Prologue
Why I'm including a disclaimer with this story:
Behind all my writing are many books that I read or have read. Everything originates from thoughts conveyed to me by other thoughts. Books are thoughts in written form.
For as long as I can remember, I've been interested in people and their stories. Our German history is full of them—of fates, of tragedies, and also of greatness. This narrative arose from such an interest, sparked by a war diary I read.
East Prussia has long been a subject that particularly fascinates me. The period from 1813 to the present day holds special attention for me.
In Otto Will's diary, "Diary of an Eastern Front Fighter—In Action with the 5th Panzer Division 1941–1945," I read about the fates of women and children in January and February 1945 near Königsberg—and about what happened in Metgethen. These events are historically documented; There is also a corresponding Wikipedia entry: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massaker_von_Metgethen
As is so often the case when reading about human suffering, the book deeply moved me. These lines arose from this impression—as a prologue to a story that is fictional, but whose roots lie in real suffering.
In his diary, Otto did indeed have a girlfriend in Metgethen; she had left East Prussia before the Russian invasion—thanks to Otto. However, what became of Otto and his sweetheart after the war remained open. I have brought this story to a close for myself.
His sweetheart was not affected by the Russian massacre; I deliberately chose a different ending for the story. These lines are meant to remind us that we should avoid violence and war and commit ourselves unconditionally to peace and understanding between nations.
Human dignity is inviolable—and that is what we should strive for.
Fought in East Prussia (A Short Story)
The ship lay heavily in the icy waters of the Baltic Sea. February 1945. Otto Brenner leaned against the railing and stared back at the coastline disappearing into the fog. His left arm hung uselessly in a sling, his uniform stiff with blood and seawater. Around him crowded wounded soldiers, refugees, women with vacant eyes, and children who no longer cried.
In his breast pocket, he carried two things: a crumpled letter and a photograph. The photograph showed a girl with dark braids in front of a house with a whitewashed fence. On the back, in her rounded handwriting, it read: "For my Otto, so you know where to return to. Your Grete. Metgethen, August 1944."
Grete. He had always called her Grete, even though her full name was Margarete. A suburb of Königsberg, a small village with a train station, a church, and farms. He had met her there, in the summer of '43, when his unit was stationed behind the front lines for rest and refitting. She had been the younger daughter of the village blacksmith, seventeen years old, with a laugh that brightened the world. Her older sister, Erna, had often been with them—the two looked like twins, even though there were two years between them.
Now Metgethen was lost. On January 30, the Soviets had overrun the town. The 5th Panzer Division—his division—had struck back on February 19, cutting a swathe through the enemy lines to reopen the road to Pillau. Otto had been there. He had seen what they had found in Metgethen.
He closed his eyes, but the images remained. The bodies on the tennis court. The women in the cellars. The children.
He had searched for her. For hours. The house with the white fence was nothing but a smoldering ruin. Not a trace of the Moldenhauer family. Perhaps they had escaped in time. Perhaps.
"We'll make it through," the captain had said as they carried him onto the ship. "We will live."
Otto wasn't sure if that was what he wanted.
Forty years later, Otto Brenner stood at the window of his house in Lübeck, watching the rain. He had grown old, with white hair and a scar on his left arm that had never ceased to ache whenever the weather changed. He had married—a woman from the West whom he had met in 1949, a good woman who had given him two sons. She had died three years ago.
A letter lay on his desk. It had come from the Soviet Union, by circuitous routes, through the hands of aid organizations that cared for the fate of the displaced. The letter was written in Russian, but someone had enclosed a translation.
"Dear Mr. Brenner," it began. "We have processed your inquiry regarding Margarete Moldenhauer, born in Metgethen in 1926. According to our records, a person of that name was registered in the Königsberg transit camp in March 1945. She was later transferred to a labor camp in the Urals." According to the records, she died there in the winter of 1947.
Otto had read the letter a hundred times. He knew every sentence by heart. He also knew he couldn't trust it. Soviet documents were notorious for their gaps and errors. It could be true. It could also be false.
But there was a second letter. It had arrived just yesterday, from Hamburg, from a man named Krüger, who claimed to know a woman who remembered the Moldenhauer family from Metgethen. An old woman living in a retirement home in Hamburg-Bergedorf. A woman who came from East Prussia.
Otto drove to Hamburg the next morning. The rain had stopped, but the sky remained gray. The retirement home was a stark building from the 1960s, with long corridors and the smell of disinfectant.
The nurse led him to a room on the second floor. "She has good days and bad days," she said quietly. “Today is a good day.”
The woman at the window was small and stooped, with snow-white hair combed thinly over her head. She turned as he entered, and Otto felt his heart skip a beat.
He knew that face. He knew it even though forty years had passed over it like a glacier across a valley. The eyes had remained the same—dark, deep, with a spark that had never quite gone out.
"Grete," he whispered.
The old woman looked at him for a long time. Then she smiled, and it was a smile he thought he knew—the same smile he had worn in the photograph in his breast pocket, across Russia, through the Königsberg basin, over the icy Baltic Sea.
"You're Otto," she said. "I wondered if you would ever come."
They talked all afternoon. She told him how she had escaped—from the train that was supposed to take her to the camp. She had hidden in a forest, run west, pretended to be a Polish forced laborer, and spent years in displaced persons camps. When she finally arrived in Germany in 1950, she hadn't known how to find him.
“I got married,” she said. “To a good man. He died ten years ago.”
“Me too,” said Otto. “Her name was Gertrud. She was a good woman.”
They sat side by side by the window, looking out at the gray Hamburg sky. Two old people who had known each other forty years ago, in a village that no longer existed, in a country that no longer existed.
“I still have that photo,” Otto said finally. He pulled it from his wallet—yellowed, frayed at the edges, but still legible. Your Grete. Metgethen, August 1944.
The old woman took it with trembling hands. She looked at it for a long time, and Otto saw her eyes well up.
Then she said something that changed everything.
“That’s my sister,” she said softly.
Otto stared at her. “What?”
She turned the photo over and looked at the back. “This is Grete’s handwriting. My sister Margarete. I’m Erna.” She looked up. “We looked very similar. Everyone said so.”
The world around Otto began to spin. He remembered the summer of 1943. The girl with the dark braids. Her laughter. He remembered that there had always been two girls, inseparable, like twins. He had loved Grete. But now he saw the other girl’s face—Erna’s face—and realized he couldn’t tell them apart. Not after forty years.
“You’re not Grete,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“No.” Erna shook her head. “Grete told me about you. She loved you. She told me everything—how you met in the woods, how you promised to marry her when the war was over.”
“Where is she?” Otto asked. His voice was now just a croak.
Erna looked out the window. The gray sky. The endless rain.
"We were on the train together," she said. "The train that was supposed to take us to the camp. I managed to jump, hide, and get west." She closed her eyes. "Grete didn't. She was weak, sick, she couldn't jump. I... I had to do without her."
A long silence.
"The letter from Moscow," Otto said finally. "The files. Margarete Moldenhauer, died in 1947 in the Urals."
Erna nodded slowly. "That was her. My little sister. Your Grete."
Otto looked at the photograph in his hands. The girl with the dark braids. The laughter that brightened the world. For forty years, he had carried her face in his wallet. And now he sat next to a woman who looked just like her—but wasn't her.
"I mistook you for her," he said. "When you turned around. I thought..."
"I know." Erna smiled sadly. "Everyone mistook us for each other. Even our mother sometimes."
Otto stood up. His legs could barely support him. He went to the window and looked out at the city he didn't know, at a life he hadn't lived.
"I fought for a photograph," he said. "I survived for a signature. I searched for a face for forty years—and when I finally found it, it was the wrong one."
Erna stepped beside him. She was shorter than Grete had been—or was he just imagining it? He didn't know anymore. After forty years, he didn't know anything at all.
“She loved you,” Erna said. “Until the very end. She told me that on the train before I jumped. She said: If you ever find him, tell him I loved him.”
Otto nodded. He picked up the photograph and looked at it one last time. Then he placed it on the table, next to Erna’s hand.
“Keep it,” he said. “It’s all that’s left of her.”
He walked to the door. On the threshold, he turned around one last time.
“I fought in East Prussia,” he said. “I fought for Germany. For the Reich. For final victory. But in truth, I only fought for a photograph. For a girl who died in a camp while I started a new life in the West.”
He laughed, but it wasn’t a joyful laugh.
“For forty years I searched. And now I’ve found what I was looking for.” "But it's not what I'd hoped to find."
The door clicked shut. Outside, it started to rain again.
Erna Moldenhauer died three months later in her bed at the nursing home. Her sister found her in the morning, peaceful, with a smile on her lips. In her hand, she held a yellowed photograph of her sister.
Otto Brenner learned of it through a letter. He didn't attend the funeral. Instead, he drove to the Baltic Sea, to a beach near Travemünde, and threw a handful of earth into the water.
"For Grete," he said.
The water carried it out into the Baltic, eastward, to where East Prussia had once been, where a village called Metgethen had once existed, where two sisters had once lived, looking as alike as twins—one who had survived, and one who had died in a camp in the Urals, nineteen years old, with a photograph of a soldier in her pocket, a soldier who had never known that she was waiting for him.
The sea was silent.
As it always is.
S.
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