My father came home from the war for the last time in August 1943 and I was born seven months later. When I was born, my brother Gunther still lived at home but Bernhard happened to be on leave from the military. He proudly pushed the baby carriage, he told me, and since he was in uniform everyone thought that I was his child. My mother, despite the Nazi propaganda that we were still winning the war, felt that the war would probably end and, for my baptism in May of 1944, decided to bring as much of the family together as was possible under war time conditions. I ended up with a total of 7 godmothers and godfathers, surely some kind of record. As I was passed around the baptismal fond, bundled up and invisible, the proud family members managed to reverse head and foot position and when my mother got me back into her arms I had been held head down and feet up. Also, on the way back from the church, uncle Bruno wanted to throw a fire cracker in celebration of my baptism, missed and hit a strange woman on her head where the fire cracker got caught in her hat and went off. She, predictably, made a ruckus. To paraphrase Queen Victoria - my mother was not amused.......My father was not present at either my birth or my baptism. At the time he was stationed in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in charge of a huge supply depot. I never saw my father until 1951 when he was released as prisoner of war from Yugoslavia. Suddendly our situation changed in January of 1945. The Russians entered the city and for us the war was over. Mother temporarily had left our large apartment located in the inner city and moved to the suburbs into uncle Hans' home to avoid the house to house fighting. A few days later she sent Gunther back to get some fresh clothes for us. He returned white as a sheet and reported to my mother that there was nothing left. The Russians had burned down the house. Little did we realize that this act saved our lives. The Russians killed, raped, plundered, stole with abandon. We lived through the revenge. Everyone wearing a uniform was shot on sight. Thus all coal minors coming up from their shift and not realizing the city had changed hands were shot as the shift ended. Guilt by association went so far that everyone was killed who possessed any military article of any kind and not limited to W.W.II. Our apartment had closets full with my father's uniforms. The "evidence" had been destroyed by the enemy. We were also lucky. Gunther, age 11, was shot at numerous times but only grazed. A few years ago he went to one apartment where this had occurred (because he had not opened the front door quickly enough for a Russian soldier to come in and loot) and could still feel the bullet in the wall. It had just been painted over. My mother was once rounded up to be transported to the Russia but somehow got away. If this experience in January was not enough in May of 1945 the Poles entered the city. The killing, raping, and looting started all over. Not only were the concentration camps recycled for Germans but the Poles started new ones for Germans. That and the new language requirements that everyone had to speak Polish immediately convinced my mother that we had to flee as well. In the end, 10,000.000 people fled and 2,000,000 died trying to escape. These numbers do not include the civilians that were rounded up at the end of the war and transported as slave laborers to Russia (within days the Russian rounded up every male between 16 and 70). Somehow these civilians were counted as prisoners of war and these figures also do not reflect the millions of Germans who had settled peacefully centuries ago as farmers in the Volga region of Russia and were all shipped off to Siberia by Stalin as Germany invaded Russia. The reader may think that we deserved this fate since we killed millions of innocent people ourselves and I accept that. The point I am trying to make is that most history books today describe the allies as the benevolent victors who were morally superior to the Nazis and who tried in a court of law all those Germans who were criminals (Nuernberg) and the general population was treated decently. Such a nice fairy tale. A few bigwigs got a trial (we Germans would not have mind seeing those people strung up WITHOUT a trial) and the little man on the street got shot. My oldest brother Bernhard said once: "We did not mind being liberated from the Nazis but we did not think that we would be liberated from home and country as well."
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I am in my mother's arms. Gunther is looking down. A few months later Gunther was the man of the house and stole the food that made us survive. He was still small enough to climb into cellar windows of abandoned houses and get the canned goods. The Russians used Gunther as grave digger! Every January I call him because - like all survivors - he relives this nightmare. After I was born, Gunther immediately went to the Nazi authorities and told them that his mother needed help at home. He was tired of marching with the Hitler Youth. He took me in the babycarriage to the nearest park, weather permitting, and read his Karl May books. |
Mother bribed a Russian truck driver with some featherbeds (certainly could not have been ours!) who took us westward. We ended up in displaced persons camp in Dessau, Saxony. Our hope was to get to Stuttgart where mother's sister Mitze lived. In Dessau Gunther fell ill from typhoid and I got diphteria. My earliest memory is from this camp. I am in a hospital room, I see my mother through a window but she does not get me and I am crying my eyes out. After languishing for over a year in this camp my brother Bernhard (how did he know we there there?) comes to the camp from Berlin and we just walk away.
| This is the only picture from the camp. Notice how Gunther has grown....So have I! |  |