Meanwhile, they had the certain feeling that their life was no longer directly under threat. I also, looking back, cannot say for certain that we were systematically exposed to starvation. The dreadful turnip scrap soup of Georgenburg was replaced by sauerkraut, kapusta. There was a litre of that soup twice a day. The calculated ration of meat and fat, both of which were mixed into the soup, was 9 grams for meat and 12 grams for fat. There may well have also been at that time, I cannot now recall exactly, a tablespoon of sugar and bread, the ration for which was 600 grams per day. But the sugar, it was always unrefined sugar, was hardly ever edible, but mostly damp and heavy. It was generally known in all camps that the Russians responsible deviated from the set ration of food for the prisoners of war.
The calculation was simple. If you mixed to the quantity of 10 grams of sugar 1 litre of water, you had got an additional kilogram left for private barter. It was a similar case with the bread, the khleb. There was an unimaginable difference, even while the war was still going on, between what we considered to be bread, and the bread that the Russians provided. It must have been baked in moulds, in tin boxes, because with the unimaginably high water content the dough would have run away. But the moulds had to be lubricated, and we never got to the bottom of the question as to whether this was done with petroleum or with engine oil. The crusts, the only parts that were baked through, sometimes tasted disgusting and smelled unpleasant. From time to time a lot of oats were also mixed in. Many could not face the damp, badly baked bread, and for that reason often, if an oven was nearby, it was toasted, which gave off quite considerable clouds of steam. The weight of the toasted slices was considerably less than it had been before.
‘Camp Holstein’ was in a plant that had been built in the inter-war period, probably after 1933. It had housed an ‘Army Optical Research Institute’, or something of a similar name. Two buildings measuring some 20 by 10 metres stood at right angles to each other. They had two storeys and were built of red brick. The area was no larger than 2,000 or 3,000 square metres and had been securely fenced in by the builders. The building to the right of the entrance, ran at a right angle to the road, and had been a workshop. From its roof you could see across the freshwater lagoon far to the west and to the south. The plant lay alone outside the settlement. In the first building there was still a lot of equipment from the time of its earlier use, in particular binocular periscopes, for which the Russians obviously had no use.
The other building, lying parallel to the road, was where we were housed. The officers were quartered in some smallish rooms on the ground floor and on the first floor, and the other ranks in two large rooms. We officers had individual wooden beds, whereas the other ranks lay on bunks one above each other and subdivided. The German camp leader, Oberleutnant Karl, had a room of his own in which he lived with his assistant, another officer. In front of the accommodation building was the kitchen block from the time when the plant was in German hands.
The running of the kitchen was the responsibility of two officers. They had been taken prisoner unwounded and were a picture of enviable strength and health. They used their position to divert rations to themselves. From the roof they had thoroughly observed the terrain, and one day in the spring of 1946 they disappeared. Many months later there was a rumour that their escape attempt had succeeded and they were supposed to have written from Germany.
Our workplace in the Holstein factory was about three-quarters of an hour away. We went there on a country road and passed a solitary house, that had earlier been a simple inn. Oberleutnant Kahl told us that, on our road over 200 years earlier, Immanuel Kant, the Königsberg philosopher, had gone for walks. He was said never to have left Königsberg, and yet in his lectures had been able to give exact descriptions of London and Paris etc.
The factory was already partly in operation again. We prisoners were detailed, in the Russian fashion, into so-called brigades, groups of about 10 men each. My brigade worked on making multi-layered wooden trestles that were used in the construction of a larger container. We worked under the direction of Russians, who were all members of the technical units, as shown in the names of their service ranks. So, for instance, the normal sub-lieutenant was called Mladschy-Tjechnik-Litenant, in German Unter-Technik-Leutnant. The so-called Natschalnik, the commandant in our area, was an elderly first lieutenant, of good-natured appearance. He was a teacher from Tambov, a provincial town halfway between Moscow and Samara. The foreman was a sergeant-major from Tomsk in Siberia, a skilled craftsman as far as I could judge. He must have been a mix of Russian and Mongolian. With him I had the impression that it embarrassed him that officers were performing menial tasks for him as prisoners.
During the fighting the high factory chimney had received a direct hit from an anti-tank gun. But it had only made a hole and had not brought down the chimney above it. To all appearances the Russians had suspected there was an artillery observer on the flue and had wanted to clear him out. A topic of conversation was how, and by whom, the hole could be repaired. Rumour had it that a specialist, a Russian buzz-word, had been offered 8,000 roubles to repair it. Such a specialist had been requested from Moscow and was already on the way.
It was autumn. We had been working for some weeks in the factory. Our working hours were 10 hours a day, only Sunday was a day off. But one Sunday there was a ‘voluntary’ work detail in which every prisoner capable of working had to take part. However, the unusual thing about it was that we did not have to go to work in the factory. We were loaded up on lorries and driven into the area of the new frontier between Russia and Poland. The process of drawing the frontier had apparently not yet been fully accomplished.
In the frontier area we had to gather up stinging nettles and similar weeds that were supposed to serve as fodder for horses. On that work detail I must have caught cold. The following Monday I felt ill. With difficulty I dragged myself to work in the factory. I was completely weak on the march back. I felt a stabbing pain in the right side of my chest that I could not explain. The lung that had been injured had been the left one. My strength deserted me more and more, and I was in danger of being left behind. The men next to me and behind me had apparently not noticed, and gradually I had reached the end of the column. I was afraid that I would soon collapse, when quite unexpectedly I got a hefty blow on my back.
The frequent cries of dawai, dawai by the sentries who brought us, or rather drove us, to work, was something that we were used to, and were part of the prisoners’ every day experience. Until then and, I have to say, also later, there had not been any mistreatment. I fell, and it was only with difficulty that I could pull myself up again. But two comrades got hold of me under my arms, and supported me on either side. They saw to it that I did not drop out of the column again. It was not the physical pain that hurt me and brought tears to my eyes, it was the mental torture I suffered through the degrading and humiliating mistreatment. I can still see the guard who hit me with the butt of his rifle in the small of my back. He was a young chap with a pretty face, if it had not been disfigured with pockmarks. Back in the camp I reported the incident, but Herr Kahl could do nothing. The only thing was to be treated by a doctor. By the evening it was obvious that I was running a fever.