Exeter woman’s memories of childhood in Nazi Germany
Recent atrocities in Syria and other Middle Eastern countries were the catalyst for a retired professor to finally chart her own childhood in war-torn Germany.
Barbara Ottaway, who has lived in the United Kingdom for the past 50 years, is one of a group of 13 friends who have relived their childhood experiences of Nazi Germany in an extraordinary bilingual biography, Memories Unlocked- Befreite Erinnerungen. The stories are presented in Barbara’s translation into English and in the original German.
Along with her Berlin-based co-editor, Renate Mehta, they have produced an emotive reminder of war and the lengths families will go to to survive.
Barbara, who now lives in Exeter, said: “The recent horror of women and children fleeing from yet another war, at first in Syria and now spreading to most of the Levant and the Middle East, vividly brought back my own memories and prompted me to start writing them down”.
“My co-editor and I started to collect the stories of our fellow college students from our Berlin study days in the late 1950s. Of the college year graduating in 1958, only nine of us are still alive. We now want to put these memories on paper while we still can.”
Barbara was born in Dresden in 1938. She spent the war years in Saxony, East Germany, before crossing over to West Germany in 1947 and later studying in West Berlin.
After working in German research laboratories, Barbara moved to Edinburgh in the early 1960s for employment within the biochemistry research laboratories of the university. After marrying, having two children and studying archaeology, she went on to teach at three British universities. She retired more than a decade ago, but there was one piece of work which remained undone.
Barbara continued: “Memories of my childhood during the Second World War in Germany had been floating around in my head for several decades, sentences, short paragraphs, unconnected incidents, memories awakened by watching documentaries and films of the Second World War - but memories which had never been openly acknowledged or written down.
I found that the same had happened to the friends from my student days in Berlin, even though we never talked about our memories then or at our later, irregular meetings. We had all concentrated on forgetting about the terrible war and post-war years - passing examinations, finding jobs, getting married and having families.”
Some of the 13 authors had been evacuated into the Eastern provinces during the war. Almost all became refugees, leaving most or all of their possessions behind, either fleeing from the Eastern provinces towards the end of the war or illegally crossing from Russian-occupied East Germany into West Germany after the war.
Co-editor Renate Mehta, born in 1938 in Berlin, spent some war years in Landsberg/Warthe – now Gorzow in Poland - then moved back to Berlin in 1945. After college graduation in 1958, the same year as Barbara, she worked in a biochemical research laboratory, got married and had two sons. After a ten year pause she continued working in West-Berlin, retired in 1993 and has engaged herself ever since in the further academic education of seniors. She is a Board Member of the Academy of Further Studies in reunified Berlin.
Renate confirms her motivation to publish these stories: “We were small children during the Second World War, so naturally we only knew our own pain and anxieties. In the 1950s, in our teens, when we learned about the crimes and atrocities of Nazi Germany, of our own people, these discoveries added another level of horror and shame to our childhood experiences. Like most Germans, we brought a mental iron curtain down to enable us to get on with our lives.”
Both Renate and Barbara found that “even now some people are unable to unlock their wartime memories.”
The stories collected in Memories Unlocked – Befreite Erinnerungen are an important snapshot of European social history and a timely reminder of the difficulties that displacement through war brings for a child.
Memories Unlocked – Befreite Erinnerungen is available in both paperback and Kindle formats. For more details, visit Amazon and search for Barbara Ottaway and Renate Mehta.
