My friend Gertrud Schakat Tammen, 86, passed away on Dec. 30, 2017 at the Iowa River Hospice Home in Marshalltown. Although I only got to know her about a year ago, she is someone in my lifetime I shall never forget.

On Jan. 8, 2017, I penned an article about her life growing up in Nazi-occupied East Prussia entitled “Surviving the Nazis and the Soviets.” Gertrud told me about her harrowing evacuation of her homeland at the age of 13 as the Red Army advanced in 1945. These evacuations, and the expulsion following World War II, is regarded as the largest forced migration in world history.

She was born on June 24, 1931, in Tilsit, East Prussia, then a northeast German city near the Russian border. After the city was captured by the Soviets, it was renamed Sovietsk, and is now a city in Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia. After the evacuation, she never returned to her hometown.

“If you wanted to advance in life, you had to join the Nazi Party, so many people did,” Gertrud told me in our interview. “I even remember seeing Nazi boots sticking out from under the robe of our church minister.”

In July 1942, the Nazis bombed the Soviet city of Stalingrad, breaking the two countries’ 1939 Nonagression Pact. Tilsit endured many heavy air attacks by the Soviets. As a child, Gertrud used a red crayon to mark every spot on the family’s map where a bomb had dropped on Tilsit. She showed me this aged map during our interview.

On Jan. 13, 1945, the Great Russian Offensive began, and her family was desperate to get to Annaberg in western Germany. Nazi officials had repressed the efforts of civilians to evacuate until the Red Army’s advances could no longer be halted.

“The Russians had taken control of the roads, so the only way out was to cross the frozen Frische Haff (a brackish water lagoon on the Baltic Sea),” Gertrud told me. “On Feb. 1, 1945, my mother, my sister Eva, three aunts, cousins and my 81-year-old grandmother, on top of a covered wagon pulled by two strong horses, made our way to the town of Stolp in Pomerania (today a city in northern Poland).”

This mission, called Operation Hannibal, was the largest emergency evacuation by sea in world history. Over the course of 15 weeks, between 500 and 1,000 vessels of all sizes transported 800,000 to 900,000 refugees and 350,000 soldiers across the Baltic Sea into Germany and occupied Denmark.

The Schakats were able to reach Annaberg, and she documented her plight in a diary which her family still possesses.

On May 20 she wrote: “We have a curfew from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. The Russian prisoners who had been released, are looting. We have to lock the doors. If we kill one Russian, 50 Annaberg residents will be shot.”

Her family fled to Berlin in July, then got sent to refugee camps. Eventually, the family settled in Leer. She graduated high school there in 1950, and went on to become a nurse. She got engaged to Frank Tammen and moved to Iowa, settling in Marshalltown in 1954. They became American citizens in 1962, and had three daughters: Dorie, Ingrid and Linda.

I enjoyed my handful of visits to Gertrud’s apartment to talk about politics and our shared German ancestry over cocktails with her daughter Dorie. I found Gertrud’s insights into the current global refugee crisis all the more relevant in light of her first-hand experiences. Let Gertrud’s life be a reminder that the horrors of war are things no child should have to endure.

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Contact Sara Jordan-Heintz at 641-753-6611 or sjordan@timesrepublican.com