have been Nazi officers who had time to pack. The Nazis got time to pack their belongings, we kids had to flee with just the clothes on our backs. Our train took us to Dresden, and there I found a freight train to Berlin. I got to Berlin in middle of January. There was no more school after that. "
Addendum, August 4, 2020, Pop's observation about Americans whining about not being able to go to school during covid:
“Between January 1945 and mid 1946, there was no school anywhere. In all total, I lost about two years of basic elementary and high school – six months when I was in first grade, when I was sick was with scarlet fever and had to stay home, and again after the war. I never did graduate from high school. My only education then was self taught, by reading whatever books I could find. I often found books that had been abandoned by people fleeing, in old carts and such. I also taught myself English and French. “
Letter from Hali to his Father, November 14, 1944
Lissa, November 14, 1944
Dear Vati!
I am very unlucky. I came to Posen well. But then the train in Konigsberg-Poznan-Bresla-Vienna, which I had to use to Lissa, was 70 minutes late, so I missed the train to Rozzelstadt, now I have to wait until 2:30 pm. I am sitting in my hotel and have already written to Mutti and Irmel. I also got a red pillow for Irmel.
By the way, I could have stayed for another 15 minutes. I was in Charl 35 minutes before the train left. On the way from Posten to Lissa, it began to snow, which it just picked up to do. It was -4 degrees, now it's +1 degree, and snow thaws again.
Now dear daddy, lots of greetings,
from your Hali
(author's note: Hali was Walter's nickname to his family)
Photo above is of children being evacuated from Berlin believed to be in September 1940, because before September the allies avoided bombing Berlin. That changed after the Germans started bombing London.
Source: German World War II KLV Evacuations (1940-45), https://www.histclo.com/schun/country/ger/era/tr/ww2/ww2-evac.html,
downloaded 8/16/2020.