Lest We Forget: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Grafeneck (Satis Shroff)
It does me good to witness that a Culture of Remembering has sprouted in Germany, France, Switzerland and Austria where the respective museums are doing a great job informing visitors about the World Wars, how people lived and suffered in those terrible days. Young school children are obliged to visit concentration camps, write essays and discuss about these themes. Not a single Abitur class (GCE 'A' level) finishes its final exams without having visited a concentration camp, and discussed about the problems and misery created by the World War I and II, and the National Socialists.
Nevertheless, it is scary to feel the fear and anxiety expressed by Hans Sahl (1902-1993) when he wrote:
'More than the onerous task of surviving, my mind is engaged with the thoughts, what'd going to happen to this world that has experienced such things, what will happen to the children who know of the holocaust through hearing, and as a result are predestined to make the same mistake. Was it all in vain?'
It was a shame and disgrace how the Nazis treated the citizens who were Jews, using repressals, passing antisemetic and racist laws, rules and acts of terrror from the beginning. The nazis wanted to ruin the economy of the Jews systematically, leave them no choice but to emigrate and flee. The boycott of Jewish shops, cliniques and factories were organised in April 1, 1933. They removed the Jewish civil servants from the state-run universities and administration centres. They passed hundreds of rules, regulations and bans against the Jews in daily life. Even the German citizenships of Jews were cancelled and they were declared persona non grata by the Numemberg Laws of 1935, and introduced racial separation (like Aparthied later in South Africa) in schools in 1936. All Jewish undertakings and enterprises were Aryanised by force in 1938 and professionals like solicitors, medical doctors and all people of Jewish descent who had their own business in commerce and trade were not allowed to work anymore since 1939.
The Nazis arrested all Jewish people. Those who thought of a change of heart on the part of the National Socialists were sadly mistaken, and these people were herded and brought out of Germany in a secretly carried out Wagner-Bürckel-Action and interned under inhuman conditions in Gurs, the concentration Lager Riversalted, Noe, St. Cyprien, Recebedou and Les Milles in Southern France. Only a few of the interned people could flee.
As for the 6,504 deported, the Camp Gurs was just a stop inbetween. Many died in the first winter. Most of them were brought by force to the death-camps in Eastern Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia) in the summer of 1942. One a few managed to escape. A number of children were saved by help-organisations, and thus can serve as elderly time-witnesses today.
* * *
The 27th of January 1945 is an important day in the annals of German history, for it was the day when the Jewish, disabled and Roma gypsies of the German society were freed from the concentration camp of Auschwitz.
This memorable day has been celebrated since then every year. This year the historian Pavel Polian was invited to hold a talk at the Emperor’s Hall (Kaisersaal) of the Historical Kaufhaus at the Münsterplatz in Freiburg. Polian is a member of the Jewish community in Freiburg and talked about the fate of the Jews during the World War II. He commented on a film interview with Andreas Meckel.
It might be mentioned that the 9th of November is also a memorial day to think about the victims of the Reichsprogrom night in the year 1938. At the memorial in the former Synagogue it has become a tradition for the Cultural Mayor to give a speech, along with members of the evangelical community, a rabbi and a cantor.
Last year Professor Heinrich Schwendemann spoke on the theme ‘Das Jahr 1938: Radikalisierung der national-sozialistischen Judenverfolgung.’ At the Albert Ludwig’s university of Freiburg Professor Miriam Schambeck spoke about ‚Auschwitz can’t be thought about, Auschwitz has to be remembered: Challenges and Principles of Holocaust Education in the religion-pedagogic context.’
November 9, 1938 marked the change from latent anti-Semitism to open aggression on the Jews in Germany. For many towns and communities this day is remembered as the dark side of German history. The assassination of the German Sceretary Ernst von Rath in the Parisian Embassy by the Polish Jew Herschel Grünspan was used by the then Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, as an excuse to carry out a Reich Progrome throughout the country. In the wee morning hours of November 10, 1938 the synagogue in Freiburg was set on fire and many Jewish shops were demolished by the SS and SA-men.
An interesting lecture was given by the social scientist Heiko Wegmann on the little-known SS-standard leader Walter Gunst (1900-1943) who master-minded and ran the Progrom in Freiburg. He was a leading personality of the NS-aggression in Freiburg. Mr. Wegmann made an important local contribution towards research on one of the perpetrators of the Third Reich. In his lecture he sketched the organisation of the south-badische SS, the military and antisemetic propaganda work, and the cooperation with other NS-organisations. Walter Gunst was one of the many persons who misused their positions to make themselves rich. Gunst was very fond of alcohol and rather corrupt, and as a result attempts were made to remove him from his job. Although he was a Nazi he fell in love with a Polish woman, and when his superiors got wind of it, he was degraded and sent to the warfront and was declared as missing since 1943. (Walter Gunst, Führer der Standarte Schwarzwald, brauner Bonze und Synagogen-Brandstifter).
In this connexion, the psychiatric clinique of the Freiburger University under its first director Alfred Hoche played a nefarious role, for it was Hoche who published in 1920, together with the lawyer Karl Binding, a book with the title ‘Die Freigabe der Vernichtung unwerten Lebens,’ a book about worthless lives that were given free to be exterminated. It is in this work that definitions and words were coined and constructed which were later implemented by the Nazis to justify the mass-murders of physically and mentally handicapped and disabled people by using Zyklon B to gas them.
The Stuttgarter House of History drew 150 000 visitors and this year’s theme is ‘Zwangsarbeit,’ that is, forced labour in the National Socialist times. The visitors are given the opportunity to try out dried bread similar to those days baked according to a World War I recipe, and the visitors are expected to use their sensory organs to discover how the people live lived in the south-west during the World War I. There’s even a reconstructed hut where the sentenced convicts lived and visitors are expected to try these out to have an idea of being a prisoner in the Nazi times in an outdoor museum in Wackershofen in Schwäbish Hall. There’s also an exhibition for the visitors.
A baroque castle in Swabian Alb was the first gas-chamber for the industrially organised mass-murders of the nazis. The fact that 10 654 people were murdered by the nazis was well known among the people of Baden-Württemberg. This heinous act went under the the name of euthanasia. When it comes to mass-murders you automatically think of Auschwitz and Treblinka, but certainly not Grafeneck. But that’s exactly where such crimes were committed. The families of the victims didn’t talk about due to shame or angst. For the grandchildren this taboo theme is interesting, as the children have history in their curriculums, and are well informed about the dark side of the Third Reich, which is indeed a good thing. A good many books written by the current generation have been published along the lines of ‘Grandpa, what did you do during the last World War? German school classes visit the former concentration camps and are speechless, cry and later discuss about Auschwitz, Gurs and Treblinka. The current generation is also well travelled and are well-informed, thanks to the mobile and iPads and what-have-yous.
Recently, a friend of mine said he’d discovered that his oh-so-good family-friendly Dad was a Nazi officer. He found it hard to swallow but he knows a lot about his dead father now that the taboo has been broken. I encouraged him to keep at it till he knew everything to find, what we call in German, his Seelenfrieden. Peace of the soul.
* * *
War Poems:
THE GURKHA NEVER ASKS WHY (Satis Shroff)
A lifeless body is cremated,
His sins and folley,
Bravery and loyalty,
Licked and devoured by the flames
Of Agni.
Only the thoughts remain,
Of a man who did his duty,
Never questioning why.
He did it for the Queen of England,
The small, sturdy Gurkha.
But when he became ill and old,
The NHS refused to pay the bill
For his medical treatment.
Hischildren weren't sent
To English schools.
The Brits would rather let
The Gurkha and his kind,
Go to Nepal,
To lick his wounds.
His English friends never rallied
Around him.
They kept to themselves,
And let the stoic, brave Gurkha,
Die in the foothills
Of the Himalayas.
His was not the praiseworthy laughter,
Friendships, gentlemanliness
Of the English world.
The dying Gurkha never saw your tears,
The praise that you bestowed upon him
Became a curse.
Many a Gurkha fought
For your English honour,
Pride and greed;
Died with his blood-soaked khukri
For evermore.
Did you care, the MoD,
The oh-so-proud officers?
Nevermore. Nevermore.
* * *
LE GRANDE GUERRE (Satis Shroff)
Man versus monstrous machines,
Scared humans with panic stricken eyes,
Against the angry growls of guns,
The wailing shells that rained death,
In the trenches of Verdun, Gallipoli,
Flander's Boesinghe.
The West and East Front.
Puny soldiers pitted against beastly machines,
Infernal to the core,
Manufactured to slaughter
Enemies with two legs,
On both sides.
After forty years of peaceful coexistence,
Hatred, greed, envy, political cuningness
Began to spread in Europe,
Like the plague,
Or aids and MRSA today.
The Germans, French, Russians,
Austrians, Hungarians, British
Began slaughtering each other.
Was it a war of colonial powers,
Of whites against whites in their own homes?
Far from it.
Logistics, armaments and cannon-fodder
From even the former colonies,
Were not spared.
In the bloodiest of battles
That began in the summer of 1914,
The soldiers lost everything,
Even their precious minds,
In a krieg of man against technology.
Humans were herded like cattle to the slaughterhouse.
The larks hid themselves and ceased to sing,
In the thunderous din of the shells
That shook the heavens.
The charge of the light brigade
Was abruptly stopped by well-placed barbed-wire.
People in uniform perished
In a hail of bullets from machine guns.
White bones only prevailed.
'Schnellfeuer!' was the order of the day.
Load, aim, fire!
The systematic killing of heroes began
In a hell of shells.
A yellowish-green mist arose,
Made in the lab by chemist Fritz Haber,
Mingled with the air.
Soldiers started coughing, bodies shook,
Big horses neighed and trembled,
The riders and their steeds faltered.
Chemical war waged on April 22, 1915,
Near Ypern – the Belgian Front.
150 tons of chlorine emptied in the trenches,
Panic broke among the French troops.
1200 soldiers of Franch died,
Another 3000 were injured,
Without firing a single shot.
The gas war had begun,
And mustard gas was deployed
The British Tommies died in pain.
80,000 soldiers were killed in the gas war.
More than a million were injured.
Tears of happiness flowed
Over Fritz Haber's cheeks,
And he received soon a promotion
For his deed.
'Im Frieden der Menschheit,
im Krieg dem Vaterland'
Was his motto.
Haber and Bosch discovered
The ammoniac synthesis,
Useful as fertilizers.
The Allies wanted to bring him to court,
But the Swedes awarded Fritz the Nobel Prize.
After the Great War was over,
Fritz Haber created Zyklon B,
The dreaded gas of concentrations camps.
The Nazis forced him
To give up his job at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
He went to England,
Died eight months later,
For he'd been declared a Jew.
* * *
CROSSES AND POPPIES (Satis Shroff)
Remember the dead
And place a scarlet poppy
Between the hundreds of white crosses
In Flanders,
Or elsewhere.
The sun has set for the men
Who fought,
Died on duty
For their fatherlands,
Or for the wily politicians,
In the home front.
The dead were obliged to take up quarrels
Instigated by politicians and powers that be,
Wh used fiery speeches,
To mobilise the masses.
To fight the enemy
With aeroplanes, tanks and infernal gas.
The tempo of combat became fast,
Put pressure on the mind and body.
Enlisted, mobilised soldiers were caught
Unprepared and surprised.
Isn't history full of goodwill and good intentions?
Even tyrants and dictators believe,
And still do,
They're improving the world.
Galvanizing and mesmerising people
With their charisma,
The way Hitler, Stalin, Lenin have done,
The fury of World War I went on
For four years and three months.
It left 2,7 million dead Germans,
More than 1,8 million Russians.
1,9 million French dead,
1,8 million Austrians and Hungarians,
And 1 million from the British Isles.
What had ended for the dead?
This wonderful world,
With its friendships, smiles given, favours done,
The culinary flavours, mirth, glorious sunsets,
The twitters and chirps of birds at dawn,
Music and dewdrops,
An unforgettable lover's kiss.
The seasonal changes, children laughing at play,
The whims of women,
The pride of men,
The useful technology of man,
Philosophy and literature.
All these came to an end,
For the 15 million humans died.
2 million Germans died near Villiers.
August Stramm (1874-1915) wrote in his 'Tropfblut:'
Sturmangriff
Aus allen Winkeln gellen
Fürchte wollen
Kreischen
Peitsch
Das Leben
Vor sich
Her
Den Keuchen Tod
Die Himmel fetzen
Blinde schlächter wildum das Entsetzen.
Erich Maria Remarque scribed:
Ruhr, Grippe, Typhus –
Würgen, Verbrennen, Tod.
Graben, Lazarett, Massengrab
– mehr Möglichkeiten gibt es nicht.
In the autumn of 1917 a fourth of the British
Drowned, wounded and helpless in swamps.
Half of the ther twelve million soldiers
Of the Zar of Russia were wounded or died.
There was a dearth of medication.
The only solace was the Orthodox priest,
Who blessed them all.
* * *
GURKHAS GO TO THE GREAT WAR (Satis Shroff)
Gurkha soldiers on leave in the hills of Nepal
Were summoned to their batallions.
Colonial British based in India
Pledged to do their bit.
The Gurkhas left India on the SS Barpeta,
In November 1914.
British ladies gave them tea, dried fruits,
Chillies and cigarettes.
The officers were given books.
The 1/4th Gurkhas chugged in the SS Baroda,
Destination: Suez Canal on August 24,1914.
To the Hindu Gurkhas the sea was 'kala pani,'
Black Water.
It was a sacrilege to cross the sea.
A Hindu Gurkha would risk his caste,
Unless a Vedic ritual was performed ,
A ceremony with the name pani patiya.
If a Hindu returned from overseas,
A Brahmin priest was summoned
And this special dispensation performed.
The Nepalese Maharaja
Sir Chandra Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana
Appealed to the Raj Guru (high priest)
To give his approval to cross the Black Water.
The Gurkhas became seasick.
'Where did the water come from?
Where did it go?' asked the hillmen.
The ship left a trail behind,
Where were the tracks up front?
Steam ship? Never heard of such a thing.
The Gurkhas were simple, sturdy, loyal sons,
Knew no geography, leave alone history.
School was out of question.
They were outdoor men and loved a good fight.
What was the cause of the war?
They couldn't read English newspapers,
Couldn't talk with people other than Gurkhas.
They lived in splendid isolation.
The king was the absolute monarch of Nepal,
Even though he'd usurped the throne.
Democracy was a foreign word.
Gurkhas fought for the honour of their army units,
After the motto:
'It is better to die than nto be a coward.'
They fought for their comrade-in-arms,
For pay and pension.
And the excitement of combat,
Whipped up by their officers.
Nepal not only gave its best men to the world,
But also a million rupees to the colonial British.
The Maharaja presented thirty-one machine guns
On King George's birthday in 1915.
On October 29,1914 the first Gurkhas entered the trenches near Festubert.
The war was grim,
The terrain was wet, cold, damp,
And hunger prevailed in the trenches.
The 2/8th Gurkhas were greeted
By heavy German shelling.
After a splendid dash the Gurkhas beat them back,
But thirty seven were killed,
Sixty were wounded.
A hundred were missing,
Blown to bits and pieces by shells.
Nepal's hillmen had to brave the German artillery,
Bitter stormy wind in northern France and Belgium.
The straw-filled sandbags over the boots,
Whale oil for feet massage,
Were of no help against frost bite.
Gurkhas and officers were shot dead,
While cutting barbwire in the Front.
4000 Indian Corps soldiers were wounded
In ten days.
Heavy rains flooded the trenches and ground
Around Neuve Chapelle.
Among the 529 Gurkhas,
147 fell.
Where was the glory?
Angst, bloodshed, frozen toes,
Biting pain subdued the thoughts
Of the ones he's loved and left in the Himalayas.
Duty and war demanded sacrifice.
Breathing poisonous air,
Emitted by the enemy,
A whiff and your eyes burn,
Yellow blisters develop on your skin.
Mustard gas was fifty times worse
Than chlorine.
Not even the gas mask could save you.
It went through and through.
Richard Aldington (1892-1962) wrote aptly:
'The battle was as a rule so impersonal
That it was like a nature catastrophe,
A clash of the elements.
It was a war of shells,
Murderous explosives that made a lose
Your senses,
And not a fight man against man.'
* * *
HOPE HEALS (Satis Shroff)
Unto you that fear my name
Shall the sun of righteousness
Arise with healing in his wings
(Malachi)
Bridges of peace, friendship and togetherness
Are built on mutual respect,
Tolerance and Miteinander.
We must talk about the symbols
Of tyranny in your villages, towns and cities.
On Memorial Day we gather with earnest faces,
To honour and remember the people
Whose names are engraved on stones,
Who died in the two World Wars.
The suns and husbands have fallen,
But a new ghost raises its ugly head again,
The Neonazis who work for
The Bundesnachrichtendienst.,
Who receive money for their incompetence,
In Thuringen, Saxony,
Hessen and Lower Saxony.
The lesson of faschism taught us
Never to combine
The police with the secret service,
For it would be akin to the Gestapo,
The Geheimen Staatspolizei.
The sixteen secret services in Germany
Cannot coordinate and cooperate.
Since thirteen years have we given
Neonazis a free hand,
Who robbed banks,
Executed Turkish and Greek migrants.
The constitution makes it possible:
‘Germany for the Germany,
All aliens out!’
Long live the Freedom of Speech.
But prithee, where is the protection
Of the migrants and underdogs
Of the society?
Is a new holocaust in the offing?
Yet there is no way
But the path of peace and togetherness.
The ewig gestrigen and the neos
Are still licking the wounds of war,
Wounds that won’t heal,
For they are infected with hate anew,
With brown-propaganda.
War has always been ugly and brutal.
The widows of the on-going krieg in the Hindukush,
The survivors who don’t understand their own world,
After the trauma of Vietnam, Irak, Afghanistan.
When the NATO sirens are tested,
The air vibrates with a monstrous noise.
Fear makes the olde soldier’s heart beats faster,
His pulse races and he almost chokes.
The memories and the fury of war overwhelm him.
Who will restore the faces we’ve adored?
Love, faith, togetherness and peace
Haven’t been lulled to sleep.
We still hear the clarion call
To the dangers of war,
To the hoarse shouts
Of the Neos in the street,
Who strut and fret,
And believe Auschwitz was a lie.
A silence treads like clouds shadows,
Among the people of Germany.
Hope hasn’t abandoned us yet,
Despite the petite victories of the rightists,
In Germany, Switzerland and Austria.
The people in these lands
Think otherwise.
In every good person there is a bad part,
In every bad person there’s a good trait,
Like ying and yang.
We can only appeal to humans,
Hope and pray for peace,
And the old wounds to heal,
Between humans in this world.
* * *
UPROOTED & BANISHED (Satis Shroff)
A Banat Swabian poetess
Was born in 1953
In a hamlet called Nitzkydorf,
Which lies in Romania.
She came to Berlin in 1987.
Wrote verses to mete out justice
To the fate of German Romanians,
Who were departed to work camps.
The other way round.
Jews died in concentration camps,
80,000 ethnic Germans from Romania,
Uprooted and banished,
Suffered hunger and death
In the Ukranian camps.
Survival strategies and dreams
At the end of the Second World War.
If Bertold Brecht’s Furcht und Elend
Im Dritten Reich
Told us about the Nazi terror,
Hertha’s verses and prose reveal
The sadness and angst of her lost people.
In a small hamlet in Banat,
Small Herta tells us
In her hard, Banat-German accent,
How hostile her home environment was.
She speaks of her doubts and fears,
For it is plain to see:
She’s made of another genetic material
That made her vulnerable to her environs,
Like underdogs everywhere in this world.
How unbearable for Romanians,
The Banat-Germans had their own
Culture, tradition
And way of life.
But pray, don’t ethnic Germans say
The same things about migrants
Eking out a living here?
Hertha speaks a poetic language
Of a gone but not lost past,
Of the misery, angst and terror
Felt by her people.
Her books emphasise
The cruel, inhuman face of communism,
Under Nicolae Ceausescu.
A chronist walking
Along the thin line,
Between poetry and terror,
Where every line is a cry
Against injustice
With pregnant titles:
The Fox Was even Then a Hunter (1992),
Herztier (1994),
In the Hair-knots Lives a Lady,
The King (Ceausescu) Bows and Kills (2000)
The Pale Gentleman and the Mocca Cups (2005).
Herta said:
‘My innermost desire is to write
I can live with it.’
Her literary style is precise,
Laconic and matter-of-fact.
Despite her publications,
Ms. Müller was a nobody.
Without her notes on Oskar Pastiors
She couldn’t have penned ‘Atemschaukel.’
It became more than a swing of breath.
She was shadowed, interrogated and persecuted.
Günter Grass said:
‘I’m very satisfied with the Literature Prize
For Herta from Stockholm.’
Karasek quipped:
‘My mantra is always for Philip Roth,’
And sounded like: ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy.’
Germany’s literary pope
Marcel Reich-Ranicki:
‘I plead for Roth and wish to say
No more.’
Literary critics form the USA commented:
‘We suggest Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon,
Joyce Carol Oates
Or Bob Dylan.’
The Swedish Academy gave the prize
For the fourteenth time
To Germany.
Poor Romania
* * *
Rübenzahl: Schlesian fairytale figure
Schlesien, My Forgotten Heimat (Satis Shroff)
Blue hills; green valleys
In the middle a small house,
So wonderful this piece of earth,
That´s where I´m at home.
This old Heimat song from Schlesien was painted and hung on the stairs of Frau Ana Podolski in Kappel by her dear husband when I visited her. We´d had a chat outside her house where her late husband had done a mural on the side wall of the house. When you drive or walk to Kappel you can´t miss it: a big painting depicting a giant called the Rübenzahl, holding a carrot and near his feet is an old Schlesien town with its church. In the distance you can discern the Schneekoppe, which is a 1603m high mountain.
Ana said, ´It is a German mountain with alpine character. Below the peak you can see a Wetterwarte, a small building to forcast the weather.´
Frau Ana Podolski was born in Hiddensee, Agnetendorf, and has gone through her share of separation from her old home during the war years, and has now found a place she call home in Kappel. But the longing (sehnsucht) remains. Rübezahl is a giant from the Riesengebirge, a mountain spirit, and is the name of a person and place since the 13th century. It might be noted that there are 13 Rübezahl stories in the Daemonologia Rubenlii Silesii published in 1622 by Johannes Praetorius in 1662. Rübenzagel is the name used in Schlesien like the words: zahl, zoal, zeul even today.
Ana said, ´In Norway they have a spirit called the Troll and in Schlesien we had our Rübezahl, who is not only a Berggeist but also a magic word. The spirit helps the poor.´ Her home is filled with memories of Schlesien. I asked Ana to tell me something about her late husband because he seemed to be omnipresent in the house. He´d constructed and painted a lot of beautiful and useful things which were on display.
She smiled and said, ´My husband was a painter but he also indulged in artistry. He could repair a lot of things. We had leave Schlesien in 1945 because Germany had lost the war that began in 1939 and lasted till 1945. We also lost the territory till the Gorlitz-Neisse line. We were evacuated to north Germany. The winter months of 1944-45 were extremely cold and snowy, and many people migrated to the USA and Canada. What followed was injustice towards us Germans.´
It was on Juli 14, 1945 between 6 to 9am that the evacuation of Germans began. The German population was brought to the area west of the river Neisse. Every German was allowed to carry a maximum of 20 kilos of luggage. Transports like wagons, oxen, horses, cows were not allowed. The entire living and inanimate objects had to be left behind and became the property of the Polish government. Hirschberg became Yelemagora and Breslau was given the Polish name of Wronlaw.
We had to travel from Pommern, East Prussia across the east sea to Schleswig-Holstein because the Russians were coming. The people in the east part of Schlesien were trying to flee the onslaught of the Russians. The German radio spoke of a wunderwaffe that Hitler´s Luftwaffe was working on, but the living conditions declined with the passage of each day. Towards the end of January we were kept awake by the artillery fire. The front was coming closer to the Bunzlau, Liegnitz and Breslau, some 50 km north of Hirschberg. Even old men had orders to fire at the enemy with the panzerfaust (bazookas) to save the Vaterland.
A lot of people died in the East Sea and everything was confiscated by the Russian soldiers. We had to remain. My father died on February 1, 1943 in the home military hospital. That was also the day when Stalingrad fell and lots of German soldiers were missing. The Russians had won the battle.
My husband was a prisoner of war (p.o.w.) and had to construct bridges, work in the mines and elsewhere. He always sent his mother letters, who later had to flee from where she lived near Breslau.
Before he came home, my husband used to construct useful things with wood and the Russians discovered that he had talent so they took him to the Kremlin as a carpenter. He was six years in Russia and he worked for Russians officers to help build their houses and dachas.
Ana said, ´In order to avoid assassination, Stalin had three identical limousines with security-men. My husband was wounded on the left leg and that was why he was discharged from the p.o.w. camp.
After he was released, he returned to his mother, and that was when I got to know him better and fell in love with him,´ she said with a twinkle in her eyes as we sat in her living room.
He got a job as a painter in the town council of Rerenau (Amt Oberkirchen). It´s called Auetal now. We had a lot of agriculture in those days an in the Ruhr area everything was destroyed. You know, we were evacuated and weren´t refugees,´ said Ana emphatically.
Ana Podolski folded her hands, which looked frail like parchment, the blue veins were distinctly visible on the backs of her fair, pigmented hands, as she said, ´We had no choice but to leave the country in the years 1946-47. This was a decision made by the USA and the Soviet Union with the signatures of the former enemy nations: Great Britain and France. We had the Russian East Zone, the British and US West Zones and the French Zone. The love for our dear hamlet and the whole of Schlesien has not been minimised, even though we were forced to leave our beloved land. We, Schlesiens, meet every two years in our old Heimat, and even the younger generations share our sense of loss of Heimat and the pain that goes with it.´
Ana went further to say, ´I still think it´s important to tell people in the west about our odyssey from Schlesien. I have the impression the people still don´t know what happened to us in those days.´
It might be mentioned that Krommenau is an old settlement and was mentioned in 1305 in the bishop district circa Hyrsberc (Hirschberg) as the hamlet ´Crupow.´ There was a coal mine, a small tavern with fishery and a place for breakfast, complete with a tree, under the shade of which the travellers could tie their horses. There was a nickel-mine in the year 1373 on the Czeis hills. You can read about it in the city library of Breslau. As time went by, the name of Crupow was changed to Cromnow, then Krummenau, and in the end Krommenau. A rivulet called Krummseiffen flowed through the hamlet. It was three km long before it became a tributary of the Altkemnitz. There was an elevation called Nebelberg, which means ´Misty Mountain´ (698m). The founders of this settlement were 20 families where agriculture was the main occupation. According to a certificate book, in the year 1576 Krommenau had 25 farmers. The main religion (90%) was evangelism. During the 30 Year War (1618-1648) the Christians had a tough time because in 1637 the Lutherian faith was forbidden, and as a result 578 evangelist churches were closed.
The entire country was destroyed and was in penury. When the King of Prussia Friedrich II took over Schlesien in 1714, he declared freedom of religion for all. A big church was built but was misused by the Poles as a store-room for hay, straw and cereals. The windows were closed with nailed planks.
I asked her how she and her husband had landed in Kappel and not in north Germany.
Ana said, ´ A cousin of my husband met a colleague from the Black Forest and she married him and settled down in Lenzkirch. My husband got a job at Knosp in the Moltke street. I was 14 years old when the World War II began and now I´m 70.´
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