Under this labor program, the local authorities provided my family with a Polish POW named Sigmund, a factory worker from the Polish city of Lodz. Treating him as they would any German farmhand, my family worked beside him in the fields and never encountered any problems. Though government regulations stipulated that POWs should eat separately from German families, my mother ignored them and regularly set a place for Sigmund at our dining room table.
Eventually the authorities permitted the POWs to live out on the farms, if there was a space where they could be safely confined. Obtaining special permission, my family gave Sigmund a room in the Altenteil (my grandparents’ former home). This positive experience with Sigmund was repeated later in the war with two Belgian POWs whom the government supplied to my family as farm labor. Despite such changes, life in Püggen still appeared almost normal and the war seemed far away for those not engaged in the fighting.
In the middle of my two-week visit with my family, I departed Püggen on August 21 to see Anneliese in Hamburg. Despite the passage of two years since we had last spent any significant time together, our increasingly frequent exchange of letters had brought us closer, though she still remained engaged to the florist’s son.
Arriving in Hamburg, I met Anneliese not far from the florist shop in the Arkade across the Alster River from city hall, where she had been working since leaving her position at the shop in the city’s main train station earlier that spring. In the half a day that followed, we quickly recaptured the intimacy of our early relationship as we talked and strolled around the city. Our time together was everything that I had imagined while I had been frozen in the snow at Uritsk and mired in the mud at the Volkhov.
From the moment I saw Anneliese again, I began to think seriously for the first time that she would make a wonderful wife, even if she was engaged to someone else. Unable to conceal my sentiments, I told her, “I am sorry. I do not want to interfere. But I still love you.” What she chose to do was her decision, but it was important to me that she understood my feelings for her.
Just before I boarded the train to return to Püggen for the remaining week of my leave, Anneliese handed me a gold cloverleaf talisman, promising it would bring me good luck. Placing the gift in the breast pocket of my tunic, I felt confident that it was only a matter of time before we would get back together.
Yet, we both now recognized that a soldier’s fate on the battlefield was very uncertain. Even with the widespread optimism over the German advances toward the Volga and the Caucasus that summer, it was clear that many soldiers would not be coming home to their loved ones.