The Second World War ended in May 1945 – but not for the German “Wolfskinder,” or “wolf children.” On their own, they made their way from East Prussia to Lithuania, a decision they’ll never forget.

When Alfreda Pipiraite turned 18, she believed she’d made it. “But no, they said to me, ‘You German pig! You Hitlerist! Fascist!’ And so on,” she told DW. “It was particularly painful whenever a member of my family called me that.”

After all, Alfreda was really Luise, a German born in 1940 in the town of Schwesternhof in East Prussia, today in the Russian region of Kaliningrad. At the age of four she was adopted by a Lithuanian family as a so-called “Wolfskind,” or wolf child. During the chaotic final stages of the war, more than 5,000 children, according to historian Roth Leiserowitz, fled from East Prussia to Lithuania, looking for food as well as peace.

Such children were robbed by the Second World War of practically everything: their parents, their home, their language. It also robbed them of their past and what could have become of them.

The children, most of whom are believed to have been between four to twelve years old, stumbled away through forests, alone or in groups, some of them without shoes. Their bellies were bloated, their arms no more than twigs, their teeth beginning to rot. Sometimes they ate grass, at other times frogs – and often, simply nothing.

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