They were all up in age, even as much as fifty, she thought. How could they be like this? She was bitterly afraid—mostly because she did not understand what was happening. First the SS—now the Volkssturm. Their own people! Why were they being held prisoners? They were not the enemy. Just before Willi calmly had surrendered to the Volksstürmers, he had whispered to her out of the corner of his mouth: “Careful. Don’t say anything. Let me handle it.” But he had done nothing at all, except to tell the men that they were refugees from Berlin trying to get to some relatives in Potsdam. He had admitted that he had no identification—it had been lost in a shelling, he’d said, and he had meekly handed over his gun to them. The men had seemed uncertain. They had tied them up and the four of them had been arguing almost an hour about what to do with their two prisoners who sat, hands tied behind their backs, leaning against one of the beached sailboats.One of them wanted to march them back to their headquarters and let their superiors decide.
