The train puffed its way through the suburbs, spraying sparks into the air as evening started to fall. We chugged past masses of green-covered ruins, in the direction of the West. We had fought so bitterly, not so long ago, in those streets. We passed churches in whose graveyards the past generations of my fellow passengers slept under centuries-old stone crosses.
Our wagon was full to overflowing. There was very little room to sit. In the past I was accustomed to the usual military phrase ‘the wagons must roll to victory’ when we used them as our military transport. But we had it far better then, for we could and did open the door, dangle our legs over the side, and move around freely. We could not do it on that journey, which could take perhaps a week, because the Poles had sealed the wagons from the outside.
CHAPTER 20
In the Eastern Zone
The sound of the wheels was a monotone taking the exiles with every turn of those wheels, further and further away from their homeland. From a small ventilator in the roof our wagon, I could see the flat fields, green woods and the decorative farmhouses, now threatened with dereliction. I could understand only too well, the bitterness of my fellow passengers, for this land had found its way into my heart too. The fate of Silesia had been a turning point in my life, particularly in Breslau. There I had fought my last battle against Bolshevism, been wounded, taken prisoner and became a civilian once more. The 24 hours’ respite had grown into a year, one with falsified papers, and an adventurous one at that. Above all I had met a young woman whom I could not wait to see once more, and who, with luck, would become my wife.
We made a stop in Sagan, another in Forst, where we were deloused, and then again Görlitz. After another two days, we reached Zittau, but we were not in the Western zone. Our train rolled over the railway bridge spanning the river Neisse, into the farthest most easterly corner and the Soviet zone in Zittau, in Saxony. Lorries, one after the other then drove us to a regimental barracks, a transit camp. Not even rested from the stress of the journey, we had to assemble on the square the next morning. There we were forced to hear a welcoming speech from the representative of the Socialist Party of Germany, the SED. Worn out, cold and apathetic nearly 2,000 of us stood, huddled together and surrounded by Communist red flags. Degradation was on the agenda that day. After all that we had been through, we were forced to hear that we should be grateful, grateful that we had been freed from the yoke of Fascism, and by the peace-loving Communist Josef ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin. This Saxon had perhaps more to say but his insulting comment had met questions of disbelief from the brave as they asked “Freed from WHAT? our house and home!” So he cut his speech short, but not before he turned the knife and welcomed the future German/Soviet friendship, before he disappeared and we were put into quarantine. We were therefore not allowed to leave the camp for the next fourteen days.
It was on the second day that I found the hole in the fence and took my-selfoffon a one-man recce into the city. Once upon a time Zittau had been a beautiful city, with its Renaissance and Baroque architecture and buildings and their decorated portals. Now it could only be described as something similar to ‘a worker’s paradise’. The shops were empty, and I mean of goods. They did have window decoration, made up of empty boxes, offering the thick layers of dust for free. The Zittauer went on their way, when they were to be seen, in streets that had not seen a street cleaner in many a month. The women did not appear to be any different to the Russian women except that they were not so stout and round. In fact, when you took a glance at their faces under the headscarf that they all wore, you could see sad and empty eyes, small mouths and hollow cheeks. They were quite haggard. I bought and wrote a postcard to Brigitta, and then made my way back to the camp, using the hole in the fence once more.
All of the deportees wanted to leave this camp as quickly as possible, for here in Saxony it was situated far too near the Czechoslovakian and Polish borders, but they had no say in the matter. The occupying forces were responsible for our distribution. Just as the ‘little soldier’ was never informed of military strategy, we for instance didn’t even know the destinations of the transport, when leaving that transit point.
In 1946, on 29 October, a National Census took place, and alone in the western zones, 1,622,907 Silesians were to be found, mostly in Lower Saxony (626,087) and Bavaria (434,281). In the Eastern zones there were 1.3 mil lion.
The results of deportation, evacuation, and illegal trans portation of east Germans, were even beyond the imagination of the occupying forces. So much so, that Sir Orme Sargent, State Secretary of the Foreign Office in London declared that “it is unbelievable that the Germany of today can solve the resettlement problem of 14 million of their starving people. For me, it is beyond my imagination”.
A Commission, the ‘Papal Protectors for Refugees’, declared that “the Germans have to master a problem, the like of which has never ever before existed in world history. Such an exodus robbing such a mass of people of house, home and existence has never ever taken place, and at such short notice”.
When one assesses that 8,000 people can occupy a small town, then one can imagine that a small town arrived every single day, somewhere in Bavaria. In Hesse alone, 67,000 were counted in one month as ‘new citizens’. The transport brought the dead too. The Councillor of Control, attached to the German Evangelist Church, and the Allies, described the situation as of “half-starved, exhausted to the point of death, they arrive, having been robbed on the way of everything that they possessed”. And it happened in peacetime!
Germany performed the impossible, however, due to the discipline and will to work of the war generation. Germany absorbed all of the refugees from the east, not in a day, but in a few years. Their industriousness also produced a boom. It was an economic and industrial wonder.
This massive absorption was not without its problems. There were many who were irritated, overworked, and tearing their hair at the organisation belonging to this enormous overwhelming problem. It was particularly serious in the Western zones, where four million houses had disappeared. There were so many refugees who had to be given a home in amongst those who already existed. This was not very diplomatic, particularly when you did not have a ‘say in the matter’. In his book Die Vertriebenen, Siegfried Kogelfranz reports that particularly in Bavaria, a wave of ‘religious pilgrimages’ started. That meant that without the owners at home, their houses could not be inspected for spare rooms, or space for refugees or house-mates. When the dear Lord did not ‘help’ those unfortunates, those stout believers in Jesus Christ, then they ‘helped themselves’ out of their plight and bricked-up spare rooms or excess space, wallpapered over, and were therefore not encumbered with ‘guests’.
The situation had to be resolved by force from the local mayor or the police, so Brigitte reported to me. Such was the situation in the village where she was evacuated, near Detmold. The very sorry truth of the matter was that upon arrival, and as fellow-Germans, in Germany, they found that they were not wanted by their own people. “What is mine, is mine!” was the attitude, and those who possessed nothing were ostracised by those others who had plenty. The Westphalian farmers were well nourished. They had survived the war without drastic bombing raids in the region. They viewed the eastern deportees as ‘lousy gypsies from the East’, interlopers, who should have stayed where they were. Such behaviour was however, not the rule. When there was a hard case of resistance, Allied Regulation No.18 came into force. It allowed the refugees to occupy a place to stay in the absence of the house-owner.