February 1945, the war was almost over, but 87 German women sat freezing in a prison camp in Belgium, waiting to see if the Canadian soldiers guarding them would leave them to die in the snow.
They had been told their whole lives that the enemy would show no mercy, especially to German women.
Now, as the coldest winter in decades gripped Europe and a massive blizzard headed straight for their camp, they were about to find out if everything they believed was true or a lie.
Germany was falling apart.
The Allied armies were pushing deeper into German land every single day.
Cities that once stood proud were now piles of broken stone and ash.
The Nazi government that promised victory was now running and hiding.
Food was gone.
Medicine was gone.
Hope was gone.
Across Northern Europe, the temperatures dropped to 15° below zero.
Supply trucks could not get through the snow.
Train tracks were bombed and twisted.
Roads disappeared under ice and frozen mud.
People were starving in the streets.
Soldiers were surrendering by the thousands.
And in the chaos of retreat, these 87 women had been captured.
They were not regular soldiers.
They were nakta heler inan which meant signals helpers.
They had worked in communications for the vermach sending messages operating radios and keeping the German military connected.
They were young between 19 and 34 years old.
Many had joined because they believed in their country.
Others joined because they had no choice.
Some came from nice families in Berlin and Munich.
Others grew up on small farms where they never had enough food even before the war.
But now none of that mattered.
They were prisoners and they were enemy combatants and winter did not care about their stories.
The makeshift prison facility where they waited was never meant to hold people through winter.
It was just a collection of old storage buildings with thin wooden walls and broken windows.
The wind cut through every crack.
At night, the women huddled together on the cold floor, sharing the few thin blankets the Canadians had given them.
Their breath made clouds in the freezing air.
Some women had frostbite on their fingers and toes.
The pain was constant and sharp.
They survived on 400 calories each day, which was about two small potatoes and a piece of bread.
Before the war, a working woman would eat 2,000 calories.
Now, their stomachs hurt all the time from hunger.
Their bodies were weak.
Their uniforms were falling apart.
Many did not have proper winter coats.
Some wrapped themselves in old newspapers to try to stay warm.
These women had been forced to march for days before they were captured.
The German army was retreating so fast that they left people behind.
The women walked through snow and mud with almost no food.
Their feet bled inside their broken boots.
When the Canadian soldiers finally found them, they were more than happy to surrender.
Anything was better than walking through the frozen countryside with no help coming.
At least in the camp, they had walls around them and a roof, even if it leaked.
At least they were not being shot at anymore.
But the Nazi propaganda had filled their heads with terrible stories.
For years, they heard that the Canadians and Americans and British were monsters.
The propaganda posters showed Allied soldiers as cruel beasts who would hurt German women and children.
The radio broadcast said the enemy would torture prisoners.
Teachers in school told them that surrender meant death.
Even their own officers warned them before they were captured.
If they catch you, they will show no mercy.
One lieutenant had said, “They will use you and then throw you away like garbage.
” The women believed it because it was all they had ever heard.
When you hear the same lie a thousand times, it starts to sound like truth.
Now they sat in that cold camp, and they waited.
The guards were mostly young Canadian men, some barely older than the women themselves.
The guards brought them food and water.
They did not hurt them.
They did not yell or threaten, but the women still watched them with fear.
They did not trust the kindness.
They thought it was a trick that the real cruelty would come later.
At night, they whispered to each other.
They are waiting,” one woman named Greta said.
“When we are no use to them, that is when it will happen.
” The others nodded.
They all felt it.
The fear lived in their chest like a heavy stone.
Then the camp commander received the weather report.
A massive blizzard was coming.
The temperature would drop even further.
The wind would reach dangerous speeds.
Snow would fall so heavy that a person could not see 5 ft in front of them.
The storm would last for two days, maybe three, and this camp with its thin walls and broken windows would not protect anyone.
The commander called his officers together.
We have to evacuate, he said.
If we stay here, people will freeze to death.
When the women heard the news, the fear became terror.
Evacuation meant leaving the camp.
Leaving the camp meant going out into the blizzard.
Going out into the blizzard meant exactly what the propaganda had always promised.
They would be marched into the wilderness and left there.
The Canadians would save themselves and let the German prisoners freeze.
It made perfect sense.
Why would the enemy waste supplies and energy to save them? Why would soldiers risk their own lives for women who had worked for the Vermacht? The women looked at each other with wide, frightened eyes.
This was it.
This was the moment they had feared since the day they were captured.
They were going to die in the snow, and no one would ever know what happened to them.
The morning the blizzard was supposed to arrive.
The women woke up expecting the worst.
Through the thin walls, they could hear trucks pulling up outside.
Engines rumbled in the cold air.
Men shouted orders to each other.
The women pulled their thin coats tighter and stood together in small groups holding hands.
Some were crying quietly.
Others stared at nothing, their faces empty of hope.
Greta, who was 22 years old, looked at the youngest girl in the group.
She was only 19, barely more than a child.
“Stay close to me,” Greta whispered.
The girl nodded, her teeth chattering from cold and fear.
The doors opened and Canadian soldiers walked in.
The women braced themselves, but no one grabbed them.
No one yelled.
Instead, the officer in charge stood in the doorway and spoke in broken German.
We move now.
Storm coming.
Need to go to safe place.
The women did not move.
They did not believe him.
Safe Place was just another way of saying the middle of nowhere, where no one would find their frozen bodies until spring.
But they had no choice.
When soldiers tell you to move, you move.
They filed outside into the bitter cold.
The wind was already picking up, blowing snow across the ground in white sheets.
The women expected to see the soldiers pointing to a road, ready to make them march, but instead they saw something that made no sense.
The trucks were there, yes, but the soldiers were not loading the women into them.
One of the younger soldiers walked up to the officer and shook his head.
“Sir, the roads are completely blocked.
We have 60 cm of snow already and more coming.
The trucks cannot get through.
” The officer nodded slowly, thinking.
Then he turned to his men and said something the women did not expect.
Then we carry them.
For a moment, nobody moved.
The German women stared at the Canadians.
The Canadians looked at each other.
Then slowly the soldiers started taking off their heavy winter coats.
They walked toward the prisoners, holding out the coats.
here,” one soldier said in English, gesturing for a woman to take his coat.
She looked at him like he was crazy.
He smiled a little and put the coat around her shoulders himself.
She was so shocked she could not speak.
All around, other soldiers were doing the same thing.
They gave away their scarves.
They gave away their gloves.
One soldier took off his wool blanket that he carried in his pack and wrapped it around a teenage girl whose fingers were black with frostbite.
“You need this more than me,” he said, even though she could not understand his words.
Then the caring began.
The weakest women, the ones who could barely stand, were lifted onto soldiers backs.
The men bent down and let the women climb on piggyback style, like fathers carrying tired children.
The women were terrified at first, stiff and afraid.
But the soldiers were gentle.
They adjusted the weight, made sure the women were secure, and then started walking into the snow.
The path ahead was not a road anymore.
It was just white emptiness with snow already up to their knees in some places.
The wind howled around them, blowing ice into their faces.
But the soldiers kept walking.
Greta walked beside a soldier who was carrying her friend Anna.
She watched his face as he trudged through the deep snow.
His breath came out in heavy clouds.
Sweat formed on his forehead, even in the freezing cold.
After 15 minutes, another soldier called out, “Switch time!” The man carrying Anna carefully lowered her down, and another soldier immediately took his place, lifting Anna onto his back without complaint.
They were rotating, Greta realized.
They were sharing the burden so no one man would collapse from exhaustion.
These soldiers were organizing themselves to save their prisoners lives.
Every hour, the group stopped to rest.
The soldiers pulled out thermoses from their packs and poured hot chocolate into small metal cups.
They passed the cups to the German women first.
Greta took a sip and almost cried.
It was sweet, so sweet and warm.
She had not tasted sugar in months.
In Germany, even before she was captured, sugar was impossible to find.
It was saved for the military and even then there was never enough.
But here these Canadian soldiers were giving their sugar rations to enemy prisoners.
Drink, the soldier said, pointing at the cup when Greta tried to give it back after one sip.
You need it more.
She drank it all, feeling the warmth spread through her chest.
The contrast was so sharp it hurt to think about.
Greta had expected bayonets pointed at their backs, forcing them to march until they dropped.
She had expected cruelty and mockery.
She had expected to be left in a ditch when she could not walk anymore.
But instead, she walked beside men who gave up their own warmth to keep her alive.
Men who carried her friends on their backs through waistdeep snow.
Men who shared their food and hot drinks.
men who stopped every 15 minutes to switch who was carrying the heaviest burden, making sure no one suffered alone.
The camp medic, a Canadian man with kind eyes and steady hands, moved through the group, checking on the women.
When he found one with an injured ankle, swollen and purple, he stopped everyone.
He opened his medical bag and pulled out a small glass bottle.
Morphine.
Greta knew what it was.
Morphine was precious, saved for the most serious injuries.
In the German army, they barely had any left.
But this medic used it on a German prisoner, injecting it carefully to ease her pain.
“This will help,” he said softly, though the woman could not understand him.
He wrapped the ankle tight and helped another soldier lift her onto his back.
As they walked, Greta’s mind was spinning.
Everything she had been taught was being challenged by what she saw with her own eyes.
The propaganda posters showed Allied soldiers as evil monsters.
The radio said they were barbarians without honor.
Her officers warned that capture meant torture and death.
But these men, these Canadian soldiers were suffering in the cold because they refused to leave prisoners behind.
They were exhausted, sweating despite the freezing temperature, their legs shaking from the effort of walking through the deep snow.
But they did not stop.
They did not complain.
When one woman stumbled, three soldiers rushed to help her up.
When another started crying from fear and cold, a soldier walking beside her started humming a song, something gentle and calming, trying to make her feel less afraid.
The storm was getting worse.
The wind screamed around them.
Snow fell so thick they could barely see 10 ft ahead.
But the line of soldiers and prisoners kept moving forward, step by difficult step.
And Greta, walking through that blizzard, surrounded by men she was supposed to fear, felt something breaking inside her chest.
It was not her body breaking.
It was something deeper.
It was the wall of lies she had lived behind her whole life, starting to crack and crumble in the face of simple, undeniable kindness.
They had been walking for almost 3 hours when Greta’s legs finally gave out.
One moment she was taking another step through the snow, and the next moment she was on her knees, her body simply refusing to go any further.
She had not eaten a real meal in weeks.
She had not slept well in months.
Her body had nothing left to give.
She knelt there in the snow, breathing hard, waiting for the soldiers to yell at her or leave her behind.
This was it, she thought.
This was where her luck ran out.
But a young Canadian corporal stopped beside her.
He looked down at her with concern, not anger.
He was maybe 24 or 25 years old with brown hair and tired eyes.
He bent down and said something in English that she did not understand.
Then he turned around and pointed at his back, making it clear what he wanted.
He was offering to carry her.
Greta shook her head quickly.
She did not want to be a burden.
She was the enemy.
She did not deserve this kind of help.
But the corporal just smiled a little and waited.
When she did not move, he gently helped her up and positioned her on his back, her arms around his shoulders, his hands holding her legs.
Then he started walking.
For the first few minutes, Greta was rigid with fear and shame.
She was an enemy soldier being carried by a man she was supposed to hate.
It felt wrong.
But as the corporal kept walking step after step through snow that was now up to his waist in places, she started to feel something else.
She felt his breathing heavy and labored.
She felt how his whole body worked to push through the deep snow while carrying her weight.
She felt him stumble once, catch himself, and keep going without complaint.
And slowly the fear started to change into something she could not name.
15 minutes passed, then 30, then an hour.
The corporal did not stop.
Other soldiers called out, “Hey, you need a break.
” But he shook his head and kept walking.
His breath came harder now.
She could feel his shoulders shaking from the effort.
She could feel the heat from his body, even through their clothes.
After 2 hours, Greta could not stay silent anymore.
She had learned a little bit of English before the war in school, though she was never very good at it.
She leaned close to his ear and said quietly, “I am sorry, too heavy.
You tired?” The corporal turned his head slightly so she could hear him over the wind.
When he spoke, his voice was gentle, almost kind.
“My sister’s your age,” he said slowly, “So she might understand.
Someone would do this for her.
” Then he kept walking.
Those words hit Greta like a physical blow.
She felt something inside her chest break open, something that had been locked tight her whole life.
This man was not carrying her because he had orders to do so.
He was not doing it to look good or to win points with his commander.
He was carrying her because he had a sister at home somewhere in Canada who was 22 years old just like Greta.
And in his mind, if his sister was trapped in a blizzard in a foreign country, he hoped that someone would carry her to safety, too.
He saw her as a person, not a German, not an enemy, not a piece of propaganda, just a young woman who needed help.
Greta pressed her face against his shoulder and cried.
She tried to be quiet about it, but her whole body shook.
Everything she had been taught, everything she had believed was a lie.
The propaganda posters that covered every wall in Germany showed Allied soldiers as monsters with evil faces ready to destroy German women.
The radio broadcast that played every day said the enemy had no honor, no mercy, no humanity.
Her teachers in school said the allies wanted to wipe Germany off the map and would torture anyone they captured.
Her own officers right before she was captured warned her that the Canadians would violate German women and leave them to die in ditches.
She had believed all of it because everyone around her believed it, too.
When an entire country tells you something is true, you stop questioning it.
But here, in the middle of a killing blizzard, with snow falling so thick she could barely see, a Canadian soldier was carrying her on his back because she reminded him of his sister.
He was exhausted.
His legs were shaking.
His breath came in gasps.
But he did not put her down.
He did not complain.
He just kept walking one step at a time, making sure she survived.
If this was a lie, Greta thought, what else was a lie? If they lied about the enemy being monsters, what else did they lie about? Did they lie about Germany winning the war? Did they lie about why the war started? Did they lie about who the real monsters were? The questions flooded her mind, and each one felt like another crack in a dam that was about to burst.
Her whole world view, everything she thought she knew about the world, was built on propaganda and fear.
And now she could see it for what it was.
She thought about the last two years of her life.
She thought about her friends who died in bombing raids.
She thought about the cities destroyed.
She thought about the millions of people suffering and dying.
And for what? So leaders could stay in power? So men in fancy uniforms could feel important.
She had given two years of her life to the Vermacht, sending their messages, helping their war machine run, believing she was protecting her country.
But her country had lied to her about everything.
They sent her to fight an enemy that was not evil.
They told her to fear people who were actually kind.
They filled her head with hate and then sent her out to suffer and die for their lies.
The corporal stumbled again, this time almost falling.
Another soldier rushed over.
Let me take her, mate.
You are done.
The corporal shook his head.
Almost there, he said.
I can make it.
The other soldier looked worried but nodded.
They kept walking.
Greta could see buildings in the distance now, barely visible through the snow.
The safe place was real.
It was not a trick.
They were actually taking the prisoners to shelter.
When they finally reached the new facility, a proper building with real walls and heat, the corporal carefully lowered Greta to the ground.
She stood on shaky legs and looked at him.
His face was red from effort and cold.
Sweat and melted snow dripped from his hair.
His hands shook from exhaustion, but he smiled at her, a real smile, and said, “You okay now?” Greta did not have the English words to say what she wanted to say.
She did not know how to tell him that he had just changed her entire life, so she just nodded and said the only English word she knew for certain.
“Thank you.
Thank you.
” That night, lying on a real bed with a real blankets in a warm room, Greta stared at the ceiling and thought about everything.
The other women were talking quietly around her, still shocked by what had happened.
“They carried us,” one woman kept saying over and over like she could not believe it.
“They gave us their coats.
They gave us their food.
They carried us through a blizzard.
” Another woman said, “Everything they told us was wrong.
” And Greta whispered into the dark room.
“We marched, expecting death.
Instead, we found men who carried us to safety.
Everything we were told was a lie.
” She thought about the corporal and his sister back in Canada.
She thought about all the soldiers who rotated carrying the weakest women, who shared their morphine and their hot chocolate, who gave up their warmth so prisoners would not freeze.
These were supposed to be the barbarians.
These were supposed to be the monsters without mercy.
But they had more mercy in their actions than her own government had shown in words.
The Nazi leaders who promised to protect Germany had sent young women into war zones with no real training and inadequate supplies.
But enemy soldiers, men who had every reason to hate Germans, had risked their lives in a blizzard to save them.
Greta rolled over and pulled the wool blanket closer.
It was the corporal’s blanket, the one he had insisted she keep.
She held it tight and made a promise to herself.
She would never forget this.
She would never forget what real humanity looked like.
And if she survived this war, if she made it home, she would tell everyone the truth about what happened in that blizzard.
She would tell them that the enemy was not who they thought.
And she would spend the rest of her life questioning everything she was told because she had learned the hardest way possible that governments lie and propaganda kills.
But kindness in the face of suffering is the only truth that really matters.
The war ended in May of 1945.
By the time Greta was finally allowed to go home, it was early 1946.
She had spent almost a year in Canadian custody, first in Belgium and then in a proper P camp in France.
The Canadians treated her well the whole time.
They gave her enough food that she gained back the weight she had lost.
They let her write letters home, though most of them never arrived because the German postal system had collapsed.
They even gave her a little bit of money when she was released, enough to buy a train ticket and some food for the journey.
Before she left, Greta asked one of the guards if he knew how to find the corporal who had carried her through the blizzard.
The guard checked some papers and wrote down an address in Ontario, Canada.
If you write to him, the letter should find him, the guard said.
Greta folded the paper carefully and put it in her pocket like it was made of gold.
She also carried two other things with her.
One was a small pressed flower, a tiny white wild flower she’d found growing near the facility where they had sheltered from the blizzard.
She had picked it in the spring and pressed it between two pieces of paper, saving it as a reminder that life could grow, even in places where people expected only death.
The other thing she carried was the wool blanket the corporal had given her.
It was worn and faded now with a few holes from mods, but she would not leave it behind.
That blanket meant more to her than almost anything else she owned.
It was proof that what happened was real, that it was not just a dream she had made up in her desperate mind.
The train ride back to Germany was long and depressing.
Everywhere Greta looked, she saw destruction.
Train stations were bombed into piles of broken concrete.
Bridges were blown apart, forcing the train to take long detours.
Fields that should have been growing food were torn up and poisoned.
Small towns were just empty shells, windows broken, walls collapsed, nobody living there anymore.
And the people on the train, the other Germans heading home, looked like ghosts.
They were thin and pale, and their eyes were empty.
Nobody talked much.
What was there to say? They had lost everything.
When Greta finally arrived in Hamburgg, the city she had grown up in, she almost did not recognize it.
Hamburgg had been one of the most beautiful cities in Germany before the war with grand buildings and busy streets and parks full of trees.
Now it looked like the surface of the moon.
Entire neighborhoods were just rubble and ash.
The bombing raids had destroyed almost everything.
People lived in the basement of destroyed buildings, making shelters out of whatever they could find.
Children with dirty faces and torn clothes begged for food on street corners.
Old women dug through piles of bricks looking for anything useful, anything they could sell or trade.
The smell of smoke and decay hung over everything.
This was what losing a war looked like.
This was what happened when leaders lied to their people and sent them to die for nothing.
Greta found her family living in what used to be a shop.
The front was completely destroyed, but the back room still had a roof and three walls.
Her mother cried when she saw her, holding her so tight, Greta could barely breathe.
Her father looked older than she remembered, his hair completely gray now, his face thin and lined with worry.
Her younger brother was there, too, missing his left arm from a battle in the final weeks of the war.
They were alive, which was more than many families could say, but they were broken.
That first night, sitting around a tiny fire made from broken furniture, Greta tried to tell them about the blizzard.
She told them how the Canadian soldiers had carried the prisoners to safety, how they had given up their own coats and food, how one man had carried her for two hours because she reminded him of his sister.
Her father listened with a hard face and then shook his head.
“They were trying to make us look weak,” he said.
“It was propaganda, a trick to make us grateful.
” Her mother nodded, agreeing.
The Allies wanted to destroy Germany.
They still do.
“You were just lucky you did not see their real faces.
” Greta stared at them in shock.
Even now, even after losing the war, even after their city was destroyed and their son lost an arm and they were living in a ruined shop, they still believed the lies.
They still clung to the propaganda like it was a life raft.
She tried again.
No, you do not understand.
They were kind.
They saved our lives when they could have left us to freeze.
They treated us like human beings.
But her father just got angry.
“Stop talking like that,” he said sharply.
“You sound like you’re on their side.
We were right to fight.
We were defending our homeland.
Do not dishonor your country by praising the enemy.
” Greta stopped talking after that.
She realized that some people would never let go of the lies, no matter what the truth was.
They needed to believe that Germany was right and everyone else was wrong.
Because if they admitted the truth, they would have to face what they had supported.
They would have to admit that they had cheered for a government that murdered millions and destroyed their own country.
It was easier to keep believing the lies than to face that kind of guilt.
But Greta could not live like that.
The contrast between what she had experienced and what she saw at home was too sharp, too painful.
In Canada, even enemy prisoners were treated with dignity and given enough food.
In Germany, German citizens were starving and living in ruins, abandoned by the same government that promised to protect them.
The Canadian soldiers had valued German lives more than Germany’s own leaders ever did.
That was the truth that burned in her chest every single day.
She kept the wool blanket for 40 years, folded carefully in a drawer.
Sometimes she would take it out and hold it, remembering that day in the blizzard.
She wrote letters to the corporal in Canada and eventually got a response.
He was doing well, working as a teacher, married with three children.
They exchanged letters for years, an unlikely friendship between former enemies.
He told her about Canada and she told him about trying to rebuild Germany.
She thanked him over and over for what he did and he always wrote back the same thing.
I did what anyone should do.
You were suffering and I could help.
That is all.
As Germany slowly rebuilt itself over the years, Greta made it her mission to tell young people about what really happened during the war.
She visited schools and spoke to students about propaganda and lies and how easy it is to hate people you have never met.
She told them about the blizzard and the Canadian soldiers who carried enemy prisoners through the snow.
We were taught to fear them, she would say, looking at the young faces in front of her.
We were told they were monsters who would hurt us.
But when we were freezing and broken, it was the enemy who carried us to warmth.
Humanity does not recognize uniform colors.
It only recognizes suffering and the choice to help.
When she was 62 years old, Greta donated the wool blanket to a war museum in Berlin.
She stood in front of a group of reporters and held up the faded worn blanket.
“This belonged to a Canadian soldier who gave it to me when I was a prisoner.
” She said, “He did not have to do that.
I was his enemy.
” But he saw a young woman who was cold and suffering, and he chose kindness over hate.
This blanket is proof that even in the darkest moments of war, humanity can survive.
I kept it all these years to remind myself that propaganda dies the moment you look into the eyes of someone carrying you through a blizzard.
Greta lived to be 84 years old.
She spent decades telling her story, fighting against the lies that led to war, teaching people to question what their governments tell them.
In her final interview before she died, a young journalist asked her what the most important lesson was from her experience.
Greta thought for a moment and then said, “Real courage is not about fighting your enemies.
Real courage is about protecting them when they are vulnerable, even when everything in your culture tells you to hate them.
Those Canadian soldiers did not just save 87 women that day.
They proved that humanity can win even when everything else has failed.
They taught me that kindness is stronger than any propaganda.
And that lesson is what I want to leave behind.
The wool blanket still sits in that museum today, behind glass with a small sign that tells the story of the blizzard and the soldiers who carried their enemies to safety.
Thousands of people see it every year.
And maybe some of them looking at that old faded blanket learn the same lesson Greta learned.
That the real enemy is not the person on the other side wearing a different uniform.
The real enemy is the lie that tells you they are less human than you are.
