The War Began Behind Our Garden Fence: A Personal Story of the Second World War in Germany

May I invite you on a journey back in time? To the time of the Second World War, when millions of people fled from West Prussia, modern Poland, to West Germany in the winter of 1945. My grandparents and their nine children travelled on two carts for 8 weeks on this difficult journey to an uncertain future. Would you like to accompany this poor, uneducated family on their dangerous journey? I invite you to dive into this nearly forgotten time with my mother Hedwig, who was born in 1927 in Gdansk.

Short description:
The Blunks, a poor family with many children, lived in Danzig, a free city-state surrounded by Polish territory. On 31st August, 1939, behind their house, they experienced the beginning of the Second World War. The eldest son Paul, eager to escape his alcoholic, brutal father, voluntarily joined the SS-Danzig Home Guard.
After Poland was occupied by Germans, the Blunks had to move to West Prussia, Poland, where they received their own estate. The family lived "in paradise" until the end of the war, when the terrible deportation and murder of the former Polish landowners and the Polish intelligentsia began. In 1945, the family had to leave their farm in Adamowo. They fled in the winter with nine children and two horse-drawn carts from Poland as far as Malente near Lübeck in northern Germany.
From 1946, the family lived first in an abandoned Air Force barracks, then on a small farm nearby. The narrator, Hedwig, got married. She moved with her husband to Hamburg. Hedwig, born in 1927, describes her experiences before, during and after the war, as told to her daughter Marion.