Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). On May 8 and 9, 1945, the German Wehrmacht surrendered unconditionally; Germany was occupied and divided into four occupation zones; Silesia, East Prussia, and parts of Pomerania and Brandenburg were placed under Polish administration. For millions of people who had survived, this meant expulsion, hunger, and hardship. When I look back to the time around 1945, my memories can be summed up in a line from a poem by Heinrich Heine: “When I think of Silesia at night, I am robbed of sleep.”
Born during World War II, I grew up in Gleiwitz—now called Gliwice and located in Poland—until our expulsion in October 1945. Even as a four-year-old child, I intuitively sensed that life is finite, and so is my own. As a teenager, I then realized that I had to plan my future if I did not want to wither away in the confines of my new surroundings at the time.
My earliest memories begin in fragments in the fall of 1944. Every time I hear sirens today, a chill runs down my spine. In my memory, plaster crumbles from the cellar ceiling, cracks appear, the walls tremble, and the floor buckles beneath my feet. The fear of the adults. My mother is crying, my grandmother is praying. A bomb has struck the rear building. My grandfather is drafted into the Volkssturm, the last reserve force. The front was drawing ever closer.
On the night of January 24, 1945, the Russians arrived. The rumble of the front had grown ever more intense. We were sitting in the cellar. The lower windows were nailed shut, the doors barricaded, and the courtyard gate locked with a thick chain and a padlock. Artillery fire, the clatter of tank tracks, whipping gunshots—sometimes the ground vibrated. The lock on the courtyard gate was shot open; in the side house and the rear house, women screamed as they were raped in front of their children. But we were lucky; the front doors withstood the butts of the rifles.
The next day, the looting began. Soldiers broke into our house and took everything they liked. Household goods, clothing, and the contents of cupboards and drawers lay on the floor; our piano was smashed to pieces in the courtyard while they tried to lower it out the window. We were supposed to be shot because my mother had hidden her jewelry and refused to reveal the hiding place. Two soldiers dragged her and my aunt around, but my grandmother, who spoke Polish and a little Russian, managed to avert the danger at the last second. This went on for days; the war had come to us. I didn’t understand any of it.
A few days later, there was a knock at the door: Russian military police and a commissioner in civilian clothes. Someone had denounced my grandfather, who had been in the NSDAP. He was “taken away”—that’s what they called it. “You’d better put on a coat,” the commissioner advised him, even though the weather was mild and the sun was shining. The women were crying, and my grandfather walked away with the men who had flanked him. I can still see it as if it were today. We never heard from him again.
In April 1945, a Polish administration was established in Gleiwitz, and looting took place again for days on end.
This time, men wearing red-and-white armbands broke in, waving pistols around and taking whatever the Russians had left behind. My mother had to report for work at six in the morning: in the factories where dismantling was taking place, on road construction sites, at the rail yard. In the evenings, drunken men chased the women. That’s how the days and weeks passed. We had hardly anything to eat, even though my grandmother tried to trade everything we had left on the black market for food.
At the end of August, word finally came that everyone who did not opt for Poland had to leave the occupied territories by October 1. We were allowed to take twenty kilos of luggage with us, according to the notices posted. My mother did not want to become Polish, so we had to leave and abandon everything we owned.
In early October, we went to the train station—my mother with me and my grandparents from Beuthen, whose apartment had been occupied by a Polish couple. My grandmother from Gleiwitz wanted to stay behind to wait for my grandfather; she was still hoping for his return, even though a neighbor had reported that he had been beaten to death. The train was completely overcrowded, but if we didn’t want to be taken to a camp, we had to leave Gleiwitz. There were horrific reports about these camps, which had been set up in places like Lamsdorf, Zgoda, Myslowitz, and Jaworzno.
We managed to find just enough space on the roof of the train, which initially took us to Forst an der Neiße. It was a terrible journey. Whenever we approached bridges or tunnels, we had to lie flat. I was freezing the whole time and afraid of falling off the sloping roof. On the way, the train suddenly stopped in the middle of nowhere; men with pistols and knives climbed aboard. They beat the people, ripped open suitcases and bags, stole all valuables, and threw anyone who resisted off the train.
When my grandfather didn’t hand over his gold pocket watch quickly enough, a teenager stabbed him with a knife. My grandfather, who had lost a lot of blood, was treated by the Red Cross at the next station, which saved his life. Via Forst, located just beyond the already heavily guarded Oder-Neisse border, we finally continued westward after a week-long stay in the Uckermark.
Helmstedt was the name of the first town beyond the so-called demarcation line (between the Russian and British zones), where we were housed in makeshift quarters in a collection camp. After the hardships of the past few days, I caught a severe cold; the camp doctor suspected whooping cough. As a result, we received permission to travel on to East Frisia to join my father. He was in a military hospital there after suffering a serious wound, and my mother had tracked him down through the tracing service that had since been set up.
I still remember exactly spending the night in a bugged bunker in Braunschweig, the truck ride to Hanover, and the terribly cold train stations in Bremen and Oldenburg. There we caught a train to the coast. On January 12, 1946, we finally reached Wittmund—half-starved—around nine o’clock in the evening. It was a small town in East Frisia, back then at the edge of the world.
The town, which had perhaps 4,000 residents, plus about 2,000 refugees and displaced persons, lay on a geest ridge at the edge of the marsh; it was only ten kilometers to the North Sea coast. In 1933, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and the German National People’s Party had together received 85.6 percent of the vote. The region, which was economically and culturally underdeveloped at the time, had to take in thousands of homeless people, which naturally came at the expense of the local population, who did not hold back their displeasure.
The atmosphere was hostile; we were intruders, troublemakers, and to many locals, “Poles” and “backpacker riffraff.” When my mother asked a farmer for windfall apples in the fall of 1946—the garden was full of them—we were chased off the farm with a pitchfork. The following winter was very cold; we had barely enough to eat or heat our home.
At first, the housing office gave us two attic rooms in a single-family home; later, we moved to the refugee camp on the outskirts of town, where we stayed for ten years until our situation gradually improved. I left the city where I grew up for good in 1966, after earning my high school diploma through adult education, to study at the University of Göttingen. Looking back, the war really only ended for me then. But the feeling of homelessness has remained to this day.
When I hear and see some of the leading politicians and journalists today, or read their statements, it makes my hair stand on end. They say Germany must rearm and become “war-ready” again, and that the population must make sacrifices as a result. It turns my stomach. It’s good that more and more people are realizing they are being lied to and deceived.
