The Third Journey

The third and final transport from Ravensbrück is the most eventful and memorable. The Russians were now very close and could arrive at any moment. The prisoners came from many nationalities, mostly Eastern European countries.

Many of the younger women had infants or were pregnant. When we wondered how women who had been in the concentration camp for several years could be pregnant or have babies, they shrugged and, with a hint of a twinkle in their eye, blamed “the Holy Spirit.” The truth was probably that many had been raped, while others had tried to gain advantages or food by making themselves available.

In my bus, I had about ten infants. At most, they were a couple of months old; they could hardly get any older with the limited care possible. They were wrapped in rags and carried in arms, there were no baskets or anything like that. Those sitting at the front of the bus would place the babies on the engine hood when they had to “change diapers,” so we got a close-up view of how it was done. There were no diapers or anything of the sort; the mothers tore strips from their clothes and wrapped the babies in them again after having tried to clean and dry them as best they could with the old rags.

The children looked red and sore, but strangely enough, there wasn’t as much crying in the bus as one might have expected. The mothers breastfed, but in their condition, they probably didn’t have much to give. We had distributed care packages, which included powdered milk. They mixed this with chlorinated water from the bus’s water can in some old tin can, and using a spoon, or just their fingers, they fed it to the children.

The roads were heavily congested with military convoys and refugees, the latter traveling in horse- or ox-drawn wagons or on foot. As a result, we couldn’t maintain a high speed. By the time darkness fell, we still had a long way to go to the Danish border. On top of that, it was time for one of our passengers, a Polish woman, to give birth. A couple of others had also begun experiencing labor pains.

Of course, there was no shelter, but we had both doctors and nurses with us. The convoy drove into a small wooded area where the buses were parked among the trees. One bus was emptied and converted into a delivery room, with blackout panels on the windows. Passengers who could not lie inside the buses went outside and lay among the bushes and trees. They were thinly dressed, and there were only a few blankets, so it was quite harsh.

People were lying everywhere, and in the darkness it was easy to step on or trip over someone. Fortunately, it wasn’t raining. We drivers had our sleeping bags, so we went up and lay on the bus roofs. How long we had been lying there asleep, I don’t know, when suddenly we were awakened by cannon fire and the rattle of machine guns very close by. How we got out of the sleeping bags and down to the ground, I don’t know, but once fully awake, we were crouched and seeking cover next to a tree.

In the darkness, we had not seen that we had parked right next to an anti-aircraft battery, which had been attacked by a night-fighter plane. Fortunately and strangely enough, none of us, our passengers, or the vehicles were hit by the fighter’s shells. By morning, a baby boy had been born, and he was given the name Per-Albin, because the bus he had been born in bore that name. Most of the buses had names, given by their drivers, often after a relative or another beloved person back home.

The other two women who were about to give birth had calmed down, so we loaded up and continued to Padborg in Denmark, where we dropped off our passengers, one more than we had picked up.