"Johannes was a technician in the Luftwaffe and took care of the planes. All planes that take off must be controlled first. For three years, he worked at the airport in Velstwestbruk. When he repaired a plane, he also had to make its first flight. It meant that if he wasn't careful enough while repairing the plane and it crashed, he would crash as well. One has to imagine that thought process. But such were the times."
"Then I went to a college in Bergerov, where we used to go by train. Despite the conditions at that time, we still had normal classes at school. And unfortunately, the train tracks were bombed, so the train didn't operate anymore. Bergerov was about eighteen kilometres away from our house. There were four of us girls who had to ride our bicycles instead of taking the train. Eighteen kilometres there and eighteen back in the afternoon. It used to be common for fruit trees to grow along the road. We were going to school one day, about six months before the end of the war, and suddenly, tactical bombers came. They started shooting us. Us – girls on our bikes. So we dropped our bikes. There was a ditch next to the road under the trees, there wasn't much water, so we jumped in. We were protected under the trees. Then our parents told us that we had lost the war. The British were already approaching through Saxony. The bike riding was over. It was too dangerous."
"My husband Johannes was trained as a paratrooper. After the end of the war, the Allies sent him to Bohemia, not too far from Prague. Here, he was taken captive by the Russians. They never had a chance to fulfil their mission, it was only education. By the end of the war, there was nothing but chaos. Johannes always said they had no documents, they took everything from them. Nobody knew their names or where they were. They didn't even know each other all that well. That's how he got captured by the Russians. He was in a prison camp in the Crimea. First, they all had to reorganize, and then they (the Soviets) redistributed them to hard labour in Siberia. Over time, they began to get to know each other. Johannes had friends there with whom he would have liked to stay, but they had to go to Siberia. Even during the war, they ate frugally at the airport. He was twenty-one years old when he escaped from the war prisoners camp in Bohemia and had not been fed properly for a long time. It took a toll on him. One day, they found a couple of cans with some contents. But they couldn't open them. And when they did, it was rotten meat. The Soviets caught him in this condition in the Czech Republic. When he was in the Crimea, he really wanted to stay with this one friend. They had a Hungarian doctor in the camp who warned him that he had better stay in the Crimea and not go to Siberia. Johannes was no longer very healthy. Later, it turned out–which we didn't know initially–that he already had tuberculosis. It soon got him out of captivity because they didn't want him there. What to do with him? Away! Either work or be gone. That was the attitude towards the captives."
"At the time of the terrible bombing of Hamburg in 1943, I was visiting relatives in Thuringia with my cousin, so I did not experience those three terrifying nights. But of course, I also witnessed the bombing. We lived in the countryside outside the city. We didn't even have a proper basement, just a little cellar for potatoes. My parents were never afraid. If something happened, we would be dead, and nothing could be done about it. I was sleeping upstairs, I was 15 years old, and my parents were doing the bookkeeping. They took the accounting books into the warm room. Suddenly, we heard the alarm. I was standing at the top of the stairs and wanted to go downstairs. But suddenly, it started whistling everywhere, and I was looking at the sky because the force of the bomb had lifted the roof. My parents–I can still see it today–wanted to put the books in the cupboard. They came out of the room. They had these heavy books in their hands - and suddenly, they knelt down. I was standing there in my nightgown, looking up at the night sky above me."
Inge Tietjen, née Feine, was born on 10 May 1928 in Kirchwerder near Hamburg into a farming and blacksmithing family. During the Second World War, she experienced several bombings. At the time of the bombing of Hamburg, she took refuge in a children’s camp in Bavaria for seven months. The family maintained contact with war prisoners who helped them around the farm. At the age of seventeen, she saw the horrors of the Holocaust on television for the first time. Her future husband, Johannes Tietjen, served in the Luftwaffe during the war and fell into Soviet captivity, where he contracted tuberculosis. She married Johannes Tietjen in 1953, and they had three children. In the 1960s, they started travelling the world together. In the 1990s, she visited India, which motivated her charity work. She subsequently joined the CDU (Christian Democratic Union of Germany) and became a councillor for the municipality of Hemdingen. Her husband died in 2006. She remained in Barmstedt until almost the end of her life. She greatly valued helping others. She died in May 2023.
