April 1945, the Third Reich was dying. In the chaos of Germany’s final collapse, thousands of women wearing Vermached auxiliary uniforms found themselves trapped between advancing enemy armies. Among them were three young women whose lives were about to change in ways they could never imagine.
Helga Schneider was 22 years old. She came from Hamburg, a city that had been turned into rubble by Allied bombing raids. For 2 years, she had worked as a signals auxiliary, operating radio equipment and passing messages between military units. Her hands were calloused from Morse code keys. Her eyes were tired from reading coded transmissions by dim candle light.
Just 3 weeks earlier, her commanding officer had gathered all the women in her unit into a cold basement. He handed each of them a small glass capsule. Inside was cyanide poison. “If the Canadians capture you,” he said, his voice shaking, “Use this. Death is better than what they will do to you.” Helga had sewn the capsule into the hem of her coat.
She touched it sometimes when she was afraid, which was every single day now. The officer had told them stories. He said Canadian soldiers were savages who tortured prisoners. He said they would beat the women, starve them, and force them to work in mines until they died. Helga believed him because she had no reason not to. Everything she had ever been taught said the enemy was cruel and barbaric.
Margaret Fischer was 35 years old, older than most of the other women. She had been a nurse for 8 years before the war. She came from Munich and had kind eyes that had seen too much suffering. In the final months of the war, she had treated wounded soldiers who came back from the front lines. Some of them whispered terrible things when they thought she wasn’t listening.
They talked about what happened in the east. They talked about orders they had followed. But they also talked about allied soldiers. They said the Americans and British showed no mercy. One soldier told her he had seen Canadian troops execute prisoners. Margaret didn’t know what to believe anymore, but she knew she was afraid.
When she heard Allied forces were getting close to her position, she felt her stomach twist with fear. She had packed a small bag with bandages and medicine, things she thought she might need to treat herself if she was hurt. She never imagined she might need them for something else entirely. Anelise Hoffman was only 19 years old.
She was the youngest of the three. She had grown up on a farm in East Prussia, far to the east, where the Soviet armies were advancing like a terrible flood. Her family had sent her west to work as a clerk in a military office, hoping she would be safer there. She had never wanted to be part of the war.
She just wanted to go home to her village to help her mother in the kitchen and feed the chickens like she used to. But home didn’t exist anymore. The Soviets had taken East Prussia and Anelise had heard the stories about what happened to German women when the Red Army arrived. She and thousands of others had fled westward, choosing to surrender to the British or Americans instead.
They called it choosing the lesser evil. Anelise had sewn her few valuable things into her coat lining. A silver ring from her grandmother, a small photograph of her parents, 20 Reich marks that were probably worthless now. She was certain the enemy soldiers would strip everything from her, maybe beat her for hiding things.
That’s what she had been told would happen. On April 28th, 1945, all three women stood together near the city of Bremen. Their hands were raised above their heads. British and Canadian soldiers moved through their position, calling out in English and broken German for everyone to surrender. Helga counted 127 women from their unit who gave up that day.
She waited for the gunfire. She waited for the screaming. She waited for the violence she had been promised would come. But it never did. A British sergeant walked up to them. He was young, maybe 25, with mud on his boots and tired eyes. He said something in German that she would remember for the rest of her life.
The war is over for you. You’re safe now. safe. Helga had turned that word over in her mind like a strange object she had never seen before. Safe was what they called enemy prisoners. Nothing in her training had prepared her for this moment. Nothing in the propaganda films she had watched or the speeches she had heard had mentioned this possibility.
The soldiers didn’t hurt them. Nobody hit them. Nobody screamed at them. They were just told to gather their things and get ready to move. Margarita watched a Canadian soldier help an older woman climb down from a truck because her knees were stiff with arthritis. Analise saw guards passing out water from cantens. Real clean water, not making them drink from puddles.
The three women exchanged confused glances. Where were the torture chambers they had been warned about? Where was the cruelty? Where was the hatred? They stood there in the spring afternoon, the smell of smoke still in the air from recent fighting, and faced a terrifying unknown. Everything they had been taught said one thing. Everything they were seeing said something completely different.
Now they would be taken somewhere, to some camp or prison. Now they would find out the truth. What came next? Would the kindness last or was this just the calm before something terrible? They didn’t know. They couldn’t know. All they could do was move forward into the unknown, carrying their fear and their confusion.
And that one small word that didn’t make sense, safe. The first crack in their expectations came within hours of capture. The women were loaded onto British army trucks, not the cattle cars they had imagined. Helga noticed the canvas tops stretched over the truck beds, protecting them from the light rain that had started to fall.
She touched the thick fabric, surprised it wasn’t torn or full of holes. These trucks were meant to keep soldiers dry and comfortable. Why would the enemy waste such things on prisoners? The guards didn’t strike anyone, not even when a 17-year-old girl became so frightened she started screaming and crying.
A British corporal simply spoke to her in gentle tones, even though she couldn’t understand his words. His voice was calm, like he was talking to a scared child, not an enemy soldier. Helga kept waiting for the violence to start. She kept her hand near the cyanide capsule in her coat hem, ready to use it if things turned bad. But nothing turned bad.
The convoy of trucks rolled slowly along damaged roads heading toward the coast. The journey covered 90 km and took 6 hours because so many bridges were destroyed. At each stop, something strange happened. The guards gave them water. real water in metal cantens, clean and cool, not dirty water scooped from ditches or ponds. One guard even offered Margaret a cigarette when he saw her hands shaking.
She didn’t smoke, but the gesture confused her. Why would an enemy soldier share anything with a prisoner? During one rest stop, Analise watched a Canadian soldier help an elderly woman down from the truck bed. The woman’s knees had locked up from sitting so long. The soldier took her arm gently and guided her down step by step, making sure she didn’t fall.
Analise had seen German soldiers kick prisoners who moved too slowly. She had seen it and said nothing because she thought that was normal. But this Canadian soldier treated an old enemy woman like she was his own grandmother. It made no sense. When they reached the port, they saw something that made all three women stop and stare.
Mountains of Red Cross packages were being loaded onto a transport ship. The boxes were stacked 4 meters high, reaching almost to the ship’s deck. Analise whispered to Helga, asking if this was propaganda staged for their benefit. Maybe there were cameras hidden somewhere recording this scene to show the world how well Germany treated prisoners.
But there were no cameras, no officers making speeches, no photographers, just workers loading supplies with quiet efficiency like this was something they did every day. The Red Cross packages were real. The women could see the red crosses painted on the white boxes. Inside those boxes, they knew, were food and medicine and blankets, more supplies than most German cities had seen in years.
The crossing from the German port to England took 14 hours aboard a converted troop transport ship. The women had expected to be locked in the ship’s hold down in the dark below the water line where cargo was usually kept. Instead, they were assigned bunks, real bunks with thin mattresses, not just a concrete floor. The space was crowded. 200 women were packed into a room meant for 120 soldiers, but they had bunks.
They had blankets. Margaret couldn’t make sense of it. She had visited prisoner camps in Germany where people slept on bare concrete in rooms so cold you could see your breath even in summer. Why would the enemy waste blankets on German prisoners? During the crossing they received their first meal as prisoners of war.
A British sailor brought around tin bowls of stew. The smell made Helga’s stomach growl. She couldn’t remember the last time she had smelled real cooking. The stew had actual chunks of meat in it, pieces of potato and carrots. The bread wasn’t mixed with sawdust to make it stretch further. It was real bread, dark and dense.
They also received hot tea with the meal. Several women refused to eat. They thought the food must be poisoned. Why else would the enemy feed them so well? Helgo watched the British sailors eating from the same pots, the same stew. If it was poisoned, the sailors would die, too. She forced herself to take a bite.
The stew was bland and had too much salt, but it was real food. She counted seven pieces of potato in her bowl and three chunks of what tasted like mutton. This was more than many German soldiers had eaten in the final months of the war. She wrote in the small diary she had managed to hide in her coat lining.
They feed their prisoners better than we fed our own soldiers at the end. I don’t understand. From England they traveled north by train to Liverpool, then crossed the Atlantic Ocean on another ship. The ocean crossing took 7 days. During those seven days, more impossible things happened. The women received meals at regular times three times each day.
They were allowed on deck to get fresh air in small groups with guards watching, but still allowed. Nobody beat them. Nobody starved them. Nobody did any of the things they had been promised would happen. One guard, a French Canadian corporal named Gong, even tried to teach them English phrases. “You’ll need it in Canada,” he said with a smile.
“His teeth were straight and white. He wore a wristwatch that actually worked. His boots were new, not held together with wire and string like German boots at the end. He looked healthy and wellfed and completely unconcerned, like guarding enemy prisoners was just another ordinary job. These small observations piled up like stones.
Each one added weight to a growing sense that something was terribly wrong with everything they had been taught. If Germany was superior, if the Allies were suffering and desperate, then why did the guards look so healthy? Why did they have new equipment? Why weren’t they angry and cruel? The older women in the group kept saying, “Wait until we reach the camps.
That’s when the real treatment begins. This is just for show.” But the disbelief was already growing. Deep inside, Helga was starting to wonder, “What if everything had been a lie?” May 17th, 1945. The train pulled into a small town called Gravenhurst in Ontario, Canada. The women had traveled 6,000 km from the ruins of Germany.
Now they pressed their faces against the train windows and saw something that seemed impossible. The buildings were intact. Every single one. The streets were clean and swept. People walked on the sidewalks carrying shopping bags. Children played in yards laughing and running. Not one bombed out building. Not one pile of rubble.
Not one burned skeleton of what used to be someone’s home. “Anelise insisted it had to be fake. “They prepared this route to trick us,” she said. “They want us to think Canada is doing well.” But as trucks carried them 15 km further to the prisoner camp, the illusion would have required impossible effort.
Every farmhouse they passed stood complete with fresh paint. Every barn had a roof and walls. Cows and horses grazed in green pastures that stretched as far as they could see. Margaret stared out the back of the truck, feeling something crack inside her chest. The propaganda had told them Canada was suffering from the war.
They said Canadians were starving and desperate, barely surviving. But these farms looked like pictures from before the war, from the good times nobody in Germany could remember anymore. Camp 20 sat in a forest area with lakes and trees. The camp held about 600 German prisoners total with men and women kept in separate sections.
The women’s area could hold 200 prisoners. When the truck stopped and the women climbed out, they saw their first shock. The barracks were made of wood, yes, but the wood was solid and weatherproof. The buildings had real windows with glass in them, not just holes covered with boards or paper.
Each building had a stove inside for heating when the weather turned cold. The buildings were designed to hold 40 women each. Inside were beds, not the four high bunks stacked like shelves that they expected. These were two-level bunks with actual mattresses. The mattresses were thin and filled with straw and cotton, but they were real mattresses, not boards or piles of wood shavings.
Helga walked to the latrine building, almost afraid to look inside. She pushed open the door. Running water. There were sinks with taps that you could turn and clean water came out. In Germany, by the end of the war, her unit had shared one water pump for 400 people. Lines to get water took hours. Sometimes the pump broke and they had no water at all for days.
But here in a prisoner camp, there were taps inside a building. Helga turned one of the taps and watched the water flow. She put her hand under it. The water was cold and clear. She started to cry and didn’t know why. The second shock came at their first meal in camp. The women lined up outside the kitchen building, expecting watery soup or maybe a crust of bread.
The kitchen workers filled their plates with boiled potatoes, a large pile on each plate. They added canned meat, the kind that came in tins from America. They gave each woman 500 g of bread. Back in Germany, civilians were lucky to get 200 g of bread in a whole day. Here, prisoners got 500 g in one meal. There was margarine to put on the bread.
There was tea with real sugar, not the fake sweetener that tasted like chemicals. Anaise stood holding her plate, tears streaming down her face. This is more food than my mother ate in a week, she whispered. She thought about her mother back in Germany, probably starving, probably eating grass soup and potato peels.
And here was Anaise, a prisoner of the enemy, holding more food than her mother had seen in months. Several women couldn’t eat. The shock was too much for their minds to handle. They had prepared themselves for torture and starvation and death. Instead, they were being fed better than they had eaten in 2 years.
One older woman from Dresden named Fraud Dresser said it was a trick. They’re making us fat before they work us to death, she said, insisted. This is how they fool us. But even as she said it, her voice sounded less certain than before. The third shock came the next morning during an orientation meeting. A Canadian officer stood before them, a woman wearing a major’s uniform.
Her name was Major Patricia Wilson. In Germany, women were not allowed to be officers in the military. Women could not give orders to men. But here stood this Canadian woman, and the male guards clearly listened to her and respected her authority. A German Canadian sergeant translated her words into German so everyone could understand.
Major Wilson explained the camp rules. Work would be voluntary, not forced. If they chose to work, they would be paid 20 cents per day in camp credits they could use to buy small things. They would receive medical care from the camp doctor if they got sick or hurt. They would be allowed to write letters home, though the letters would be read by sensors first.
They could take educational classes if they wanted to learn. There would be no forced labor in dangerous conditions. The Geneva Convention would protect them even though Germany had broken those same rules when it held prisoners. “You are prisoners, not slaves,” Major Wilson said firmly. “You will be treated as such.” Helga noticed everything about Major Wilson. She wore a wedding ring.
Her shoes were polished and in good condition. She stood straight and spoke with confidence. In Germany, this would have been impossible. A woman could not command. A woman could not wear an officer’s uniform. A woman’s place was to support men, not lead them. Yet here stood Major Wilson, and nobody thought it was strange.
That first night, lying on a real mattress under a wool blanket, Helga pulled out her diary. By the light coming through the window from the camp’s electric lights, she wrote words that scared her. Everything we were told was a lie. The question is, what else was a lie? She lay awake for hours, staring at the wooden ceiling, feeling her whole understanding of the world beginning to crumble like a building with a broken foundation.
The rhythm of daily life at Camp 20 brought new discoveries that piled up like water drops that would eventually break through a dam. In late May of 1945, the camp commander announced that prisoners could volunteer for work assignments. Nobody would be forced to work, but those who chose to could earn a small amount of money.
Three types of jobs were offered. 62 women volunteered to help with camp maintenance, cooking meals and washing laundry and cleaning buildings. 89 women volunteered for agricultural work on local farms. 34 women volunteered for light factory work at a garment company nearby. The rest of the women stayed in camp, taking classes or simply resting and trying to recover from everything they had been through.
Margaret chose to work on a farm. She was assigned to a family named Morrison, who owned land 8 kilometers from the camp. Every morning at 7:00, a truck collected 12 women and drove them to the farm. Every evening at 5:00, the truck brought them back. On her third day of work, something happened that Margarite would never forget.
Mrs. Morrison, a woman in her 50s with weathered hands and kind eyes, invited all the workers to come eat lunch at the farmhouse table. The German women froze in confusion and fear, eating with the enemy, at their family table, inside their home. Mrs. Morrison had already set places for everyone with real plates, metal forks, and cloth napkins.
She served roasted chicken with crispy skin, green beans fresh from her garden, mashed potatoes with real butter melted on top, and cold fresh milk in glasses. For dessert, she brought out apple pie, still warm from the oven. Margarite stared at the food, unable to move. Mrs. Morrison sat down with them and spoke in broken German, using her hands to help explain what she couldn’t say in words.
“My son is in Europe with the Canadian army,” she said slowly. “I pray someone shows him kindness, so I show you kindness.” Margarett felt tears running down her face as she ate. That night, she wrote a letter to her sister in Hamburg, though she knew it might take many months to arrive.
“They treat us like humans,” she wrote. “Not subhumans, not enemies, just humans who happen to be on the wrong side. I don’t understand this kind of thinking. Where is their hate?” Helga’s discoveries came through machines and technology. She had volunteered to work in the camp laundry facility. The first time she saw an electric washing machine, she stood perfectly still for 5 minutes just staring at it.
The machine was white and metal with buttons and dials. You put dirty clothes inside, added soap, pressed a button, and the machine did all the work. In Hamburg, Helga and her mother had washed all their clothes by hand in a metal tub, scrubbing until their fingers were raw and red. Even officer’s wives did laundry by hand because there wasn’t enough electricity to run machines, and machines like this didn’t exist anyway.
But here in a prisoner camp, they had electric washing machines to clean prisoner uniforms and bedding. The camp also had electric lights in every barracks, not just in the offices where important people worked. There was a medical clinic with an X-ray machine that could see inside your body to find broken bones.
There was a recreation room with a radio that played music, carefully watched by guards, but still there for prisoners to use. There was even a library with 247 books, most of them in German. Someone had collected German language books for the prisoners to read, stories and history books, and even technical manuals about machines and building things.
Helga asked one of the guards, a German Canadian sergeant named Mueller, why they had a library for prisoners. He explained, “We believe in making you better, not just punishing you.” When minds have nothing to do, they cause trouble. When minds can learn and grow, they can help rebuild. Helga had never heard anything like this before.
Anna Lisa’s biggest discovery came through the mail. In June, she received her first letter from home from her aunt who lived in what was now the British occupation zone of Germany. The letter described a country destroyed. People were receiving only 900 calories of food per day, barely enough to stay alive. There was no fuel to heat homes.
There was no glass to fix broken windows. Former Nazi officials were hanging themselves as Allied authorities investigated their crimes. Cities were fields of rubble with people living in basement and ruins. Anelise compared what her aunt described to what she saw every Sunday when the prisoners were allowed supervised walks into the town of Gravenhurst.
She had counted 47 different products on the shelves in the grocery store. 47 different things you could buy. From soup to soap to candy. Children wore shoes without holes in them. The movie theater advertised new films every single week. The church had collection plates where Canadians gave money to help people in Europe.
people across the ocean they had never met. Anelise wrote in her diary, “The propaganda said Canada was suffering, that yubot attacks had cut off all supplies, and Canadians begged for peace. But their children have chocolates, real chocolates, while German children are starving and eating anything they can find.” Conversations between the prisoners revealed how their beliefs were breaking apart in different ways.
Young women like Anelise and Helga were changing quickly. They asked questions. They watched everything carefully. They tried to learn English from guards who were surprisingly patient with their mistakes. But older women, especially those who had been members of the Nazi party, resisted harder. Fraud Dresser, who was 51 years old, insisted everything was propaganda.
They’re trying to corrupt us, she said. They want to make us forget our duty to the fatherland. But even Fraud Dresser couldn’t explain some things. The camp received inspections from the Red Cross every single month. International observers came and checked the conditions. In July, a man from Sweden interviewed 23 women chosen randomly.
His report said the conditions met or went beyond what the Geneva Convention required. The prisoners appeared healthy and wellfed. Nobody reported abuse or mistreatment. The gap in technology became impossible to ignore. When several women were allowed to work at a garment factory in the nearby town of Bracebridge, they saw things that shocked them.
The factory had 47 electric sewing machines in one room, all running at the same time. There were machines that cut fabric automatically. The lighting was so bright, it removed all shadows. The temperature was controlled to keep workers comfortable. Helga went on a tour of the factory and asked the foreman a question. How did you build all this while fighting a war? The foreman laughed.
Build it? This factory has been here since 1938. The war barely touched our industry. We just switched from making dresses to making uniforms. The meaning of his words hit Helga like a punch. Germany had thrown everything into making weapons and tanks. They had gutted their civilian factories. They had rationed food until people starved.
And they had been told they were winning, that they were superior, that their enemies were suffering worse. But Canada had fought wars on two oceans, had sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers overseas, and still kept an economy that produced abundance even in wartime. The truth was becoming impossible to deny.
Each small thing, each machine, each meal, each act of unexpected kindness chipped away at the foundation of everything they had been taught. But the dam hadn’t broken completely yet. That would require something more powerful than just observations. It would require something sweet. Saturday, September 15th, 1945.
The moment that would shatter everything came on an ordinary autumn morning. The war in the Pacific had ended on August 15th when Japan surrendered. Victory over Japan Day had been celebrated across Canada with fireworks and parades and relief that finally after 6 years all the fighting was over. At Camp 20, the mood among the guards had shifted from wartime watchfulness to something more relaxed.
The war was done. These German women weren’t enemies anymore, just people waiting to go home. On Friday evening, Major Wilson made an announcement. Tomorrow morning, there will be a special breakfast to celebrate the harvest season. Attendance is voluntary. 8:00 in the main dining hall. Most women assumed this meant extra food, maybe some canned fruit.
Nothing prepared them for what they would find. At 7:45 in the morning, 143 women walked into the dining hall and stopped dead in their tracks. The tables, which were usually bare wood, were covered with white cloths. Real tablecloths, not cut up sheets or paper. Each place at the table had been set with proper dishes, metal forks and knives instead of the usual tin, and cloth napkins folded into neat triangles.
But that wasn’t what made Helga’s breath catch in her throat. It was the smell, sweet and rich and buttery, a smell she had almost forgotten could exist. the smell of plenty, of abundance, of a world where food was made not just to survive, but to enjoy. The kitchen staff, both Canadian workers and volunteer prisoners, brought out the food on large serving platters.
Pancakes, not the thin, awful crepes they had choked down in Germany, made from potato flour and water and desperation. These were real pancakes, golden brown and fluffy, stacked three high on each plate. Each pancake was about 18 cm across, thick and soft. There was bacon, actual pork bacon, crispy and fragrant, four strips for each person.
Margaret would later calculate that each woman was receiving more meat in this one breakfast than most German civilians had seen in an entire month. There was fresh butter, not margarine or the chemical spread that tasted like soap. Real butter in small bowls on each table, yellow and creamy. Then came the maple syrup. This was the moment everything changed.
Sergeant Mueller, grinning like a proud father, placed a glass bottle on each table. The liquid inside was dark amber, thick and beautiful, catching the morning light that streamed through the windows. This, he announced in German, his voice warm and happy, is Canadian maple syrup from trees right here in this region.
We tap the trees in spring and collect the sap, then boil it down. It takes 40 L of sap to make just one liter of syrup. It’s sweet. It’s ours. And today, girls, today it’s yours, too. He used the informal German word for girls, the same word a father might use with his daughters. He showed them how to use it, pouring the thick syrup over his own pancakes, watching it pool in the spaces and soak into the golden surface.
Analise was the first to try it. Her hand shook as she picked up the bottle and poured a tiny amount over her pancakes. She was careful as if it might be rationed, as if using too much might result in punishment. She cut a small piece of pancake with her fork, lifted it to her mouth, and bit down. The sweetness hit her like a physical blow to the chest, pure and rich and natural.
Not the bitter fake sugar they had used in Germany, not chemicals or substitutes, real sugar concentrated from tree sap through a process so careful and time-consuming it seemed impossible during wartime. She began to cry. Within 2 minutes, she wasn’t alone. Helga sat across from Anelise and watched her sobb into her napkin.
Then Helga poured her own syrup, took her own bite, and felt tears running down her cheeks before she could stop them. The taste was almost too much to bear. It was sweet, yes, but it was more than that. It was proof. Proof that everything had been a lie. Margaret, the strong nurse who had held dying soldiers in her arms, who had kept her composure through bombing raids and retreats and the collapse of everything she knew, put her face in her hands and wept like a child.
Around the room, 143 German women prisoners of war were crying. Not from sadness or fear, but from something far more devastating. The complete destruction of everything they had been told about the world. The moment crystallized like ice forming on a window. These so-called barbaric Canadians, these supposedly inferior colonials, these people they had been taught to view as lesser, had taken sap from trees and boiled it for hours to create something purely for pleasure, not necessity.
And then they had shared it, shared it with prisoners, shared it with enemy prisoners who, if the war had gone differently, might have been part of the system that killed Allied soldiers. They had done this not because they had to, not for propaganda purposes. There were no cameras in the dining hall, no reporters, no newsreel crews, just women and guards sharing a Saturday morning breakfast.
They had done it because it was Saturday. and Saturdays meant special breakfast. And weren’t these people deserving of Saturday pancakes, too? Helga would later write in her diary words that would take her hours to compose because her hands kept shaking. In that moment, with maple syrup on my tongue, I understood that everything, absolutely everything, had been a lie.
Not a small lie or an exaggeration, but a complete upside down inversion of reality. We were told we were the superior race. We were told our enemies were weak, degenerate, and suffering. We were told our sacrifices were necessary because we were surrounded by inferiors who wanted to destroy our greatness. But people who are weak don’t share maple syrup with prisoners.
People who are suffering don’t have flour and eggs and bacon to spare for enemy combatants. People who are degenerate don’t take time to fold napkins into triangles for women they would have been justified in hating. I realized we weren’t the superior ones. We were the ones who had been starving our own people while our leaders ate well.
We were the ones who had bombed cities to rubble. We were the ones who had built camps, not camps like this one, but camps where people were, I couldn’t even form the thoughts yet. And these Canadians, these supposedly inferior people, had won not just the war, but had won while keeping their humanity. They had won while still having enough to share.
They had won while treating their enemies with more dignity than we had treated our own citizens. The syrup was sweet, but the truth was bitter, and I could never unknow it. Sergeant Mueller watched the room full of weeping women, and felt his own throat tighten. [clears throat] He had expected happiness, maybe gratitude and thank yous, not this.
Major Wilson appeared in the doorway, took in the scene with experienced eyes, and quietly understood. She had seen this before with other groups of prisoners. The moment when ideology cracked against the hard reality of ordinary human kindness. She let them cry because what else could they do? They were 6,000 km from the homeland that had lied to them, eating pancakes in a country they had been taught to despise, cared for by people they had been told were their inferiors.
The meal lasted 2 hours. Women ate slowly, carefully, as if the food might vanish if they rushed. Some took second helpings when offered. Some couldn’t finish their plates, too overwhelmed by emotion. When it ended, something fundamental had changed in that room. Fraud Dresser, the oldest resistor, the former party member who had insisted everything was propaganda and tricks, approached Sergeant Mueller with red eyes.
She whispered just one word in German. Dunca, thank you. But in her voice was the sound of an entire world view collapsing like a building whose supports had been cut away. The maple syrup breakfast became known among the women as deag. The day in letters written afterward in whispered conversations in the barracks in memories that would last 70 years.
It was the turning point, the moment of no return. You cannot eat maple syrup pancakes made by people you have been taught to hate and remain unchanged. The dam had broken. everything that came after would be different. Hey, quick moment. When I started this channel, people told me nobody cares about Canadian war history anymore. I didn’t believe that.
And every time you subscribe, you prove them wrong. So, if these stories mean something to you, join the fight. Subscribe to Canadians at War. Let’s keep going. Thank you. I appreciate it a lot. Now, back to the video. The weeks following the day revealed how differently women processed the collapse of their worldview.
Some changed quickly, like ice melting in spring sun. Others resisted, like stones refusing to move in a river, and many remained trapped somewhere in between, torn between what they had believed and what they now knew to be true. Younger women like Helga and Anaisa transformed rapidly. By October of 1945, both were attending English classes three evenings per week.
A local teacher named Mrs. Catherine Pierce volunteered her time to teach prisoners the language of their former enemies. Helga threw herself into learning everything she had been denied. She read newspapers that were translated and discussed in class. She learned about the concentration camps, information that was being published in detail now that Allied forces had liberated and documented them.
On October 23rd, she wrote in her diary with hands that shook so much her writing was barely readable. Today we read about Bergen Bellson. The photographs of bodies stacked like firewood, of survivors who looked like skeletons with skin. I wanted to say they were fake, that the allies made them up, but there were too many photographs from too many sources, American, British, Soviet, and the German civilians who lived near the camps who claimed they didn’t know.
I understand them now. I didn’t know either. Or maybe I didn’t want to know. Is there a difference? Anna Lisa wrote home to her aunt a letter that would take months to cross the ocean and get through the damaged postal system. I need you to tell me the truth. Did you know? Did father know? When they took the Goldstein family from our village in 1942, where did they go? I need you to write back and tell me the truth even if it destroys me.
The response would arrive seven months later. We knew they were taken. We told ourselves it was resettlement to the east. But yes, child, somewhere in our hearts, we knew it was worse, and we did nothing. Forgive us if you can. About 30 women, mostly older, refused to believe any of it. They were led by Fra Dresser and a former school teacher named Fra Steinbach.
The British faked photographs before during the First War. Fra Steinbach insisted during a heated argument in the barracks one November evening, “The Americans are masters of propaganda. Why should we believe them now?” But even among the resistors, cracks began to form, like ice breaking under spring warmth. In December, the camp showed a documentary film compiled from footage taken at the concentration camps. Attendance was voluntary.
The film included testimony from German guards who had been captured. From survivors who could barely speak about what they had endured, from American and British soldiers who had liberated the camps and were still haunted by what they found. Fraud Dresser attended the showing. She walked out after 12 minutes.
But Helga saw her face as she left. Not anger, but horror. The kind of horror that comes from recognizing something you had refused to see. Three days later, Fra Dresser stopped eating. The camp doctor, whose name was also Morrison and who was married to the farmer, diagnosed severe depression. She had lost 8 kg within one week. Major Wilson visited her in the medical ward where she lay staring at the ceiling.
I taught children to sing Nazi songs, Fraud Dresser whispered, her voice hollow and broken. I taught them to report their parents if they spoke against the furer. I taught them to hate Jewish children. What did I teach them? What kind of monster was I? Major Wilson sat down beside the bed and spoke quietly.
You taught them what you believed was true at the time. You were wrong, but you believed it. Fraud Dresser turned her face away. But I should have questioned. I should have thought for myself. I should have. Major Wilson interrupted gently. Yes, you should have. But you didn’t. Now you must decide. Will you spend the rest of your life in this bed punishing yourself? Or will you stand up and be different from now on? Fraud Dresser began eating again two days later.
She never joined the English classes, but she stopped resisting and arguing with those who did. About 60 women remained trapped in the middle, seeing the evidence, but unable to fully accept what it meant. Margaret represented this group. As a nurse, she had seen things during the war. train loads of wounded soldiers coming back from the Eastern Front with frostbite and horror in their eyes.
Soldiers who whispered when they thought she wasn’t listening about villages they had burned, about orders they had followed that made them sick to remember. She had treated SS officers who drank too much and talked about special actions in Poland using words that made her stomach turn. She had told herself it was just war, that war was ugly on both sides, that every army did terrible things.
But now reading detailed reports about Achvitz, about the industrial scale of murder, about children being sent to gas chambers. She could no longer hide behind that excuse. She wrote to her sister in Hamburgg, letters full of anguish and guilt. I keep thinking about the train that passed through Munich in 1943.
We heard it was carrying prisoners east. We smelled something terrible, something dead and rotting. We saw hands reaching through the wooden slats of the cattle cars. We did nothing. We told ourselves it wasn’t our concern, that we couldn’t help anyway. But what if those hands belonged to children? What if I walked past and did nothing while children were being taken to their deaths? Arguments in the barracks grew heated as women struggled with what they were learning.
One November evening, Helga and Fra Steinbach had a shouting match that brought guards running. You’re young and you don’t understand. Steinbach snapped, her face red with anger. You don’t remember the Versailles treaty that humiliated us. You don’t remember the hyperinflation when our money became worthless.
You don’t remember the chaos of VHimar. The Furer saved Germany from communism and starvation. Helga shouted back louder than she had ever spoken to an older woman. He saved us into destruction. Look at Germany now. Divided among four foreign powers. Millions dead. Cities reduced to rubble. How is that salvation? Steinbach’s voice rose higher.
The Allies destroyed Germany, not us. Helga was shaking with fury now. We destroyed Germany. We started the war. We chose to follow a madman. And now we’re paying the price. She stopped suddenly, aware that a Canadian guard, Corporal Jensen, was standing in the doorway. Jensen quietly backed away and left.
He had heard enough of these arguments to know when to give the women privacy to work through their demons. The guards responded to all this transformation in different ways. Some, like Sergeant Mueller and Major Wilson, handled it with professional compassion. They understood these women were processing deep trauma, that having your entire understanding of the world collapse was painful and difficult.
Others struggled more. Corporal Davis, whose brother had been killed at DEP when Canadian forces attempted to raid the French coast, found it harder to watch. He remained correct and professional in his duties, never abusing his authority, but he kept his distance emotionally. He couldn’t quite forgive even though he tried.
Sergeant Mueller wrote to his wife back home letters that revealed his own conflicted feelings. They’re like people waking from a nightmare only to discover the nightmare was real and they were part of it. Some days I pity them deeply. Other days I remember what our boys found when they liberated those camps.
And I think these women are getting off easy with pancakes and English lessons. But then I remember that’s what separates us from them. We don’t become monsters to fight monsters. We stay human even when it’s hard. The women’s letters home during this period showed their changing perspectives. Helga wrote in December, “I’ve started attending church services with some of the other women.
Not because I found God again. I don’t know if I can believe in God after what we’ve learned our country did.” But the minister, Reverend Patterson, says we’re all worthy of redemption if we choose to change. I need to believe that’s true. Otherwise, what was the point of surviving? Annaise wrote in January of 1946, “I told Mrs.
Morrison about my village, about the Jewish family who lived two houses down from us. I told her how we did nothing when they were taken away. She didn’t condemn me or call me evil. She just said, “Now you know the truth, and now you can choose to be different.” It’s strange to receive understanding and almost forgiveness from someone I was taught to hate.
Margarita wrote in February, “The other nurses and I have started teaching basic medical skills to some of the younger women. First aid, how to bandage wounds, how to recognize infections. It feels absurd. enemy prisoners teaching each other to save lives when we come from a country that turned death into an industry.
But maybe that’s exactly the point. Maybe we rebuild humanity one bandage, one lesson, one choice at a time. Through teaching and living differently, these three women carried forward what they had learned in camp 20. The transformation was happening. By spring of 1946, 109 of the 143 women who had wept at the maple syrup breakfast had enrolled in education programs.
They were becoming something different than what they had been taught to be. Soon they would face the hardest test, going home. May 8th, 1946. Exactly one year after Victory in Europe Day, Major Wilson called an assembly of all prisoners at Camp 20. The repatriation process will begin in June, announced to the gathered women.
You will be returning to Germany in stages, processed through the British occupation zone. Prepare your personal effects. The reaction was complicated and confusing. These women had spent months, some over a year, waiting desperately to go home. Now that home was finally coming, many felt terrified instead of joyful.
Helga wrote in her diary that night, “I should be happy. I’m going home, but I’m scared. What am I returning to? And who am I now?” News from Germany had painted a dark picture of what awaited them. Letters that arrived in early 1946 described a nation destroyed beyond recognition. Anna Lisa’s aunt wrote about food rations of only 800 calories per day, barely enough to stay alive.
Margarite’s sister described their old neighborhood in Munich where 78 of 120 buildings had been destroyed by bombs. We live in the basement of what used to be the Schultz apartment building. Her sister wrote, “Seven families share this one basement. We have no heat, no glass for the windows, only boards nailed across the holes.
” Helga had received no letters at all from Hamburg. She had learned that her city was 60% destroyed, and her last known address was in the most heavily bombed district. She didn’t know if her parents had survived or if she was returning to find graves instead of family. The women who had transformed most completely faced an additional crisis.
What would they say when they got home? In April, a heated discussion broke out in Helga’s barracks late at night. Fra Steinbach, still resistant but less certain than before, warned them, “If you tell people how well we were treated here, they’ll think you’re a traitor to Germany.” The Soviets are interrogating returned prisoners.
Anyone who speaks well of the Western Allies is suspected of collaboration with the enemy. Anelise countered with passion in her voice. But if we don’t tell the truth, how do things ever change? How does Germany become different if we come home and lie about what we learned? Margarita, now 37 years old, spoke with the weight of experience.
We tell the truth to those who will listen, to our families, to our children if we have them someday. We plant seeds of truth quietly. We don’t throw our lives away by being loud martyrs. But we also don’t become liars. We choose the middle path. Final interactions with their captors carried heavy emotion. In late May, Mrs.
Morrison visited the camp to say goodbye to Margarita and the other women who had worked on her farm. She brought a parting gift for each of them. A small jar of maple syrup wrapped carefully in paper. “Take this home,” she said, tears in her eyes. When things are hard, when you remember only the terrible parts of the war, taste this and remember that kindness exists in the world.
Even between enemies, kindness is possible. Margarita hugged her, a profound gesture between former enemies, and whispered in halting English, “Thank you for showing me a different way to be.” Sergeant Mueller organized a farewell social evening in early June. Guards and prisoners gathered in the recreation hall where someone had brought a gramophone.
They played music, Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, and even some German folk songs. Helga asked Corpal Yensen, who had remained distant and professional throughout, to dance with her. He hesitated, then agreed. And as they swayed awkwardly to the music, he admitted something. I wanted to hate you. My brother died at Juno Beach on D-Day. I wanted to hate all of you.
Helga felt tears on her face. I’m sorry. I can’t undo what was done or bring your brother back, but I can promise to be different, to live differently. Yensen nodded slowly. I suppose that’s all any of us can do now. The journey home began June 15th, 1946. The 143 women from the maple syrup breakfast along with others from camp, 20 were transported to Halifax in a convoy.
503 total prisoners traveled together, retracing the route they had taken a year earlier. But now they saw Canada with completely different eyes. On the train to Halifax, Anelise stared out at the passing farms and forests and whispered to Helga, “A year ago, I thought all this prosperity was fake, staged just for us to see.
Now I understand. This is just how they live. They won the war, and it barely touched their homeland at all.” The Atlantic crossing took 8 days aboard a converted Liberty ship. Conditions were crowded with 800 German prisoners total, both men and women from various camps across Canada, but the conditions were adequate.
They received three meals daily, were allowed access to the deck in shifts, and had medical care available. One evening, standing at the rail, watching the sunset paint the ocean red and gold, Margarita stood next to a male prisoner from a work camp in New Brunswick. “What will you tell people back home?” he asked her quietly. Margaret thought for a long moment before answering the truth. That we were wrong.
That we were lied to by our leaders. that the people we thought were inferior showed us more humanity than we showed ourselves or our own citizens. The man shook his head. They’ll call you a traitor for saying such things. Margaret shrugged. Maybe, but I’ve been called worse things during this war, and those accusations weren’t true either.
Arrival in Britain came June 24th, 1946. They docked at Southampton and were processed through a massive British repatriation center that handled thousands of German prisoners every month. Here they received more concrete news of home. Germany was divided into four occupation zones controlled by America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union.
The Nuremberg trials were ongoing, prosecuting major war criminals. Dennazification programs were sorting former Nazi party members into categories of guilt and responsibility. Helga learned that Hamburg was in the British zone, which was a relief. Still no word about her parents. Transfer to Germany happened in stages over the next week.
On July 3rd, 1946, Helga, Anelise, and Margaret along with 247 other women crossed into the British zone of Germany by train. The moment they crossed the border, everything changed. The landscape was devastated. Entire towns reduced to fields of broken bricks and twisted metal. Bridges blown apart with only temporary wooden structures replacing them.
Factories were gutted shells. Rail lines were barely functional, patched together with salvaged parts. And the people were even worse. Gaunt faces with hollow eyes. Children with swollen bellies from malnutrition. Women wearing threadbear coats despite the summer heat because clothing was so scarce there was nothing else to wear.
Men missing limbs still wearing old vermocked uniforms with the insignia torn off because they had no other clothes. Anelise began to cry, not from joy at being home, but from horror at what home had become. Oh God,” she whispered, staring out the train window at the devastation rolling past. “What did we do to ourselves? What did we allow to be done?” The contrast was impossible to ignore and impossible to escape.
They had left Canada, where children ate chocolate, where farms overflowed with abundance, where even a prisoner camp had electric washing machines and enough food to share. They returned to Germany, where the average civilian received 1,200 calories per day, still below what a body needs to maintain weight and health, where cities were fields of rubble, where the master race ideology had delivered nothing but complete destruction.
Processing at the repatriation center took 3 days of interviews and paperwork. British officers asked about their wartime activities, their party membership, if any, their skills and education. This determined whether they would face further investigation or could be released immediately to return to their families.
All three women, Helga, Margaret, and Anelise, were cleared as low risk. They had been auxiliaries, not combatants. There was no evidence of war crimes or significant party involvement. On July 6th, 1946, they were released and given papers allowing them to travel. The moment of separation came at the train station in Hanover.
Margarett was heading south to Munich in the American zone. Anelise was going to her aunt’s village in Lower Saxony. Helga was traveling north to Hamburg or to whatever remained of it. They had become close during their captivity, sisters bonded by shared transformation. Now they faced the unknown separately, each carrying a small suitcase with their few possessions, a jar of maple syrup wrapped carefully in sweaters, letters from Canadian guards and farmers wishing them well, photographs taken at the camp, and the enormous weight of
what they now knew about themselves and their country. They embraced at the platform, crying and promising to write, to stay in touch, to remember. Then the trains pulled away in different directions, carrying them toward futures they couldn’t yet imagine. Helga’s return to Hamburgg came on July 8th, 1946. The city was unrecognizable from the place she had left 3 years earlier.
Her old neighborhood called Homerbrook had been 95% destroyed in the 1943 firebombing raids. The apartment building where she had grown up, where she had learned to ride a bicycle and had her first kiss, was simply gone, just rubble and broken bricks and twisted metal where five floors of families used to live.
She found her parents living in a refugee shelter, a former school gymnasium now housing 200 displaced families. Each family had a small corner sectioned off with hanging sheets for privacy. Her mother didn’t recognize her at 4 first. Helga had left home at age 20, weighing 52 kg, thin from rationing.
She returned at 23, weighing 59 kg, healthy and strong despite being a prisoner for over a year. Her mother weighed only 43 kg now, her clothes hanging loose on a frame that looked like it might break. The reunion was full of tears. Both joy and devastation mixed together. Her father had survived, but looked 15 years older than his actual age.
Both parents had survived on British occupation rations and whatever they could find or trade on the black market. That first night, sleeping on a thin mattress on the concrete floor of the gymnasium with 200 other people around them, Helga unwrapped the jar of maple syrup she had carried 6,000 km. Her mother stared at it like it was treasure from another planet, which in a sense it was.
Where did this come from? Her mother asked unable to finish the question. From Canada, Helga answered softly. From the enemy who fed us better than our own government fed us. She told them everything that night, speaking in whispers so others wouldn’t hear and judge. She told them about the pancakes and the maple syrup breakfast, about Mrs.
Morrison inviting prisoners to eat at her family table, about guards who treated them with dignity, about electric washing machines in a prison camp while German cities had no electricity. Her father listened in heavy silence. Her mother wept quietly into her hands. Finally, her father spoke, his voice rough and broken. We knew things were bad here, but they told us the enemy was suffering worse.
They told us we were winning until the very end, until Russian tanks were in Berlin. We believed because the alternative was admitting we had sacrificed everything, lost everything for nothing. Helga corrected him gently but firmly. Not for nothing, father. We sacrificed everything for evil. We have to say the word evil.
Margaret’s path took a different turn entirely. She returned to nursing in Munich’s overwhelmed hospitals, where the wounded and sick far outnumbered the beds and medicine. In 1947, she encountered a Canadian military medical team providing assistance to German civilians as part of the reconstruction effort. One of the doctors was Captain James Morrison, the son of the very farmer who had employed Margarite during her prisoner days.
“The coincidence seemed impossible, like fate arranging a second chance.” “My mother wrote to me about you,” he said when they met in the hospital corridor. “She said you were one of the good ones who had been caught in a bad system and were trying to be better.” Margarite worked alongside his medical team for 3 months and when they prepared to return to Canada, Captain Morrison asked if she would write to him.
Letters turned into something deeper. In 1951, Margarite immigrated to Canada on a spousal visa and married James Morrison in a ceremony attended by his parents, the same Mrs. Morrison who had served her chicken and pie 5 years earlier. I went home to Germany as an enemy, Margaret wrote to Helga after the wedding.
And I returned to Canada as family. If that isn’t proof that human beings can change and that forgiveness is possible, I don’t know what is. Anna Lisa’s story proved harder and more complicated. She returned to find her village now in the Soviet occupation zone in the east. Her father had died during the war. Her aunt had barely survived and was living on the edge of starvation.
In 1948, as cold war tensions rose and the Berlin blockade began, Anelise made a dangerous choice. She fled west illegally, crossing the border between zones with only 15 kg of belongings, and her precious empty maple syrup jar kept as a reminder. I had learned what it meant to live under people who valued human dignity and freedom,” she wrote in her diary.
“I couldn’t unlearn that, and I couldn’t live under another dictatorship, even a different kind.” She settled in Frankfurt, found work as a clerk, and in 1952 began teaching English to German children, using the same patient methods Mrs. Pierce had used to teach her back in camp 20. Her students in the 1950s and60s would remember her as strict but deeply fair.
And she always emphasized one lesson above all others. Learn the language of former enemies. It makes creating new enemies much harder. In 1955, Helga and her husband Ernst, a former prisoner who had spent three years doing farm work in Scotland, had their first child. They named their daughter Katherina after Mrs.
Catherine Pierce, who had taught Helga English and opened her mind to new ideas. When Catherina was old enough to ask questions about the war, Helga told her the truth, adjusted for her age, but never lying. She explained what Germany had done, what the propaganda had hidden, what ordinary people like. Helga had failed to question until it was too late.
“Never believe someone who tells you that you are superior to other people,” she taught her daughter, holding her small hands. “That belief is how they make you participate in evil things.” In 1985, on the 40th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, something remarkable happened. Sergeant Mueller, now 68 and retired, organized a reunion at the site of former Camp 20.
The camp had been taken apart in 1947, and the land returned to forest and farming, but a small historical marker showed where it had stood. Helga traveled from Germany with her daughter and two grandchildren. Margarita came from her home in Calgary, though her husband James had passed away 3 years earlier. Anelise, now 59 and struggling with health problems, made the difficult journey.
Also attending were children and grandchildren of guards of Mrs. Morrison, who had died in 1978, and Mrs. Pierce herself, who came in person at 81 years old. 17 other former prisoners from Camp 20 attended as well. They gathered at the Morrison family farm, still operating and now run by Margarite’s stepson. And there they recreated the maple syrup breakfast.
Pancakes and bacon and butter and maple syrup purchased from a local producer who still tapped trees in the same forests where syrup had been made 40 years before. When the syrup was poured, several people wept, including some who had not been at the original breakfast, but knew the story by heart.
Sergeant Mueller stood with difficulty, his arthritis making movement painful, and raised a glass. 40 years ago, we ended a terrible war. Today, we celebrate what came after. We proved that enemies can become friends, that hatred has an expiration date, that the best revenge against evil is refusing to become evil yourself,” Helga added with a smile.
“And we proved that pancakes can change the world.” Laughter mixed with tears around the tables. Helga lived until 2008, dying peacefully at age 83. In her final interview two years before her death, she was asked what people today should learn from her story. She thought for a long time, her old hands folded in her lap before answering.
The most dangerous lie is believing you are better than other people simply because of where you were born or what race you are. That lie justified everything Germany did. the war, the camps, the destruction of our own country. Once you believe you’re superior, you can justify any evil done to those you call inferior. But we weren’t superior.
We were just people who had been lied to successfully and who chose to believe those lies. The Canadians could have treated us the way we treated others. They could have chosen revenge. Instead, they chose something much harder. They chose to remain human even when dealing with enemies.
That taught me more than any book ever could. You want to know if a society is truly civilized. Don’t look at how they treat their friends. Look at how they treat defeated enemies who would have destroyed them if given the chance. By that measure, we failed completely. They succeeded beautifully. I spent the rest of my life trying to be more like my enemies than like what my own people had been.
That is what maple syrup tastes like to me. The sweet knowledge that you can choose to be better than you were taught to be. Every single day, you can choose to be better. Today, Helga’s greatg granddaughter, 21 years old and also named Helga in her honor, studies conflict resolution at the University of Toronto. She keeps a photograph on her desk showing her great grandmother at 22, standing with other prisoners at Camp 20, smiling genuinely at the camera.
Next to it sits a small bottle of Canadian maple syrup that she buys fresh each year on the anniversary of that September breakfast. When her roommate asked why she keeps it, young Helga explained, “Because my great grandmother learned that enemies can become friends if you choose curiosity over hatred.” Because pancakes changed her life and taught her that kindness is not weakness but strength.
Because we live in a world that still desperately needs that lesson. Because the most powerful weapons are not bombs or bullets, but small acts of unexpected humanity that crack open closed minds. And because maple syrup on pancakes is delicious, and deliciousness is a form of hope. The story endures because the lesson remains true.
Choose to be better than you were taught to be. That is the taste of a better world.
