大象传媒

The following story appears courtesy of and with thanks to Marushka (Maria) and Zygmunt Skarbek-Kruszewski and George (Jurek) Zygmunt Skarbek.

We were coming to the Algaue Alps, the regions situated at the foot of the Alpen hills. Gone were the arable fields. Now there were forests and meadows in which cows were grazing. This part of Germany was called 'the land of butter, milk and cheese'.
We were coming to the end of our travels. The train entered a deep valley covered by evening mists. The sun disappeared behind the hills, dusk covered the township, the church tower was clearly visible and also some tall houses. Rattling and panting, the train stopped at the station. It was the end of the line. There was a high embankment and a lantern. On the station wall the sign 'ISNY'.
We thought that we had arrived at the end of the world. That night we slept comfortably under eiderdowns in the 'Old Post' hotel.
What would we do now? Through the window we saw a church, rooftops of an unknown town and, on the street, strange people.
Taking our letter of introduction given to us in Kosewo by the German soldier, we went to deliver it to his father. Mr. Herman Gock was very pleased to receive a letter from his son. To our astonishment, he spoke Polish very well. Mr. Gock loved talking, using high-flown words. Proudly he told us that he was working 'in politics' in many organisations. Later, on knowing him better, we discovered that he was poor at writing but made up for it by his orations. By profession he was a roofer but was at that time working in a factory producing airplane parts.
I had trouble stemming the flow to get some information of interest to us. Firstly, the most important person in Isny was the 'Burgermeister' (Mayor). He registered the newcomers, he allocated rooms and work, also food coupons, and he could also lock them in prison. He was a Party member and the leader of this town.
There were many Poles and other foreigners in Isny. Everyone had to work, strictly supervised by industrial police. The work was firstly in the factory of Mr. Heim, producing parts for planes, secondly a large hospital-sanatorium for wounded soldiers, a silk factory, many cheese factories and, lastly, the farmers.
From the complicated explanation of Mr. Gock I gathered that without work you could not have any accommodation, without accommodation one could not receive food coupons and that without coupons one could not live in Germany. As we wanted to keep on living, we went to the Mayor's office.
The talk was short. We were given work for the right to buy food. After checking our documents, we were allocated to the plane factory of Air. Heim. Marushka looked very skinny and ill. It did not require much of my persuasion for the boss to agree to give her a rest for two weeks. He was probably sure that she was not a good physical worker. I was enrolled immediately.
I never knew that a labourer so low in the hierarchy of the German Reich had to fill in so many forms and sign so many declarations. Some of the questions went back three generations. First I had to sign a declaration that I was not a Jew and that none of my genealogical branches had produced any undesirable offspring during the last three generations. I had to enrol in the 'Workfront' and immediately pay some fees, also sign documents for employment offices, insurances, sick benefits, permits for accommodation and many more which I was unable even to memorise. After the last signature, my Lithuanian passport and four pictures were taken. I stopped being an individual and became a cog in the huge working force of the Third Reich. I was allocated to the production line at Ru-Helfer No. 350. Le 1590. In this way I became one of the fifteen million labourers who were employed in the production of tools for murder, direct or indirect. Day factory was No. 161.
In return I received from the Third Reich: -
1) the right to live;
2) the right to buy two saucepans;
3) coupons for food;
4) a room in the attic with two beds;
5) a small wrought-iron stove with one burner;
6) half a cubic metre of wood for all winter;
7) 75 pfennig per hour from which 30 per cent was deducted for social, war and Party dues;
8) additional ration cards for hard work: 400 grams bread, 200 gr. meat and 20 gr. fat 鈥� WEEKLY! and
9) the right to buy (when available) two cigarettes a day.
The room allocated to us was in the house of a widow, Mrs. Fleck, on the outskirts of the town. She was an old woman, with a wrinkled face and white hair. She lived with her invalid son and a daughter with two children whose husband was somewhere at the Front. Mrs. Trudel was constantly waiting for news from her husband. It was over a year since she had last seen him. Old Mrs. Fleck had eleven children and twenty-three grandchildren. There were seven grown-up sons and many sons-in-law. The Fuehrer took them all, dispersing them through Europe. Only God knew how many of them were still alive. Only the youngest one, as he was a war invalid, did the Fuehrer return. She used to complain bitterly that now when the Fuehrer could not use him any more he was returned to her. But the Fuehrer had not forgotten him and was paying 20 meagre marks monthly for his lost arm.
Our room was in the attic from which a door led to the garret. Two small windows overlooked the valley and small hills behind which the sun used to set. The attic contained two wooden beds with eiderdowns, a small robe and a table made of unpainted pinewood. Over the beds were a few pictures of chubby angels. This was to be our anchorage until the END of the war.
Isny was an ancient town in the Algauer Alps. Surrounded on all sides by hills, it was at the foot of the 'Black Grat', the highest hill in Wuerttenberg. This little town was surrounded by marshy meadows and it nestled along the old fortress walls. The roofs of the old houses nearly touched each other and the old bell tower of the church rose high above the houses and the old brick town gates. Narrow streets wound between monastery walls overgrown with moss. Cloistered galleries led to the dark arches of the town gates. Nearer, beside the lazy River Arg stood an old watermill, bent with age - nothing was ground here any more. The water rushed undisturbed through the skeletons of the old wheels. The mill remembered the oldest times. It was built in the ninth century by Count Vehringen who was then the possessor of this land. When later on the church became richer, it appropriated this land. The monastery was built in the village and church towers were the symbol of rule. Isny became a monastic town, paying service not so much to God as to the owners. One could still see the old dungeons where the blood flowed from those who did not obey 'the Will of God'. Three hundred years later Isny was proclaimed a free town, its coat of arms a black eagle in the middle of a horseshoe. The town had many happy and free years until it was incorporated into Wuerttenberg.
Instead of the lucky omen of a horseshoe, they now had the black swastika. They were paying their tribute to the Third Reich with cheese and fresh air for the wounded and the consumptive soldiers. They might have been forgotten if it were not for the factory for plane parts. The Minister for Armaments, Mr. Spei, was looking everywhere for new factories. The small factory that was previously producing packaging for its cheese now grew into a big plant. Many large workshops were built, new ramps for the railway and, lastly, slaves were imported from the captured European countries. The town became multi-lingual and the factory started to work. All roads led to Mr. Heim. Wilhelm Heim, a well-to-do local Isny man, was a Party member with influential friends. He received from the Wehrmacht the licence to build and run the factory for war necessities. In a very short time the once small producer of boxes for cheese became a very important man.
In Isny everyone knew who Mr. Heim was. The Mayor treated him as his master, trying to make him more comfortable during the Council meetings. Heim was the undisputed leader, being a Party member and chairman, of many organisations. It was even whispered that he had great friends in the Gestapo and sometimes saw the Gauleiter. Mrs. Heim also seemed to be very important. People in Isny would greet each other with a 'Gruess Gott' (Praise Be God) but they did not greet Mrs. Heim this way as it would have been tactless. She was greeted with 'Heil Hitler' - any other greeting could have been interpreted as being against Hitler. If she was kind enough to accept the greetings, the womenfolk felt happier as this would show that their men would not be sent to the Front at present but that they were indispensable to the war industry in the factory of Wilhelm Heim.
As I was to start work on Monday, we had time to buy the two saucepans as permitted by the Mayor, and to buy the wood.
I received only a quarter metre of wood which I carried home on my back. Now our housekeeping was complete. The cultural requirements were also shortly completed. We bought two pictures of Isny and, in a very underhand way certainly not suitable for a Pole, I talked the salesgirl into selling me a large map of Europe as at German's highest power. Marushka was fixing the pictures over the beds as I spread out the map, marking Isny with a pin and considered its position to the rest of the world. Like the egocentric German philosopher, Nichte - "I and not I,鈥� the rest was of no great importance. Geographically, Isny was 32 km from the Swiss border. Hearing the name Switzerland, all homeless war wanderers felt a pleasant and warm sensation. This neutral land, my God - if only one could be there. To the Austrian border it was 30 km and to the Italian one 80 km. As regards the distances to the Front, we measured the map carefully and arrived at the following distances; the western Front was 350 km away, the eastern about 1,000 and the southern further than 1,000. We were not on any war highway. Even from Burgundy, that was historically in the road of moving armies, we were protected by a sharp corner of Switzerland, the Boden See and from the south by the mighty Alps.
I was really happy, being quite certain that no fighting would reach this little corner. It was Sunday, the fifth of November, 1944.
Next morning I had to leave at 4:30 am, and go to work. It was still dark. In the streets were sleepy and tired people, all going to work for Heim. The factory was outside the town under the 'Black Grat'. By the end of the town there was one big procession of Heim's slaves taking lanes through the meadows and along the railway line. People were walking singly or in groups, all mostly quiet. Some were making loud noises stamping in their wooden shoes. It was getting lighter when we reached the factory. At the right side were the long, low workshops, to the left were the stores and barracks for the 'Russkis'. We passed the gate in a single file, calling out our numbers to the watchman sitting in his guard hut. I, being new, was told to wait. Soon the boss, dressed in grey overalls, came and told me to follow him. The noise in the workshop was deafening. Hammers hitting tin sheets, the screeching of files, whining of drills, some explosions, hissing, wheezing and roaring, all joined into one sound, drilling the eardrums, causing pain. We walked along various workbenches where people were standing or sitting on the stools. Above some were large signs: "Mark only in soft pencils on dur-aluminium". We entered the next hall. On all sides of the hall were lying wings of planes. They were kept in position on the workbenches by a kind of vice. Many men were working around them with some unknown instruments. On some benches sparks from welding flew, from others came a sound like a revolver shooting into a tin plate. I did not understand anything that they were doing here. I was still stunned by the previous noise. Automatically I followed the boss. The men were glancing at me curiously. At the end of the hall the boss stopped at a bench.
"You will work here,鈥� he told me and added, pointing to a men standing at the bench - "he will show you what to do. It is not permitted to leave the workbench,鈥� and then he left.
The man looked at me searchingly and I at him. He was a young man of about twenty dressed in dirty overalls. He was working alone at the workbench. He asked me something but I did not understand. He repeated it louder. I thought he was speaking in German but was not certain. Slowly, screaming into each other's ears, we understood each other. He was from Holland. No wonder I could not understand him. It is always very hard to understand a Dutchman when he is speaking German as the languages, although related, have quite different pronunciations. A year and a half ago he was taken from Utrecht and deported for work to Heim. His name was Jan Vaal.
Our talk was interrupted by the approaching boss. When the Dutchman saw him coming he pushed a pneumatic drill attached to a long hose into my hand and told me to drill holes in the marked places of the aluminium sheets. After pressing a button, drilling started with a loud wheezing sound, throwing out small aluminium chips of metal. This was my work in the beginning. Standing on a high bench, I was drilling small holes on the four metre long wings. Hours were passing, my head and ears were buzzing. At last the siren sounded for a meal break. All the noise stopped immediately but I could still hear the echo in my head. I had already forgotten that such quiet could exist. Before I realised what was happening, the hall emptied and I caught up with the last labourers going upstairs where the mess room was located. Everyone took their place at the table, taking from their pockets a spoon and a piece of bread. The girls were bringing plates with soup. A watery, thin soup and a few frozen potatoes was our dinner. The conversation was multi-lingual. One table was occupied by French war prisoners dressed in torn military coats. At the next table were Dutchmen. Germans were sitting separately at a table in the far corner. From one of the tables I heard Polish. Around the table sat a few young girls, a few youths and an older labourer. I came closer. They greeted me in a friendly manner, making a place at their table. Lunchtime was forty minutes. Again the siren. We washed our spoons and plates with hot water and started to go slowly back to work. The foremen were speeding us up. Compressors were connected, the air hissed noisily, all the sounds came back and the hall was once again full of noise. The boss was sitting behind a glass partition between the two rooms, watching constantly. On the walls were the familiar pictures of a civilian in a large-brimmed hat trying to overhear something, beside him a large yellow question mark.

颁辞苍迟颈苍耻别诲鈥︹赌�
'This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by 大象传媒 Radio Merseyside鈥檚 People鈥檚 War team on behalf of the author and has been added to the site with his / her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.'

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