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Out of Germany. The Walls Came Tumbling Down relates the real saga of a Dutch girl, condemned to death by the Nazis for her work in the underground and awaiting execution at the Waldheim prison in southeastern Germany. Her story begins with the carnival of freedom that occurs when Waldheim is captured in 1945 by the advancing Russians. In those first hysterical days, the freed prisoners are as vindictive as a wolf pack. Captured guards are hurled to their death down a stairwell; a brutal prison doctor is beaten insensible and shot. Henriette comes face to face with a woman guard she has sworn to kill: "I stared fixedly at the woman, at those coarse features, and cruel mouth I had hated from the bottom of my soul . . . Yet now I found that, even if I had known how to go about it in a sunny courtyard full of people, I was incapable of killing in cold blood."
With that decision, Henriette and her friends change from uncaged animals to human beings with purpose and pride. With two girls who were her fellow prisoners and a young Dutch seaman, she starts out on the long journey to her home in The Netherlands. The book becomes a picaresque adventure as the quartet travel by foot, horse cart, boat and truck. Along the way are Germans, sullen or penitent or self-pitying; Russians, busy "liberating'' wristwatches, bicycles and women; and a boisterous medley of all the races of Europe who had been penned into camps by the Nazis and are now moving deliriously toward their homes. The biggest problem of course is posed by the Russians: "We never learned to predict what a Russian soldier would do. Was he going to shoot? Be friendly? Look the other way? Help us out? Run us into a displaced persons camp? . . . We could never tell beforehand."
Life's Encore. In the final stage of their journey they encountered the overwhelming if absent-minded munificence of the U.S. Army. A Negro truck driver whisked them 50 miles in 60 minutes to Halle airfield, where a U.S. dispatcher airily put them aboard a C-47 bound for Brussels and, by easy stages, home.
Author Roosenburg. now a LIFE reporter, writes with such warmth and euphoria that often the great migration of prisoners seems as jolly as a Sunday in the park. The heady excitement of survival made it easy to put the dreadful past out of mind and heart. Nearing home. Henriette says: "I feel like one of those violinists at a concert who gets called back for an encore. I was so convinced that I was going to die and that the concert was over, but apparently life wants an encore. I just realized that tonight."