Frau Beck turned out to be as prescient as ever. "I sat with my mother and on the radio heard big speeches about cannons instead of butter. My mother immediately said, 'It's all over for us. It won't go well. It's the worst thing that can happen.' She saw immediately we'd lose the war and what kinds of losses there'd be for all sides. She pictured it right away."
Family concern about the war immediately turned to the draft, and her brother Joachim. "My brother had to be a soldier, against my mother's wishes. He had no choice. But he didn't have to fight, because he was the only son of a father who died in battle [in the First World War]. The last male of the family didn't have to go to the front. To the contrary, he could even go to college. He studied medicine during the war. But he had some difficulties."
She said a junior officer complained in the barracks that Joachim had not laid out his underwear in an orderly enough way. Joachim replied that that was beside the point with a war going on, and added, "You're nothing to me but a little piece of shit." The remark constituted a criminal offense. Joachim was summoned before a military tribunal. His panicked family then "mobilized everyone possible" to help and found a "very nice lawyer. He was in the Party. But he was not a Nazi. There's that, too. And he helped my brother." Joachim was released.
Spared both jail and the front line, Joachim nonetheless was sent to France and Russia. At one point, he was made an officer himself.
Back at the Marburg home front, a matriarchy of four had evolved: Frau Beck, the future Frau Beyme, and two children, Annegret and Joachim (named after his uncle), born in 1944. Life was made up partly of drudgery and partly of terror.
The drudgery included milk buying, which Frau Beyme said took at least two hours every day—forty-five minutes for the round-trip walk to get it, the rest of the time waiting for it. "When the man who sold the milk finally came, some fifty women were standing there with their little milk cans. This milkman was such a sadist, he really enjoyed it. He saw how we all stood, greedily waiting for the milk, and he moved very slowly, making us all more nervous and waiting even longer. Then he made jokes. Finally, we got our little bit of milk. It was completely light blue, not white, it was so thin." Sometimes she took Annegret or the baby with her. By the end of the war, Annegret no longer went to school; it was shut down, partly because of the bombing raids. (The effect of the bombs on Annegret showed itself decades later, when mother and daughter and others were on a walk in the mountains. A stunt pilot suddenly flew so low—probably to impress a girlfriend—that everyone ducked. But Annegret disappeared. "We found her crouched in a ditch. She'd hidden herself, in terror. A war child.")
An advantage of living away from major targets, as the family did, was that fewer bombs were dropped. A disadvantage was that there were fewer bomb shelters. Everyone was frightened wherever they sought shelter, said Frau Beyme. "We could only go to our cellar. That could have been a lot worse if you're trapped there by rubble. In the last year, my son was just born and I didn't go to the cellar at all because I didn't want to wake him. We hoped for luck. I didn't want to make the child nervous. During the day, we often went into the woods. I took the baby carriage and a bicycle, too, because in between I had to go back to the house to get food or clean diapers for the baby. We couldn't take everything with us at once. And sometimes I quickly warmed the milk or made soup. We could hang the can of milk on the handlebars of the bicycle, so I'd take that in the woods."
The war also came to Marburg in the person of prisoners.
"A French prisoner of war was assigned to the local coal store and hauled coal in a sack to the customers. Although we didn't have much, we could give him an apple or something. Not in the light of day, of course. But what is a terrible memory, we lived on a street where you could see everything. And every morning around four o'clock, I heard steps, steps, steps. It was Russian prisoners from a nearby camp going to work. They were brought here to our little train station. Every morning at four I woke and got up and saw these sad figures going by, some without shoes. In the winter. There was ice and snow. And completely starving and completely in rags. But I couldn't give them anything. There were always guards, German soldiers. It wasn't possible."
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