On a narrow bridge between freedom and death, Johanna Schlottke stood with her two young daughters on the dark night of March 18, 1950.

While attempting to escape East Germany across the border into the village of Walkenried, West Germany, Schlottke and her daughters Marianne, 11, and Gisela, 10, had become separated from their group in the forest and apprehended by border guards.

The patrol took them to a nearby station for interrogation. Guards told them they would be punished for trying to escape, and one led them back through the woods of no-man’s land and the bridge.

With her daughters gripping the metal rails wailing, Schlottke begged for their release, finally screaming “If you take us back, I am going to throw myself over this bridge!”

It was a pivotal moment in what had been a hellish childhood for Gisela, who cried, “Please let us go!”

Gisela — now Gisela Habel, 69, of Pleasant Prairie — has had 59 years to think about why her particular guard relented and whispered, “Go!” and pointed towards the West.

“He must have had a soft spot somewhere that he felt, ‘I have to let these people go,’” Gisela said in the dining room of the home she shares with husband Bert. She has never forgotten the events of a childhood that thrust her family into the hellish reality of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II.

She considers her family’s survival a miracle, and that God helped them in their ordeal.

War and fear

Her father, a German soldier, was killed just three months before her birth.

As the Soviets approached in the bitter cold of January 1945, loudspeakers ordered the residents to evacuate their home city of Breslau in present day Poland.

“I never forgot it. I was only 5 years old when we left Breslau,” Gisela said. “I remember the train station, I remember packing up and leaving and waiting there for hours and hours; we couldn’t get out of the city with everybody trying to get out. It was chaos.”

A friend of the family had a truck and offered them a ride out of the city. Most of the other residents didn’t fare as well.

Some 90,000 people died during the evacuation, having to walk the 18 miles to the next city in sub-zero weather.

“Some were frozen, some were trampled to death, especially the children and old people,” Gisela recalled.

The saddest moment in the lives of Gisela’s family came in 1945, when she, Marianne, her mother, and her grandmother Olga Thauser, desperate and exhausted, sat on a curb in the city of Prague in what was then Czechoslovakia.

The four refugees had nothing more than the clothes on their backs and did not know where to go.

They spent six months making their way to East Berlin.

Gisela tells her grandchildren she didn’t carry a doll around back then. She carried something more important in her pocket: a spoon. Her mother had found two spoons and gave them to her daughters.

“That spoon went with me wherever I went because sometime I might find something to eat,” she said. Their lives were bathed in constant fear.

If a parent were caught stealing something to sell to feed their children, the authorities would remove the children. “The biggest fear that my mother had was that she would be separated from us,” Gisela explained. “They put (children) in orphanages and they never saw their children again.”

Many fled in 1950

In 1950, Schlottke feared that the Communists’ grip was about to tighten and if they were going to escape, they needed to do it soon.

Gisela and her family were among the 197,000 German citizens who fled to West Germany in 1950. Before the Berlin Wall’s erection in 1961, 3.5 million East Germans were able to skirt the emigration restrictions and escape into West Germany.

In 1960, the Schlottkes came to the United States. As she got older, Gisela’s curiosity about their adventure was met with silence from her mother.

“My mother never talked about this trip. We could not find out much from her. She never wanted to talk about it,” Gisela said.

Over the years, Gisela told the story of her family trials to her children and then to her grandchildren. With her family’s encouragement, she, Bert and their son Philip Habel and his wife Sara traveled back to Poland, the Czech Republic and reunified Germany last summer to see the places where it all happened.

On their trip, Habel had the opportunity to talk with a former East German border guard, who was a tour guide at a border museum in Bad Sachsa, close to where the family had crossed.

“The question that haunted me for many years was answered by him: what would have happened to us if we had been sent back?” Habel said.

The former guard told her they would have been sent to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp in southern Germany, which the Communists operated until 1953. It was used to imprison those who had tried to escape East Germany.

“You were just lucky,” he told Habel.

Habel says it was more than just luck.

“We trusted God. We prayed about it before we left and we thanked God after we got to the West,” she said. “That’s the only way we feel it worked: it was God leading us.”