The rainbow never sets

and examiners, and at the end of it, all in our group were declared fit for military service. Those who turned 17 were immediately called up. Those in Posen who did not pass the fitness test (due to either lack of height, malformation, or health), were drafted into a new category of FLAK Helpers, called FLAKV soldiers. Some of them had been allocated to our battery, to fill the gap left by those comrades, who had turned 17 and had been drafted into the army. It seemed strange to us, that they were not fit for the army, but deemed fit for the anti-aircraft guns. We were given the task of training them for their work.

I heard from my parents during November, that Günter had received his call-up notice to report on Monday, 4 December, to Krotoschin, about 125 km south-east of Posen. He was home for only a week, but I was glad to be able to see him before he went. Tante Ruth and her family had already gone back to Essen, as Onkel Richard considered the situation on the eastern front unsafe.

The atmosphere that weekend at home was tense and gloomy. Our hearts were heavy, for deep down we knew that the future was anything but rosy. Unfortunately, these feelings were never expressed. Günter had been drafted into the army, not the cavalry, as he had hoped. His unit was the Grenadier Reserve Battalion 96. We heard from reports of the eastern front, that the German defence line along the river Vistula was holding. German newspapers had described in gruesome detail, about brutalities committed by the Russian army on German civilians in Eastern Prussia.

Armin Ziegler writes in his book Posen Januar 1945, p.7 "At the end of October 1944, German troops were able to beat back units of the Soviet army. In the re-captured Nemmersdorf, cruelties of bestial proportion had been committed on the German civilian population. They are not described here, German papers did that in full details. An international commission confirmed this. Any German, who did not know what would happen to them following Soviet occupation, should know this."

No one wanted to fall into their hands, and now Günter had to go to Krotoschin, even closer to the front than we were in Posen. But no one could have foreseen, that this was to be the last time we saw each other.

On 1 December 1944 I was promoted, with most other FLAK helpers of my year, to 'Luftwaffen Oberhelfer', and in recognition of my duties for the FLAK artillery, I received a badge on the 17.12.44.

The war was coming closer to home. Air raids became more frequent now. Had we been allowed to listen to the BBC, we would have known, that two days earlier Churchill had announced in the Lower House, that an agreement had been reached with Stalin from the USSR, that the Poles, fighting for the Allies, should not expect the same national borders as when the War had started.

"Until this time, the agreement reached in Teheran was neither official nor public knowledge. In his speech to the Lower House on 15.12.44,

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