The winter of 1944–45 was very cold and very long, especially in the eastern parts of Germany. People were hungry and cold and I was too. My stomach pains became almost unbearable. I could have gone to hospital. But my fear was too great, although there were still hospitals run by the churches. As it later turned out, my fear wasn't without grounds. In the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, I found documents showing that sterilizations were carried out in the Lutheran hospital in Cologne. Reiner Pommerin published a book about that in 1979, titled Sterilisierung der Rheinlandbastarde: das Schicksal einer farbigen deutschen Minderheit 1918–1937 (The Sterilization of the Rhineland Mongrels: The Fate of a Colored German Minority 1918–1937).

People can get used to anything, even hunger and lack of sleep. I spent the last months of the Third Reich as usual: work every day from six in the morning to six at night, interrupted at least once by an air raid, then air raid duty, every night two more air raids, inspection rounds on the roof and on each level of the plant. Mainly to find any incendiary bombs, which could then be easily defused. Some of them did have fuses that ignited as soon as they hit the target, but normally, as long as the surrounding material hadn't caught fire, a bucket of sand was enough to eliminate the danger.

The Allies had reached the Rhine and the Russians East Prussia, from which people were fleeing in long treks. They reported terrible things. Could everything the Nazi propaganda was saying be true? Women and girls raped, civilians murdered? Wassili was convinced that none of it was true. The air raids were getting more and more intense. I had heard nothing about the conferences of the Allied leaders in Casablanca and Yalta, where Germany's fate was finally being decided. For me all that counted now was: how do I get through the next day?

In January 1945 refugees told us that the Russians had already reached Küstrin and the River Oder.