14 February 2009
Ursula White now lives in England in Shropshire, but in 1945, at the end of the war, she was a 6 or 7 year old girl living with her parents in a village in Germany, just outside the city of Krefeld. She recently emailed me, after reading this blog, to say she still has vivid memories of the hard winter of 1946-7, when she and her family stole coal from the open wagons of the goods trains, when they stopped at signals in the woods near the village.
The books about life in Germany in the years immediately after the war always mention how people had to steal coal to keep warm, because there was none available to buy. The documentary film School in Cologne (which I wrote about on this blog a few weeks ago) starts by showing a young boy stealing coal briquettes, picking them up from the ground in a railway siding. But this is the first time I have heard the story directly from someone who was there at the time, and remembers stealing coal herself.
This is what Ursula wrote. If you want to know more, she has recently started her own blog - Friko's Musings - where she intends to write some more reminiscences of those times.
"Winter 46/47
As a small child I lived in a village on the Lower Rhine. Although we had shelter we had very little food and no fuel. There were, however, trains laden with coal from the nearby mining area of the Ruhr, which rolled through woods not far off on their way to the Dutch border. It so happened, that these trains always came to a momentary stop in the woods waiting for a signal to change to green, to allow them passage onwards. It didn't take long for this to become known in the village. The coal was transported in open wagons, not very high ones, with steps or iron bars on the outside. A few village men risked the first raids on the train; when nothing happened, others followed suit.
Little by little, everyone was involved in stealing coal, my parents and me included. It was always after dark when the raids took place. The villagers gathered on the edge of the woods, close to the tracks, but still hidden from view. As soon as the train started to slow down (it was never very fast), the men broke cover, climbed up the bank and clambered onto the trucks, women and children following behind, but staying on the ground. The men began to shovel coal, most with their bare hands, throwing it from the trucks onto the ground where the women and children frantically scooped it up, into small sacks or baskets; the lucky few might have had a handcart although it was quite difficult to get anything but the smallest conveyance over the uneven terrain of the woods. We had a bicycle which helped with carrying our loot. My father pushed it. My mother was ill with malnutrition and unable to carry much and I was too small, although I remember dragging a sack behind me until we got out of the woods and my father loaded it on to his back.
Because we were such a small group we never managed to take much coal, enough for loading the stove once or twice only. Others were better organized, a family of several men and older children could carry two or three sacks away on every raid. I still have a strong feeling that one didn't grab coal from other families; I was all for picking up the spoils thrown from the train by other children's fathers, but I remember being stopped from doing so.
Inevitably, the authorities soon became aware of the raids. The trains never stopped for long, at most five to ten minutes, not enough time to steal large quantities of coal; it was, however, a criminal offence, even people in danger of freezing to death could not be allowed to get away with it.
We never knew how the military police found out but, within a week or two, the raids were regularly interrupted by several all terrain army vehicles arriving along the tracks, lights blazing, whistles whistling shrilly and much confused shouting. The men jumped from the wagons, women and children dragged away what they could and, abandoning the rest, the thieves fled into the woods.
Nevertheless, the raids continued for much of that winter. Not always did the military police get to the signal box in time; sometimes they came when the train was already moving again and the families were just about to vanish into the woods.
I never heard of anybody being caught and punished. Why that is so I don't know; women and children would have been easy prey. It was, of course, bitterly cold - the soldiers may just have resented leaving their vehicles and stumbling into the woods? Did they possibly turn up late occasionally because their barracks were at least warm? I remember the adults speculating but I cannot remember that anyone came to a conclusion.
During that same winter the villagers were allowed, on several occasions, to help themselves to firewood in these same woods, provided they didn't actually fell any trees. Naturally, brush and small trees were taken, but again, it was such back breaking work and so difficult to transport the wood that only the larger and stronger groups profited.
Could permission to gather wood have had anything to do with the authorities trying to stop coal being stolen? I don't know."
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