Despite it being a time when there were days when one did not how to survive, to live through the next day, I also had comfortable times. One such was a rendezvous on the river Oder, which developed into much more. The weather was lovely early in 1946 and it was bathing weather. The Breslauerw did not succumb to this, for fear of the Russians and the Poles hiding in solitary stretches of the Oder. I just could not ignore this pleasure and made use of the privilege that I had, as a non-German, to bathe in the river. That I did, alone, for several days, until one sunny morning, when I was joined in this idyll, by a ‘mermaid’, who could not possibly be German.
She was 18 years of age, blonde, and spoke in broken German, and to my surprise, this was laced with Dutch words. A Dutch worker in Lemberg, the city of her birth, had taught her. The joy of bathing soon became a liaison, which was balm for my loneliness and boredom. She was, according to the song we had always sung das allerschdnste Kind. Was a man in Poland to find the loveliest child one could find in Poland? Whether the weather was good or bad, we met regularly and we met now on the Ole, a lonely tributary of the Oder. Not long after, Elzbieta invited me for a meal with her parents, who lived in Mollwitzerstrasse. My fears were quickly allayed over the meal of maize and piroggen, a form of ravioli. The friendly, open-heartedness of this Polish family called Markowitz, who came from the Carpathians, was welcoming. It was only the grandmother who was not enamoured of me, sitting there in her white headscarf and eyeing me with suspicion. She told her granddaughter that I was a spy.
Mr and Mrs Markowitz were Congress Poles, or national Poles, who were forcibly moved from Lemberg to Breslau. They did not like the lifestyle of the city, where they certainly did not feel at home. They had nothing against the Germans and actually heavily criticised the shameful behaviour of their own people. The militia in Wroclaw were not regulars, but were family members from criminal backgrounds that had now jumped on the bandwagon. The Markowitz family had had no bad personal experiences with the Germans, in contrast to the Russians, with whom they wanted no contact. This attitude had angered the Russians, in particular soldiers who had made certain advances towards Elzbieta and been given a rebuff. They had then tried to rape her. She had managed to escape them at the last minute.
The sight of Breslau troubled one’s soul and it became nauseous for me. I wanted to leave, and visit the countryside, which was a dangerous under-taking. Elzbieta told me that she would accompany me, to protect me, which was a brave decision for her to take. Our visits took us to Deutsch-Lissa, to Leuthen and Saara. The new Polish names I have now forgotten, but not the former fields of slaughter, where I lost many of my comrades. I could not talk about it then to Elzbieta, for I was to her a foreign worker from Holland, and it had to stay that way.
On our way we met the new Polish settlers, who on the whole were not happy with their new circumstances. Some from the town had been moved to the country, and those from the country had been moved to the town. Elzbieta spoke to the sinister-looking Poles who moved around us in suspicious interest. They soon determined that we were Polish, whilst I remained dumb and smiling, i.e. a Polish pair! We still had to be very careful. There were criminals who were roaming the streets having been released from prisons, but who were not political prisoners. When we heard Russian voices we disappeared as quickly as we could, finding roads over the fields to the woods. We bumped into Russian troops one day, with cars, mounted riders and Panje carts, all having flags flying from them in the wind. There were no nasty words, just grins as if they knew that we wanted just to be alone, as they saw us sitting on the edge of the woods.
I felt really free there in the lap of ‘Mother Nature’ and I lived the hours intensely. Those hours under blue skies, listening to the bird-song, were cleansing. I realised that I saw the countryside reverting to the way it had been. The fields were no longer tilled or cared for. Nature’s wild flowers were taking possession of the fields, not the wheat and corn, which struggled to ripen in that wilderness. The lovely wild flowers, the weeds, however, stood triumphant over man’s daily bread and hid a deathtrap. Whoever wanted to harvest the corn from those acres, would tread the fields of death and mines. I knew that the roots of this corn nestled side by side with the remains of German and Russian soldiers. Their bones had been washed by the rain, dried by the sun and were now turning ‘earth to earth and dust to dust’.
After those country visits, I had to ask, “does peace re ally reign here?” No, something was missing. The country idyll was not complete, for it was totally still. When one listened, did one hear the moo of a cow, or the crowing and clucking of chickens in the farmyard? The stillness was the stillness that one found in the churchyard. The war had taken the cows and the pigs from the villages. There were no strutting chickens, no warning bark of the farm house dog. There was no straw in the cow-stalls, which the farmhand had cut for the welfare of the animals, for there were none.
Once, a German soldier approached us coming from the other direction. Had he been discharged? Had he managed to escape? He walked with the aid of a walking-stick, which one could see had been a broom-handle. His bread-bag hung from his uniform, which was in tatters. He did not want to draw attention to himself. He passed by not giving us, the Poles, a glance. ‘Oh comrade, if only you knew’, was what I thought. He blended perfectly into the countryside, the changing countryside, which had once been as proud as he, a grenadier. We were both sacrifices of a changing world.
We always re turned to Breslau as the evening came, re turning to the suffocation of the city, tired from the day’s outing, leaving the wide open spaces of the country, to return to a city of ruined facades. Sleep often evaded me, after those trips, for I was always reminded of those former battlefields of Deutsch-Lissa, Leuthen and Saara and my comrades who I had left behind. I had up to a point success fully veiled my military past from the Russians and the Poles. I knew that even when my German friends and acquaintances were told, that my past was safe with them. They would never give me away. Elzbieta also believed my version about my past, at least she behaved as if she did.
There was however, someone who began to doubt my story, probably because he was a young member of the militia. He knew that I should have registered myself as a DP long before. Another reason that he had a ‘pique’ of me, was because of a woman, an acquaintance in whom I did not have the slightest interest, but he thought otherwise. He wanted me out of the way. He saw a rival in me, he was jealous, and that was a dangerous situation. He was convinced that she liked me more than him. But when the truth was known, she was not interested in his advances. He accused me of being one of the Waffen SS. I had no choice but to treat him to some aggression and tell him to accompany me to the local commander, to clear the matter. At that point the said German lady in tervened, and threw out the lovesick gallant. I disappeared too, never to be seen again.
The hopes that a peace treaty would ensure that German nationals could stay in the now Polish-controlled eastern territories, gradually disappeared. It did not materialise for those Germans still in Breslau. It never came. The ethnic-cleansing programme carried on as usual and even my friends in Lutzowstrasse, the Laskas, had to admit this reality, with a heavy heart even demanding their expatriation. Naturally enough I wanted to go with them when our district appeared on the list, for there was nothing to keep me now in Breslau, i.e. in Polish Wroclaw.