大象传媒

The von Thadden family in Pomerania (part five)

By Barbara Fox-von Thadden.

鈥淧OWs were still hiding in the hay. The men had stayed behind from the group of Canadian, Serb and British prisoners.鈥�

鈥淥n Monday, the 5th of March 鈥� a date none of us will ever forget 鈥� we woke up to a terrific crash and thundering bangs, we assumed that the bridges across the River Rega had been blow up. Simultaneously all the lights went out. I was very frightened in my room, so we made up a my bed in my mother鈥檚 big bedroom and from then on I slept in my father鈥檚 bed.鈥�

鈥淚 went to see the men in the barn. They were Yugaslav officers and I sat down with them, my knees were shaking so much. I told them we were not Nazis and I begged them to speak up for us when the Russians came and that I was absolutely terrified. They promised to help. The Canadians emerged from the back and promised to help us too. I went to the estate office to see if I could find any more things to give away, there were still some overalls and wooden soled boots and some items of clothing we had been able to get for some coupons for the 鈥榝ree鈥� Frenchmen. The men were pleased, but I had not finished working out all the wages and now I did not know what to do with all the money I had collected from the bank in Greifenberg in the previous week. Herr Koel, who was the man with me in the office, said, 鈥楯ust leave it in the box, we shall soon have no use for it any more.鈥� He stood by the window, which overlooked the yard and said sadly:鈥檞hat a lovely country Hitler had taken over and what will be left of it?' A big heap of ruins!鈥� but I replied: 鈥� surely, everything here is still in order and alright?鈥� With the word 鈥榶ou just wait 鈥斺�� he left the room.鈥�

鈥淚n the early afternoon two desperately tired German soldiers came into the kitchen. They looked dishevelled, dirty and weary. They were trying to somehow 鈥榞et to the west鈥�. I was in the kitchen while they were eating and I asked them whether all the stories were true that we had heard about the Russians. They said that the Russians were after watches but otherwise they were just like any other soldiers. We felt a little reassured. The propaganda and all the official reports about the German retreat had been so awful that you just did not believe any of it, any more than you had believed all the propaganda that had been thrown at us during the last twelve years.鈥�

Russian invasion.

鈥淢y mother decided that she should meet the Russians on her own. Suddenly we heard machine gun fire quite close and we raced upstairs. Looking out of the small window, I saw Russian soldiers run round the house then go down on one knee, with spaces of two or three meters between them, holding their riffles ready. I could see soldiers, horses and wagons on the village street. Suddenly the door opened and a Russian soldier came in, his gun at the ready. Mamsell offered him her watch with shaking hands, but he smiled and waved it away. And said:鈥橩omm, Komm! to us. My first thought was 鈥� how clean he looks, how neat his uniform! He motioned us out of the room and down the stairs and through the hall to the open front door. As we went though the hall I noticed Havrilo, the oldest of our Ukrainian men, waving one of my father鈥檚 antique pistols about, they were displayed in a glass cabinet which now stood open. My mother stood on the front door steps with the Krienitz family and Adda; the poor dog shook and trembled all over. In front of us an officer on a horse and many soldiers on foot, and beside the steps stood our Ukranians. When we arrived, Maria (the young mother) was urgently speaking to the officer, as he was pointing his pistol to one after the other of us on the steps. I remember his questioning word: 鈥楥apitalist?鈥� as he aimed his pistol from one adult to the next in our group and Maria鈥檚 resolute 鈥楴yet! Nyet!鈥� In the middle of this interrogation Havrilo appeared, obviously worse for drink, shouting and stumbling, still waving the old pistol about. The officer turned from us to him and shot him dead with a single shot. Havrilo fell down at the feet of the horse. When the officer had pointed his pistol at the last of us, we had to stay on the steps while a few soldiers went into the house with my mother. After a while my mother, followed by the still trembling Adda and by the soldiers, came back to us. The officer then rode away, followed by the soldiers, whom in the meantime some more horsemen had joined. But they left some soldiers to guard the village. The horses, wagons and soldiers left, running, driving, galloping right across the fields, regardless of the new green growing seeds, in the general direction of Cardemin. We went back into the house. Suddenly all was quiet. My mother told me that she had to go all round the house with the soldiers holding a pistol to her back while she assured them over and over again that no German soldiers were hiding anywhere in the house. She then went to speak to Maria before the Ukrainians left to go back to their house. They carried Havrilo鈥檚 body back between them.鈥�

鈥淲hen it got dark 鈥� we no longer had electricity since that big bang in the morning 鈥� my mother came to me in a state of greatest upset and agitation: there had been two German soldiers in the house after all, they had hidden themselves under the cellar stairs which led from the backdoor to the basement. She shouted furiously at these two unfortunate soldiers, because not only had they put all of us who were in the house in peril, but the Russians would have blown up or burnt the entire village and they would not only have killed all of us, but everybody else in the village and them as well 鈥� she was beside herself with anguish. She told them to leave.鈥�

鈥淲e were quite sure that we owed our lives to the Ukrainians 鈥� we had not expected that!鈥�

鈥淭he Russian soldiers who had been left to guard the village had spent the first night at the house of the Ukrainians. The eight young couples and the older woman (the dead Havrilo had been her husband) had looked after the soldiers who celebrated their entry with the liberated Ukrainians. They had to let them have their young women to sleep with them in return. Then many soldiers arrived who started taking things. At first we were in the hall but when one soldier leered at Gertrud and beckoned her to come with him, and she left with him, crying loudly, my mother sent us upstairs and locked us in. Later, more officers arrived, and my mother managed to explain to one of them that she was English, that she had never been a Nazi, that my father was not in hiding somewhere, but had died in 1932, that she alone was in charge of the village etc. He wrote on a piece of paper that she was an 鈥楢lly鈥� and had to be protected. It worked for a few days, but the one looting soldier, whom she tried to stop, grabbed the paper and tore it to shreds. After that we hardly looked at what they took or damaged. The looting went on for weeks and months.鈥�

鈥淥ur hiding place was safe. The five of us hid and as it was very cold, my mother threw down pillows and eiderdowns and rugs and warm clothes so that we could sit down on the cement floor. She covered the trapdoor with a small bedside rug and when the soldiers came into the room she stood on the trap door so they would not hear the hollow sound. We had plenty to eat because on the quiet day we had rescued all sorts of preserves after the first Russian orgy and had brought them up here to safety. We spent three nights and days in the 鈥榁erliess鈥� (dungeon).鈥�

鈥淲e heard shooting. The Russians had brought 12 Germans soldiers into the house and had taken them out the next day and had shot them into the back of the neck. Some of our men were ordered to dig a large grave at the bottom of the park and they buried Irmchen Zeisler with the German soldiers. She was the only child of one of our families. She was running back home just at the moment when the Russians came, they called her to stop but she had tried to run on and they shot her dead. She was 16 years old.鈥�

鈥淪ix days after the Russians had come we went out for the first time. We went to the Sellin to bring back our belongings from the carts and wagons. There we met other people from the village and heard of their terrible experiences. In the first week every one of the girls and women had been raped, not just once but sometimes by whole gangs of soldiers and all in front of the children, old men, old women. Girls as young as thirteen, women as old as seventy, pregnant women 鈥� not a single female had been able to escape this fate. They had tried to hide, to hide each other, to run away; they had tried to make themselves look old with scarves and old clothes. The village was full of people from other villages whose houses had been burnt or who had been driven out or who had just fled from the looting. Often the soldiers had been drunk. Sometimes the Russians were unbelievably cruel, sometimes they were kind enough to leave some food, sometimes they looted first and then raped whoever they could find. The stories were so awful that I did not know how to cope with the terror of it all. Herr Koelle had been beaten to death on the first day. A friend, Kriewald, who had mostly worked in the forest, had also been beaten to death. He had tried to protect his wife and daughter. He was a big strong man.鈥�

Three times we went into the forest. When we came back at last, Ilse and Renate von Senfft were there, talking to my mother. They were our cousins from neighbouring Batzwitz. They had been hiding for eight days in their ready packed trek in their part of the Sellin. They too had been unable to get away in time. Their father, my father鈥檚 cousin, had been at home to receive the Russians and they had shot him dead immediately. The house was burnt to the ground. The girls had come to ask if they could come to us. Ilse and Renate stayed till September, then in the village and later walked to the West in December. I watched helplessly as soldiers carried away our dolls, laughing at me as they came past. Or they would come with their Russian, Ukranian or German lovers to collect clothes, sheets, bedding or whatever the women fancied. We hardly looked. One day when my mother, Mamsell, the maids and I were sitting eating in the bedroom around a table and on dining room chairs, soldiers came in, looked at us and grinned and said something about 鈥榗ultura!鈥� to each other. We were still eating off Meissen china and with silver knives and forks as we had always done. My mother always wanted us to be safe while she faced the Russians alone and mostly it worked. I cannot find words enough to describe her incredible courage throughout all these weeks and months.鈥�

鈥淎 company of dark haired, tall soldiers came and installed themselves in the village. We learned they were Caucasians and thought them very handsome. We had to change our time to Moscow time, which meant that the days started at 4am, and all the able-bodied people in the village were called to work. Our toys and belongings disappeared. Bedding covered in red ticking they slit open, scattered the feathers and kept the red material. They took my clothes from the wardrobe. They made fires in the park to cook or to warm themselves and they used books from the library for fuel. The thin paper of the old books they used for cigarette paper. I watched one soldier pull one shirt after another over his head; in the end he must have worn five or six shirts on top of each other. When we realised that some of the first editions of Goethe鈥檚 works had gone, we put the precious Rilke books into the safe.鈥�

We carried on working in the barns. They were practically empty because all the animals had either been killed and eaten or taken away alive. There was hardly a hen left in the village. Farm instruments and machinery, anything that could be moved was moved and taken away in lorries and on trailers, driven be Russian soldiers. We loaded the 100kg sacks or corn onto the lorries. That was heavy work. When every building was empty and clean, the horses arrived 鈥� hundreds of them. They filled all the buildings. Every day we had to lead them to the pond The Russians had contaminated all the pump water in the village and in the farmyard. They would stand by the pumps pump water into the cupped hands and wash their faces. Then it would run back into the well under the pump. The increasingly dirty water started an epidemic of diarrhoea followed later by typhoid fever that spread through the entire lands occupied by the Russians. When we left Vahnerow 13 months later, a quarter of the people in our village had died. This includes the soldiers who had been killed in the war and the women who did not survive the birth of the babies after the rapes, weakened as they were by illness and lack of food during the following months. If the baby survived 鈥� and not many did 鈥� it was not allowed to live. How were the young women supposed to meet their husbands when they returned from the war, if they had a 鈥楻ussian鈥� child on their arms? Many others fell victim to other illnesses.鈥�

鈥淭he treks of the villages of Witzmitz and Medewitz had been intercepted and the people of these two villages had been taken to our house by the Russians. They had to make do with the dining room and the music room and library, all 250 of them! They had to sleep on hay and straw. They stayed with us for a few weeks before they were allowed to go home.鈥�

鈥淥ne day the soldiers found my violin which I thought I had hidden safely under a bed. The commandant asked my mother very politely if she would allow me to play for them, he promised that I would come to no harm. Together with another girl who happened to be in the house, I went to Koell鈥檚 house. First we were given a tumbler of vodka which we had to drink in one go, followed immediately by a glass of water, followed by a piece of bread thickly spread with lard. Then I was handed my violin and asked to play. I found to my dismay that neither my fingers nor my bow would play properly, the soldiers thought that this was hilarious! But I was terribly embarrassed. The vodka had taken effect so quickly, I was seeing everything double. Remember, we had eaten so very little in the last three weeks! I had to rush out and into the kitchen where dear Frau Koelle helped me when I was violently sick. I then went back, and now the soldiers entertained us. We listened to their singing; they sang such beautiful folksongs in harmony and then some rousing songs, which were probably soldiers鈥� songs. After the singing we were allowed to go home unscathed. Although I had been sick the vodka proved to have been a good medicine as it cured my diarrhoea for a short while. But I have never wanted to drink the stuff again.鈥�

To follow in part six - Under the Russians.

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