Meanwhile, there was no doctor in our camp. Only a ‘field medical assistant’ who was a medical student without qualifications. As best he could, he fulfilled the function of camp doctor. It is true that he had a thermometer, a wooden stethoscope, a few dressings and iodine. He was an Upper Silesian by the name of Lebek. He listened to my chest and diagnosed an inflammation of the lining of my lungs and my ribs on the right hand side, but could only prescribe ‘bed rest’ for me. Of course I was incapable of working. I had a fierce stabbing pain in the right side of my chest. The only treatment Lebek could give me was repeatedly painting that side of my chest with iodine. He monitored my temperature and my general condition, but apart from that had to leave me to my fate.
During the following weeks I ran a heavy fever. I lay on my bunk without straw mattress or blanket, dressed in my uniform and covered with my old overcoat. The days were bleak while my comrades were at work and, God knows, I felt myself to be abandoned. There were no scales in the camp, so that it was only by seeing my bones protruding more and more, that I realised that I was losing more and more weight. We did not have a mirror in which I could have seen what I looked like. One time, when I had got out of bed, I saw that my knees were thicker than the bones of my upper leg. I was wasting away to a skeleton. I presented a similar picture to those I afterwards saw in photographs of the inmates of concentration camps. Night and day I used an empty jam tin as a urine bottle. I had to stand it next to my head, so that I did not accidentally knock it over, and I could reach it with less effort.
Throughout the winter, sick and weak, I remained in the camp. I could not and did not work. The winter, with temperatures as low as minus 15 degrees, was said not to have been a harsh winter for East Prussia. We had a stove in the room, so that at least cold was not added to hunger. There was also a good feeling of camaraderie in the cramped room. There was no one who acted in an underhand way, with one exception. He was, of all people, a circuit judge and a Reserve Oberleutnant. He was once seen drinking a comrade’s soup as he brought it from the canteen. Everyone could see how he was tortured by shame over this lapse, and so the incident was passed over in silence.
It was a different kind of anger for the community when Herr Rauchfuss, in civilian life a police official from Potsdam, sold his watch. He had been able to hold on to it through several ‘friskings’. But then he did a deal with a Russian sentry who obtained for him some additional rations. In particular he paid for a tin of American corned beef with a label in Cyrillic script. It was as painful for the rest of us to know of the existence of that supply, as it must have been for Rauchfuss to eat those additional rations alone! He knew how much the others envied him. But camaraderie no longer extended to giving to other people even a bit on the end of a knife.
Another man in our room was an artillery Oberleutnant Theo Krühne. He came from Leipzig, was a junior lawyer, and the son of a Reichsgerichtsrat. He occasionally spoke with pride of his father, who in his job was a leading jurist. After I returned home I found out through Paul Eberhardt what a dreadful fate Krühne’s family had met. In the artillery school in Jöterbog he had become acquainted with and married a girl from the nearby small town of Kalau, from where the Kalauers come. In the little town near Berlin the family thought they would be safe and had fled from the bombed city of Leipzig to Berlin to his young wife’s parents’ house. Krühne spoke with great pleasure of his wife and his small son. He had a red moustache and had striking blue eyes. It was a cruel stroke of fate that the house in which the family was living, including those who had fled, received a direct hit. A total of nine people lost their lives as a result.
Paul Eberhart, whom I have just mentioned, was Krühne’s close friend. He came from Augsburg and had relatives in Bregenz. This had given him the idea of passing himself off as an Austrian. It was not important in the Holstein camp, but only later in Georgenburg. In Holstein I was already instructing Paul about the importance and the significance of the Heimatschein for him, as an Austrian. In actual fact he did succeed in getting released with us and in getting back home to Augsburg.
In later years, after my studies, I met him in Munich, where, with a PhD, he was working as an occupational psychologist. Paul Eberhart was the same age as I was, but he looked a lot younger. He had a somewhat round face with blue eyes, and for a grammar school boy he was very well educated. In fact he had already studied philosophy for one semester. He spoke about the art historian Worringer in Munich and about other professors. He was acquainted with publishing houses and had an eye for valuable books. It was he who brought back to the camp many books while on work details in Jüditten and Metgethen.
One day Paul had been in the library of a Königsberg lawyer, Egon Fridell. He turned up with a three-volume cultural history of modern times from the C.H. Beck Verlag. It was a large first edition in greenish yellow. He worked his way through those volumes during the winter. He always underlined important parts as he did so, somewhat as my father and his father too had done. He also let me work on Fridell. I can still remember how we both agreed that we had found studying the introductory chapter particularly difficult. Of the books that Paul brought back with him, and which I then read for the first time, Rudolf Georg Binding’s Erlebtes Leben, and Hans Carossa’s Führung und Geleit, were the best known.
Other comrades in our room were Herr Straub, a lawyer from Düren near Aachen, and Herr Korte, who was a singer, a bass or baritone. I can remember that Korte would toast his bred on the stove in small strips and slices, and carefully distribute his sugar ration over them. A particular personality was Herr Böhm, a Reserve Hauptmann who had taken part in the First World War. Böhm called himself a lyricist, but I can no longer remember the quality of his poems. He was a gentleman of refined appearance with excellent manners and a cultured way of expressing himself. His Hochdeutsch had that certain East Prussian ring to it. I had the feeling that the downfall of his home city was a dreadful blow to him. I can still hear his voice when, in his East Prussian fashion, he would say to me Härr Schejderbauerchen. I had the impression that he was a prosperous man and a bachelor. One time he gave us a laugh when he sang a popular song, full of black humour, from the period after the First World War. Wenn der weisse Flieder wieder blüht (‘When the white lilacs bloom once more’). Remarkably, I can still remember the title of one of his lyrical poems. It would have marked him out as an East Prussian dialect poet. I do not know whether that was really the case, but the poem was called Schalche Flack, in Hochdeutsch, Ein Schälchen Fleck, or ‘a little bowl of Fleck’. It referred to the sour Kuttelfleck, a favourite East Prussian dish.
When my 22nd birthday came round, on 13 January 1946, I had recovered sufficiently to feel able to walk. It was a Sunday. I can remember it clearly because for the first and only time there was meat in the soup for lunch. Because it was my birthday, like all birthday boys, I received an extra helping by order of the camp leader. I devoured it with the greatest enjoyment and without the slightest prick of conscience towards my comrades!