WARTIME TRANSLATOR
Born Gertraud Schroder in Magdeburg in the eastern part of Germany, her father, Ernst, trained as a teacher but then served in the First World War. Her mother was Friederike Kuhne.
When Ernst returned from war, he set up a large bakery business with his brother, just outside Magdeburg.
Gertraud had one brother named Siegfried.
Life was tough when Gertraud was growing up, due to the German economic crisis caused by the First World War and the subsequent Treaty of Versailles. Her father kept books of debtors as most people couldn’t afford to pay for their daily bread. He said they could pay him back when times improved.
Gertraud proved to be extremely proficient at languages when she was at school.
She was offered a scholarship at either of the universities of Bremen or Cologne, but the outbreak of the Second World War stopped this from happening.
Instead, Gertraud trained as a secretary – with languages as her speciality.
She then got a job at Maschinenfabrik Buckau-Wolf, a manufacturer of naval supplies and armaments. After work each day, Gertraud cycled to college to study English.
Her brother, Siegfried, was conscripted into the German Navy. Her father, Ernst, was also called up. He was captured by the Allies in Belgium and spent the next few years as a prisoner-of-war.
One Sunday morning, Gertraud was cycling home from church. She was strafed by a lone Spitfire. “I dived off my bike and into a ditch. After that, mother banned me from going to church. Looking back, it was quite funny – I would like to find out which pilot dared to fly about on his own.”
On the 16th of January 1945, Magdeburg was subject to a massive air attack. Two thousand tons of bombs were dropped in just 34 minutes. From her home five miles away, Gertraud watched a British Pathfinder Force destroy most of the city.
The next day, she went searching through the city, looking for relatives. It took her a week to find their bodies. “Soldiers were everywhere extracting bodies onto the street to await identification. Eventually I found them – all dead; they had asphyxiated in the firestorm and were badly discoloured and swollen up like balloons.”
By April 1945, Magdeburg was occupied by the Allies. Gertraud decided to anglicize her name to ‘Gertrude’. She volunteered as a translator for the British Army.
In June, her factory manager asked her to translate for a group of the American Intelligence Corps. They were demanding to know if the company had more factories to the south, in the Harz mountains.
Gertrude later learned that what they were searching for was places where both V-1 and V-2 rockets were being manufactured – and the scientists behind them. They wanted to take them to the USA to utilize their knowledge, before the USSR could get hold of them.
In July 1945, the British announced they were pulling out of Magdeburg and leaving it to the Soviets.
Gertrude’s mother knew how Red Army soldiers treated young women, so she packed her a suitcase and told her to flee west. Gertrude went with another local girl.
They were picked up by a British Army truck. “We were the last to leave. On the British truck we could see the Russians. Mother stayed behind, awaiting father, who was a POW in Belgium.”
Gertrude and her friend were taken to just south of Hamburg and were put in a tiny house. Being German, they were still classed as ‘the enemy’.
The girls were not allowed to fraternize with the British troops – not even to talk to them. They were only allowed to work. Nevertheless, Gertrude found the British very kind and tolerant.
However, Gertrude heard stories of terrible atrocities in her home city, including young women throwing themselves into the River Elbe to avoid the clutches of the Red Army.
Gertrude worked six days a week, typing and translating military reports. There was very little food available.
She was then moved to Field Marshal Montgomery’s headquarters in Luneburg. Gradually, the rules were relaxed. More interaction was allowed.
Translators such as Gertrude were allowed to have breakfast in the Officer’s Mess – “A real treat – there was real bread for us to eat.”
Gertrude noticed that one young British soldier visited her office more often than others, bringing her documents to translate. He was Arthur ‘Jack’ Wright of the First Royal Tank Regiment – one of Montgomery’s bodyguards. She had ‘caught his eye’.
Gertrude occasionally sneaked back into the Russian occupied zone, to go and visit her parents in Magdeburg. She took tins of fish which she had bought in Hamburg.
It was very dangerous, but Gertrude learned where it was safe to cross the border. “It was cat and mouse. You’d cross at night, alone, and run as fast as you could over meadows and a river, before the Russians had finished their breakfast, hiding in the snow, in a ditch, behind trees or gravestones, especially if you heard a soldier shouting ‘Stoi, Stoi’ (stop, stop). Then, onto a railway station to catch a train. You had to avoid the Russians and I had to keep hidden at home. It was very exciting. It is amazing what you can do to survive.”
The British Army eventually left Luneburg. Gertrude got a job as a language and engineering secretary in Frankfurt, spending a year at university in France.
In 1950, Gertrude was invited to London by some university friends. They went to a reunion party for the ‘Royal Scots Greys’. This enabled her to meet up with some friends and acquaintances she had made in the British Army.
Gertrude enjoyed it so much that she came back for another reunion at the start of 1957. There, she met Arthur Wright again.
They were married almost immediately, at Richmond in North Yorkshire, and one month later, Gertrude was granted British citizenship.
As Arthur was still in the army, they moved from place to place, eventually settling in Christleton, just outside of Chester. They threw themselves into village life.
Arthur retired from the Army in 1963, with the rank of Warrant Officer. He immediately became a Civil Servant. One of his first jobs in his new role was to decommission Chester Castle as a military base. It had been used as such since Norman times. It was felt his experience would enable him to perform this task effectively.
Meanwhile, Gertrude trained as a languages teacher, getting a job at West Kirby Grammar School for Girls.
In 1977, Arthur died suddenly after a heart attack. He was 62 years old. Gertrude was devastated, suffering, “total grief.”
One year later, Gertrude decided she had to do something, ‘to snap out of it’. She went travelling to Egypt, Australia, Thailand and India.
She absolutely loved the Western Himalayas in North Kashmir. There, with the help of the Anglican Bishop of Amritsar, Gertrude built a primary school for Tibetan refugees, called St James. It was in the village of Shey in the Leh district of Ladakh (India), one of the most remote parts of the Himalayas. It is 13,500 feet above sea level and absolutely freezing in wintertime.
The school was made of mud brick walls. It was basic by British standards but was the first such building in the Leh district.
With their parents’ approval, Gertrude brought five village girls home with her to Christleton. They lived in her house for four months and called her ‘Amaly’. They were enrolled in the village primary school but continued to wear their traditional costumes.
The girls were called Bimla, Bilques, Ruth, Anju and Ruth Mary. Gertrude said, “They were extremely happy with the wonderful welcome they had at the school and made great progress in their English. They also loved the village itself.” They took part in every bit of life in the local community.
On a trip to the Lake District, the girls asked where the real hills were.
Two of these girls later qualified as doctors.
Then, Gertrude started taking groups of Sixth Form girls from West Kirby school, to Ladakh.
In 1984, aged sixty, Gertrude drove to Magdeburg, to visit her only surviving relative, an uncle, and some old school friends. The city was now in East Germany and was under communist rule.
Some West German friends advised Gertrude not to go, but she went, without incident.
On her way home, Gertrude got caught up in a USSR Army convoy and the brakes on her car failed. She was told there were no spare parts available in East Germany – but was ordered to leave anyway. She had to use the handbrake the whole way.
The police in East Germany, tracked every foreign car, but somehow missed hers. As Gertrude neared the West German border, a police car finally flagged her down and ordered her to stop – “But I couldn’t – I shot past him, fearing I’d be shot.”
She just managed to get over the border. West German guards would not let her go any further until she’d had her car fixed.
It was only in 1993, that Gertrude learned that her brother, Siegfried, who was in the German ‘Kriegmarine’ had died on Destroyer 232, in the Battle of Ushant, just after D-Day.
Gertrude was eighteen days short of her 100th birthday when she died. Her only survivors were a few very distant German relatives.
RIP – Returning Is Perilous
