Last Train from Kummersdorf

Two days after a telegram arrives to say their policeman father has died ‘fighting for the Fatherland’, brothers Hanno and Wolfgang are drafted, against the wishes of their mother, into the Home Guard. Eight pages into the novel, Wolfgang is cut down in a Russian assault and Hanno is forced to flee the marauding Russian advance. In a shack of a farmhouse he meets Effi, the blunt-mouthed, boyish daughter of a Communist. Initially wary of each other, the ‘Hitler Youth’ and the ‘Berlin baggage’ gradually forge a bond of friendship and trust as they join refugees fleeing the ruined Reich.

Bonded by bereavement, separated from friends and family, Effi and Hanno must face together the chaotic disorder of the disintegrating state. Travelling on foot, they miraculously escape death when an opportunist Russian aircraft bombs the refugee trail they have joined. Along the way, they meet dangerously unpredictable people, such as the psychotic Major Otto, a drunken deserter, and the deranged Dr Hungerland, a haunted figure involved in the Nazis’ euthanasia programme.

Last Train from Kummersdorf does not sanitize the horrors of war or simplify the confused and conflicting feelings of a German population displaced and dehumanised by the actions of its leaders. Instead, its central subject is the remarkable resilience of youth, as embodied by Effi and Hanno, twin buds of bravery in a brutal world.