Hilke’s Diary

‘You cannot but enter this child’s world. Filled with all the usual joys and anxieties of childhood, and a self-possessed determination to behave in a practical and helpful way, it is a world in which the people and events figuring in what we call “history” are fairly mysterious to her. They are facts, facts she never really questions.’ – Matthew Parris, The Times

Hilke’s Diary is a battered, chintz-covered little book with a flowery pattern, its lock (once so important to its young owner) long-since broken. It was the inseparable companion of a little girl growing up in Germany during the Second World War.

Hilke was evacuated from Hamburg and separated from her family to live first with relatives and later with a farming family in the country as a companion for a little girl. She was often homesick. Her siblings were also sent away, split up in the desperation to place them somewhere safe as bombing on Hamburg intensified with the firestorm of 1943.

In 1944 Hilke was sent to a boarding school on Lake Constance, hundreds of miles from home, but when the war ended this school closed and the pupils were left on the streets with no papers and just a handful of money. With no trains and no communication system working Hilke embarked on a long and lonely trek across Germany to find her family, unsure whether they had survived the bombing. Her childhood diary was her one confidant along her arduous journey home.