![]() ![]() ![]() Kempowski himself, born in 1929 and raised in the coastal city of Rostock, which was almost entirely destroyed by British bombs in 1942, barely escapes the last major European offensive of the war, the Battle of Berlin, as a Luftwaffe courier. Soon afterward he will learn that his father, who’s been conscripted as a Wehrmacht officer, has fallen in battle on the Vistula Spit during the final days of the war. ![]() One of the last ships to shuttle between Rostock and the East Prussian coast with a cargo of desperate refugees is the Friedrich, a vessel belonging to the shipowner Karl Georg Kempowski, whose son, Walter Kempowski, is 15 years old when he witnesses the exhausted East Prussian refugees disembarking in Rostock and “dragging themselves” through the town. The story of this evacuation is one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of the German civilian population in the final months of World War Two. They will freeze or starve to death, be strafed by aircraft as they straggle along the roads, or break through the ice of the frozen Vistula Lagoon with their horses and carts, or else the ships ferrying them to safety will be torpedoed by Soviet submarines. Along the way, 300,000 of these people will perish. By the end of this icy winter, nearly 750,000 refugees will attempt to escape from the front, fleeing west along the Baltic coast via two narrow strips of land-the Curonian Spit and the Vistula Spit. ![]() The Red Army is advancing toward East Prussia. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |