The night is full of stars
Kurt Strauss reviews the autobiography of this PoW doctor
‘The Night is Full of Stars’ by Friedrich Schmitz-Hertzberg. Sessions of York, Ebor Press Division. ISBN: 978 1 85072 397 4 Price: £9.99 plus £2.50 UK postage & packing. There is something vaguely familiar, and slightly unsettling, about the face on the cover of this book. The eyes, looking at something just behind your left ear, convey a feeling of unease. The mouth is clearly trying not to turn down at the corners. Where have I seen this face before, I wonder? Ah yes – on video clips of hostages, filmed by those who captured them. Their unspoken question hovers in the air: ‘Will I ever get out of this alive?’ But this is not the face of a hostage but of a PoW, a prisoner of war. He was a trainee doctor, recruited into the army at the beginning of the second world war and, together with the wounded men he was caring for, taken prisoner by the advancing Russian troops less than two months before the German surrender in May 1945. This may have marked the end of the war for many, but for the author (generally referred to as Fritz), it was the start of more than four years of hardship, of suffering that must at times have bordered on the unbearable, and of having to witness the death of fellow-prisoners whose lives he was unable to save. Did the one who drew this haunting sketch of him in 1946 survive, one wonders?
Fritz recounts how his medical knowledge helped him and many of his fellow prisoners to survive the Siberian winters, the rapacious and even sadistic nature of some of their captors, and the blind acceptance of the unfeeling orders of their superiors. Working as slave labourers and transported, or marched, ever further eastwards, the death rate of the German PoWs was appallingly high. The official diagnosis was usually dystrophy, but those in authority shut their eyes to what was in fact a starvation diet, and blamed the deaths on natural causes. Somehow Fritz managed to retain not just his health and sanity but also his curiosity about human nature, and his compassionate understanding of those he encountered. And he writes about his interest in the Communist system, so idealistic in theory but so callous in practice. To quote from the book’s introduction, his is a story of survival and transformation, of a journey from war and captivity to freedom, and from death to life.
But alongside this tale of deprivation and human resistance another story was unfolding, one that was to have an equally happy ending. Before the war started, Fritz had met a young British Quaker, Kathleen Brookhouse, at an international gathering in Germany. Both were students at the time, she of German, he of medicine, and shortly afterwards they became engaged. Separated by the war, they nonetheless managed to maintain the most slender of contacts thanks to notes passed via the Soviet Red Crescent in one direction and a Quaker living in neutral Switzerland in the other. Reunited in 1949, they were married in Kathleen’s home Meeting house, Stafford, and two years later emigrated to Canada. Fritz worked on the German typescript of his story on the boat, and now her English translation has made its appearance.
She will be ninety-four this year, and her own story, if she manages to finish it, will make equally fascinating reading. She had spent some time in Woodbrooke before the war and, not long after the international gathering mentioned above, became a case worker based in Stuttgart for the Germany Emergency Committee. She and others worked day and night to help Jewish families escape from Nazi persecution and resettle in Britain. How do I know this? Mine was one of the families she saved.
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