Congratulations to young writer Leni Taylor. Leni is the joint runner-up in the 9-12 years category for the South Coast Writers Centre/Young Archies Writing Competiton.

The competition asked young writers residing on the South Coast of NSW to write a story from real life. The competition was run in partnership with Shoalhaven Regional Gallery and Shoalhaven Libraries, and was supported by Create NSW.

Leni is 10 years old, attends Bulli Public School and she loves her family, books, writing, surfing, cuddling her cat Loki and her friends. Read her story, The Journey West, below.

The Journey West

By Leni Taylor

My grandpa Helmut was born in 1940 in a part of far Eastern Germany, which is now in Poland. Opa – that’s German for grandpa – was the middle one of three boys, with a younger brother (Uli) and an older brother (Alfred). They lived on a nice farm and enjoyed a fairly simple life, until World War II struck and their father Franz was forced to join the war as a medic.

In 1944, Germany started to lose World War II and Auguste, my great grandmother, didn’t know where her husband was, only that he was in the war, and they didn’t know if he was okay. They had not heard from him in two years.

That’s when the Russians, Germany’s enemies and neighbours to the east, started bombing and attacking the eastern side of Germany. The Russian forces started pushing through Poland and Germany and, once the fighting was finished, many Polish families were forced out of their own homes further east by the Russians and placed into German homes in towns and villages further west. A Polish man was put on Helmut’s family farm and basically ‘owned’ the place. But this man felt sympathy for them, since he had lost his family and home, so he was never cruel to them and they made do together on the farm as best as they could.

When Germany officially lost the war the Russian soldiers, worn out from the war and angry about their own people’s treatment by the Germans, became cruel in return.

Whenever they visited Helmut’s village, they would pluck someone random out of the crowd and declare them a ‘traitor’.

One of my Opa’s first memories as a small child was seeing someone from the village getting hanged.

In 1946, Auguste realised they couldn’t stay any longer. She took the boys, hid all the precious family things like silver in the garden so no one could find them, and together, they all fled. They ran over 20 kilometres of fields in the bitter cold, just to get to the refugee train to West Germany.

They made it. The train had big carriages called ‘cattlewagons’ and they were overcrowded with people with metal barricades surrounding them, to stop partisans getting into the carriages during the journey West. There was one bucket for a toilet, one with drinking water. My great grandma’s job was to fill the buckets with water. They were on the train for two days and stopped at a city called Greifswald, to clean buckets and get fresh water. As Auguste was on the platform and filling the water bucket, she ran into someone from their village. The person recognised her, and told her: “If you’re on the refugee train, get off it. Your husband is working here as a medic.”

So Helmut, Uli, Alfred and their mother snuck off the train. Sure enough, they found their father at the Red Cross, an organisation that still runs many refugee camps around the World today.

Franz had been working as a medic, someone who carried wounded soldiers off the battlefield, and he had seen some awful things. But he was overjoyed to see them.

Though he was never quite the same after the war.

They were put on a farm with two other families and eventually Franz made the farm his own again being the clever and ambitious farmer that he was. Unfortunately, they had ended up in the part of Germany which was occupied by the Russians and eventually became the GDR (German Democratic Republic) so they lost everything all over again when people’s property got taken away under the socialist government.

In 1961, when Helmut was 21, he fled to West Germany, just before they built the wall that would split East and West Germany. There he met a beautiful woman in a red dress, who he married. In other words, that’s how my German grandparents met, but that escape is another story.

Hundreds of other refugee families tried to escape East Germany the same way my Great Grandmother Auguste did and didn’t make it out alive.

But my family did.