大象传媒

Summer 1944 Ilia, one of the Russian Prisoners of war had disappeared.
Farmer Graf reported it immediately to the local Gendarm and was told, that a lot of Russian and Polish Prisoners of war had fled east. They wanted to be with their Commusnist comrades.
Robert, also a Russian Prisoner of War and my friend, looked troubled. He said there were many of his friends who would not go back; they would rather go south and west to meet up with the Americans and English. I said to Robert:
"How can you go to the English, they bombed and destroyed all our houses so that we have nowhere in Berlin to live. They are bombing town after town until there are no houses left at all. They will kill you". But Robert smiled at me and said, that the war would soon be over and then the English would not be the enemy any more and we would all be friends and fight communists together. I didn't believe it.
"Where will you go?" I asked him. We were on our way back from putting the horses into the field for the night. He stopped, took out some newspaper, which we had smuggled to him, very carefully he tore off a tiny strip and started to roll one of his dreadfully stinking cigarettes. The 'tobacco' he collected and dried himself from herbs he said made fine smoking. He sat down and by the side of the field and with his finger drew a little map in the sandy lane:
"Here we are, in north, here Posen, here Bohemia, Silesia and here Austria. Here River Danube. Danube goes to almost where I live", and his finger wandered down the road.
"Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, and here the sea. Americans come from Italy and over here," and he drew an other little map of France and Belgium.
"Here English come and American. American will help get my family. Then we go America. No good stay here. Deutschland kaputt"
He frightened me. I didn't understand. I looked at Robert and I sensed an end of the peace we found here. I felt so at home here. We had made many friends, even hoped that we would stay here forever, or at least until we could go back to Berlin if there was anybody left alive.
"Why can't we all stay here? Here is no war, no bombing and no enemy?" Robert got up and started walking back. He took my hand and said:
"Enemy from east very close. Ilia know. He listens on secret radio. Very bad. You big girl, brave, help mother like you help me. You rpomise?" I looked up at Robert and asked:
"Couldn't we at least stay together?" Robert squeezed my hand and said:
"Is no permitted, I prisoner, but be patient, maybe change come. On the Wind it is written what becomes of you and me.
The worries were soon forgotten. My birthday was near and mother had promised a party. The neighbour's children were invited. Robert was not allowed to attend until late in the evening, when all the work was done. I promised to keep a piece of cake for him. He said he would play for us on mother's accordion. He was a very good musician. When we worked in the fields, and the monotony of working from one end of the field to the other, thinning beets or cutting thistles or what ever, and it was too boring to bear, Robert would tell stories in Russian or sing some of his songs from the River Don and from the Tatar Steppes, of Stenka Rasin, who was a Russian hero. He would translate the important bits, so that we could follow the story. Robert could sing the highest and the lowest notes, and could sound like two people singing together. When extra prisoners were sent to the farm in the busy season, they would also sing, and even the Polish POW's would join in. It was like organ music in a cathedral. To me it was so beautiful, it almost hurt.
Very early on my birthday, Robert knocked on the window and I dashed out to get the horses as usual. He gave me a present. It was a tiny wooden doll he had carved, and it had moving arms and legs, blond hair which he had made from bits of untwisted rope. It was small enough to put into a pocket. Robert picket me up and twirled me around and laughed and said:
"You like?" and I felt such love for Robert and wished we would never be parted.
"Thank you, it is so beautiful. Please wait while I put her into my bed". I ran into the cottage and put my doll into bed and carefully tucked her in.
I rushed out again and caught up with Robert and we rounded up the horses and rode them back to the farm.
The summer holidays had started early because of the hay-and barley harvest. We were filled with a strange feeling, that everything had to be hurried because time was running out. People were talking about the end of the world. They had talked about the end of the world in Berlin too and it still hadn't come.
In the village lived a very old man, Franz Stekuhn, and he could tell the future. he told a story and it sounded like this:
"...and then a man will rise from the people and come among us and he will give false witness. He will be as a king and create a mighty empire. Beware though of his teaching, as he is the Antichrist. And a great war will come and make the heavens red with fire in the East and in the West and in the South. And where the horses hoof beat sounded and man's foot once walked, rows and rows of graves will grow and the villages will be deserted and at the end of that time, at the end, the German People will gather under the Linden Tree, their number few and scattered"
He would end his prophecy with a whisper, his eyes round and dark and I always walked away with a shudder.
Mother had made a birthday crown from wild flowers and it was lying in a soup plate of water for me to put on later in the afternoon.
She spread a tablecloth on to a table on the meadow in front of the cottage, we had to shoo the ducks and geese and chickens, which constantly wanted to eat the delicious things mother had prepared. Frau Kramp, our neighbour, had also made some open sandwiches with homemade bread and Schinken from her own smoking chamber.
Kramps entire fowl population would not give us any peace, so Frau Kramp decided to feed them early that day behind the cottage and lock them up. A pair of storks moved closer to have a look, and majestically paced up and down on the meadow, every now and then stopping to swallow a frog. Mother fetched her Zeiss Box Camera and carefully took a photo.
During the afternoon a thunderstorm gathered. On the eastern Horizon heavy black-purple clouds and a strong gust of wind made us look up. The people here were still very superstitious and would not venture outside during a thunderstorm. The children from the village took one look at the sky and hastily ran across the field towards the village and home.
Thunderstorms had primeval powers that man would bow to. "God is angry." the people would say. the heavens turn black as it was at Golgotha. The steam that could be seen coming from the earth after the first drops fell, would be as the original fear man felt in the beginning of time. To sit near the window during thunderstorm would be sheer sacrilege. No fire on the stove, it was forbidden to touch iron or to watch the lightning. The thing to do was to go indoors and read the hymnbook with meek humility. To all of us evacuees who came here from Berlin, this sounded very strange. Often in our garden in Berlin we would listen to the thunder. Or when we were in our boat on the Wannsee, and too far out to get back in time, we would watch the lightning and get wet in the rain. But here we had to go along with the local people.
While we were gathered in our cottage, waiting for the summer storm to pass, Robert suddenly appeared.
"come quick, fire in farm. Lightning struck, lots of burning." He also knocked on the Kramps door, and every able person was rushing up the lane to the farm.
There we found the cowshed and a barn in flames. The horses were neighing and screaming. A man I had not seen before was leading the horses.
"This Nikita from Kasan, he new help and my friend" Robert said and then he grabbed me and chucked me onto the back of one of the horses and handed me a lot of lines and said:
"You take into field over there, not far. Close gate. Come back and help with bucket". When I got back, the line from the well to the fire had long gaps. I grabbed a bucket and put myself in line and passed the empty bucket one way and the full one the other. They were very heavy and I had to walk two steps to pass it on. Frau Kramp, very pregnant, had stayed at home with all her children and my two sisters, Bine and Tissi.
We saved the cowshed partly but not the barn and most of the winter hay was burnt.
" I wonder if the almighty Fuehrer can provide any hay for me". the farmer shouted. He was very red in his face.
That was the end of my birthday on July the first nineteen hundred and fourty-four. What would this new year bring for me? Would we all go home soon?
Mother receided a letter on the second of July from Tante Guste in Berlin. She wrote:
"The US Air Force has abroken the back of Berlin with a massive Air raid on the 21st of June. Berlin had died, she wrote, No water, no electricity, gas leaks everywhere and explosions out of the blue, unexploded bombs and fires that would not stop. Dead people under the ruins and no one to help dig them up. The smell was terrible. The entire city smelled of death. There were only women, a few children and old and sick people in Berlin. Our Onkel Kurt seemed to be the only doctor around. He was overworked and ill, and had no time to look after his health. Tanke Guste with her teenage daughters did what they could to help him look after the injured and sick, but it was more than they could cope with. On top of that, she wrote, there were thousands of refugees from Lithuania, Poland and the Ukraine now arriving in Berlin and nowhere to go. They had arrived only in time to be killed. And there is no food. There is no coal for cooking. There is nothing.
Mother kept wiping her eyes; she could not stop crying whilst reading Tante Guste's letter. Sobbing she asked:
What are we to do? What can I do?

The end of that month of July, all the evacuees from Berlin were herded to the station in Mehlsack on extremely short notice, and sent West by train, days later to arrive in Silesia, and then onto Bavaria. I never saw Robert again, and 5 Years later I learned that he had been shot dead by the Russian soldiers as they arrived in East Prussia, and buried with hundreds of other Russians POW's and villagers in the little wood outside the village where I had so often played.

Excerpt from my unpublished book "The Dark Edge of the Rainbow", a true account of events from my childhood during the war. In 1943, when I was 7 years old, my mother, my two sisters and I were evacuated from Berlin to East Prussia, which is Russia now, just West of Koenigsberg (Kaliningrad).

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.