My ulcers were becoming unbearable again. The camp doctor referred me to the university clinic in Frankfurt-Niederrad in view of the acute danger of perforation. They couldn't really help me there either. In those days it was not well known even among doctors that ulcers can have a psychological basis. But I met someone – a nurse. She was young and pretty, fresh and good humored. With little dimples in her cheeks and dark blonde hair done up in a braid with a lighter streak that started at her forehead. She had brilliant blue eyes and wonderful teeth. She was just up to my shoulder and a bit stocky. I fell in love at first sight. And apparently she did too.

Elfriede Franke, Friedel for short, was from Upper Silesia, where her father, who was originally from Thuringia, was a miner in the coalfields around Beuthen. He had worked his way up to foreman. When Upper Silesia became Polish, Beuthen was called Bytom, but the Franke family wasn't expelled by the Poles as other ethnic Germans were. They needed specialists like Albert Franke to keep the mines in operation. One of Friedel's brothers was still in a Russian POW camp; he was released in 1947.

Friedel was a qualified nurse. As the front was moving closer in the east, she was deployed at a main dressing station as a Red Cross nurse. In the months that followed, the field hospitals were repeatedly moved westwards into the Reich. On February 11, 1945 she arrived in Dresden with a hospital train. From there the wounded soldiers were taken straight on to a place near Eisleben. They thus just escaped the devastating air raid on Dresden, which took place on February 12. After the capitulation of the Wehrmacht the US Army took over the hospital and declared everybody in it, including patients and medical staff, prisoners of war. Once the zonal demarcation lines were established, the hospital was located inside the Soviet Zone, but the Americans moved the whole hospital to Bad Soden-Salmünster in the US Zone before handing control over to the Russians.