When the Flagpoles Bloomed by Vera Oredsson

Author:Vera Oredsson
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9789188667670
Publisher: TRSE Media AB
Published: 2018-11-30T05:00:00+00:00

Heidi

Lauban fall/winter 1941/42.

Lauban: a small town in Schlesien, an idyllic place with smaller rows of houses, where the streets are lined with hostels and lanes that blended into the well-kept gardens between the houses. Our KLV camp was located in one of these houses. This was a totally different environment than the modern youth camps in Steinau by the Oder, my previous location.

In Steinau the bedrooms had bunkbeds, about eight to ten in each room, but here in Lauban each room had three comfortable beds and a really good desk by a large window. A big cabinet with a mirror on it emphasized the hostel decor even more. A rug on the floor and a big bowl with a jug on a sturdy steel stand in white in a curtained corner made our morning and evening toiletries really private and undisturbed. There was a common bathroom with showers and toilets in secluded areas, which was different from Steinau, where everything was new and modern, but in the “everything for everyone” style where there was no integrity. The whole hostel housed about 20 girls between the ages of 13 and 14.

We had a male leader, which was quite unusual. He was a married man who lived downstairs with his family. We girls were here of our own free will from different camps in Schlesien and we were all from Berlin, but from different parts of the city. We three girls in our room were for example from a fashionable part of the city called Charlottenburg, in the middle of Berlin, the second one was from the Eastern Berlin working-class area called Moabit, and I was from Steglitz in West Berlin.

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Karin, Heidi, and I. Karin and I often quarreled. We got into arguments and heavy discussions about Sweden! Our common ties to Sweden, I with my Swedish mother and Karin with her Swedish grandmother, should have made us friends, but Karin’s completely negative attitude to Sweden in general, and especially to Swedes, irritated me something awful and once we ended up in a fist fight. Heidi broke it up. She had just come into the room and shouted dismayed, “You’re not a bunch of 7-year-olds! You’re crazy!” Her high-pitched voice, Berlin dialect, and her frank protest surprised us so much that we, red-faced and sweating, took a breather on our beds and stared at the otherwise so laid-back, sullen, and almost well-spoken-to-hide-her-Moabit-origins, friend.

A little calmer, Heidi continued, “You can talk a little calmer about Sweden now, the country that is for me the one without war in Northern Europe, where the capital city is Stockholm and there are many waterways, and I’ve read The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf. I don’t know any more than that.” Karin burst out, “No war, but they’re mean! My grandmother says that they sell the poor! They sell the poor children in the villages by making them stand on a stool and selling them to mean farmers who beat them and make them work until they drop from exhaustion.

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