The Will to Live: A German Family's Flight from Soviet Rule

By Erika Vora

This book is a true story of a German family, a mother, grand
mother and four daughters, fleeing from the approaching
Russian Red Army and from Polish men who took over their
home, land and property during World War II. Having lost all their rights, the women tell of their sudden homelessness, hunger, torture, and forced labor, long after the war was over. Their strong will and invincible courage to live under treacherous conditions renews faith in the human spirit to overcome inhumanity. This book contains only one of the stories
of fifteen million German civilians who were dispossessed and expelled from their homes during one of the largest forced mass migrations of the twentieth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 24, 2010
• ISBN: 9781453598337

Erika Vora

Dr. Erika Vora is Professor Emeritus of Intercultural Communication at Saint Cloud State University in Minnesota. Her previous book, “The Will to Live: A German Family’s Flight from Soviet Rule” depicts the traumatic flight of her own family trying to escape the approaching Russian Red Army during World War II. Professor Vora has been a Fulbright Scholar to Taiwan, Republic of China and Director of numerous international study programs in Germany. She has been a visiting scholar and intercultural communication consultant to universities and companies around the world. She is well published in the areas of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violence movement to free India, managing interracial conflict in the United States, and listening across religious and cultural divides.

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Copyright © 2010 by Erika Vora.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2010915522

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4535-9832-0

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4535-9831-3

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4535-9833-7

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACE

Historical Context

History of the Region where the Family in this Book Lived

Background Information on the Family in this Book

Synopsis of the Book

Note Regarding the Book Cover

Leokadia

LEOKADIA

Flight from Home

From Flight to Enslavement

Flight to the GDR

Escape from Communism to the Golden West

Arrival in West Germany

Starting all over again

EDITH

Flight from Home

Child Labor in Polish Servitude

Flight to the GDR

Escape from the GDR to West Germany

LILLI

Flight from Home

Overworked and Underfed: Forced Child Labor

Flight to the GDR

No Picnic in the GDR

Escape from the GDR to West Germany

Starting All Over Again

Coming to Canada and the USA

EPILOGUE

REFERENCES

DEDICATION

In gratitude and admiration, this book is dedicated to the loving memory of my courageous mother, Leokadia Wenzel, who in spite of extreme hardships had the will to live and save her young daughters’ lives.

It is also dedicated to the warm memory of my grandmother, Hulda Kuehn, whose wisdom and ingenuity helped us escape twice from bondage.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to thank the three women interviewed in this book: my mother and my sisters Edith and Lilli, who, in spite of their fears of recurring nightmares and emotional pain, gave into my urging to share their compelling experiences. That was not easy for them and not without many tears. Without opening the wounds of their heart-wrenching trauma that shaped each of their lives, this book would have never been written.

I owe a huge thanks to my husband Jay who helped me through all the stages of this book. I don’t know what I would have done without him. He was always there for me providing constant and never failing support, understanding, encouragement, and advice. It is he who created the book cover, the Escape Map, and the Maternal Lineage chart.

Many heartfelt thanks go to the source of my inspiration, my daughters Davina and Ariana. To them goes the credit for the title of this book. Their excellent editorial comments and helpful suggestions throughout the book were invaluable.

I owe my gratitude to Dr. Molefi Kete Asante at Temple University for his friendship, advice and constant encouragement to complete this book. It was he who validated that the compelling narratives of the experiences of German refugees of WWII must be heard and that to ignore the voices of lived history is to leave our knowledge of history incomplete.

Many thanks go also to Dr. Sonja Foss and Dr. William Waters of the Scholars’ Retreat in Denver, Colorado for their advice and encouragement at the beginning stages of this book. I would also like to thank St. Cloud State University for offering me a Faculty Development Grant to attend the week long Scholars’ Retreat in Colorado.

PREFACE

The historical, political, geographic and socio-cultural context of the flight of the German family in this book will help the reader understand, appreciate, and relate to their plight.

Historical Context

World War II spread death and devastation throughout most of the world. It brought about the greatest mass migration of the twentieth century (Schieder, 1961). That included more than fourteen million Germans who were thrown out of their homes in Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary and eastern German states (Von Darnstaedt and Wiegrafe, 2005; Kent, 2003). Twelve million of them fled from their homes from Poland and all the German states east of the Oder-Neisse Line (i.e. East Prussia, West Prussia, Silesia, and Pomerania) (Jungk, 2005; Knopp, 2001). All those German states were, after the Potsdam Agreement of the victors (i.e. The United States, Russia, Great Britain and France), given to Poland after World War II (Magocsi, 2002; Exhibition, 1998). They became in the winter of 1944/45 the land of the dead where the streets were covered with dead German women and children, plunderers who were luring to rob the refugees of their very last possessions, and rapists who took German girls and women as their loot (Jungk (2005).

During that bitter cold winter of 1944/45 the streets of Poland and the far eastern regions of Germany were filled with German civilians, mainly women, children and elderly, who had to leave everything behind and flee westward, trying to escape the approaching Russian Red Army (Grube 1980; Knopp, 2001).They fled on foot or by horse and wagon while carrying with them only the bare essentials to survive (Grube and Richter, 1980; Knopp, 2001). Suddenly homeless, they were totally defenseless on the icy streets. Since the war was still going on, their husbands and fathers had to fight in the war and were not with them. There were no laws to protect the German civilians, no police they could go to, no judge to cry out to against the gross human rights violations (Jungk, 2005). More than two million women and children did not survive the unspeakably gruesome conditions of the flight (Knopp 2001).

The Russian Red Army was inspired by Stalin’s propaganda exemplified by the following pamphlet distributed to millions: After you kill one German, kill another - for us there is nothing more fun than German bodies (Reuth, 2007, p. 10). Even mass rape of German women was encouraged by the Soviet regime as a rightful loot of the Russian Army (Reuth, 2007). There is no verifiable data on the exact number of rapes, not to mention that many women were raped over and over again for a lengthy period of time (Anonymous, 2003; Weidner, 2008). Researchers of the Russian archives and German hospital archives gave an estimate of about one million German women raped in Berlin and its surrounding areas, and two million German women in the eastern parts of Germany (Weidner, 2008). The pictures of the women who were raped or killed were put on posters which were hung everywhere (Knopp, 2001). Every German girl and every German woman had to count on rape at any time. Many of their homes were burned and plundered; and civilians in entire German cities were literally slaughtered, as in the city of Nemmersdorf (Knopp, 2001). An eye witness reported that in Nemmersdorf, women were found naked, their hands nailed to barn doors like a cross. Inside of the homes, we found seventy two women and children, and an old seventy four year old man, all of them dead, murdered like beasts, except for the very few who were shot in the neck (Reuth, 2007, p.9). For the German women and children living in Poland and the eastern regions of Germany, the Russian Red Army was associated with unspeakable horror (Knopp, 2001). Mass rapes of German women by Soviet soldiers continued long after the war was over (Weidner, 2008).

The end of World War II and the collapse of the German Third Reich in 1945 brought again major losses of German territories. Germany’s state of East Prussia, with the old capital of Koenigsberg, was annexed to the Soviet Union. The states of Silesia, Pomerania, and a section of the state Brandenburg were placed by the Soviets under Polish administration and became part of Poland (which was influenced by Soviet ideology). The Soviet Union occupied the German states of Saxony, Saxony Anhalt, Thuringia, Mecklenburg, and most of Brandenburg. These states were known as the occupied Soviet Sector and were blocked from West Germany by armed Soviet soldiers. On October 7, 1949 the Soviet Union proclaimed those five East German states of the Russian sector to be a separate country, and called it the German Democratic Republic (GDR) with the capital being the Soviet occupied section of Berlin (Exhibition, 1998; Kleindienst, 2001; Magocsi, 2002; Reuth, 2007).

While West Germany was free, the GDR was under strict Communist rule and was heavily influenced by Soviet ideology. Totalitarian control and pressure were imposed on people through indoctrination, persuasion, mass education, and lack of freedom. As a result, there was a mass exodus to West Germany. To stop the exodus, the Soviet led GDR built the Berlin Wall between East and West Germany in 1961 to prevent the Germans living in the GDR from leaving and to prevent any contact with West Germany (Kleindienst, 2001).

History of the Region where the Family in this Book Lived

The family in this book (my family) lived in the district of Konin in the Warthegau region for many generations. That region is located along the river Warthe (now Warta) in the Province of Posen (now Poznania). Konin is about 175 miles east of Berlin and about 100 miles north of Breslau (see Escape Path Map). It is centrally located on trade routes from Western Europe and Scandinavia to Russia. The Warthegau region was a part of Poland until 1772 when Poland was partitioned out to Russia, Prussia, and Austria. From 1772, the region was a part of Prussia (i.e. Germany) until 1919. After World War I ended, Germany lost this region to the newly re-formed independent country of Poland, except for a brief period during the World War II take-over by Germany (Exhibition, 1998; Magocsi, 2002).

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Background Information on the Family in this Book

The land in the Warthegau region was highly fertile and excellent for agriculture. Our family, like most families there, were farmers. My family (see Maternal Lineage Chart) owned a farm in the village of Lubomysle in the district of Konin, raised horses and cows, and made a living off the land. My grandmother also owned and managed her own farm in the neighboring village of Mostki, and raised seven children by herself after the sudden death of her husband at a young age. She was also a master tailor who trained students in tailoring. My mother also managed her own family’s farm and raised four daughters while her husband was forced to fight in WWII. Both farms employed several local Polish farmhands.

All members of the family were German citizens, continued to live on their land in their familiar German neighborhood. They lived with their familiar German neighbors, and attended German Protestant churches. The children went to German schools and spoke German. However, all family members were exposed to and learned Polish and some Russian, because of the ethnic diversity of the region.

Then came World War II and the lives of all Germans in this region and all eastern regions of Germany were changed forever. My family lost everything and had to flee for their lives.

Synopsis of the Book

It was in January 1945, during one of Europe’s coldest winters, when my thirty four year old mother had to flee from her home with her four young daughters to escape the approaching Russian Red Army. She lost her home, her property, all her possessions, and all her rights. Long after the war was over, until the fall of 1947, my mother and my three sisters, who were still children, were held captive as practically slave laborers, without any rights, by two different Polish families where they suffered great hunger pains. Starved and overworked, they had to do hard labor on the now Polish farms which earlier belonged to Germans. When asking for a piece of bread for her starving children, my mother was beaten several times. When she refused to give up her baby to be adopted by her Polish captors, she was almost beaten to death.

My grandmother and my nearly eighty year old great grandmother were held captive as forced laborers in their very own home and farm which were now occupied by Polish people. Miraculously, our four generation all female family got reunited and managed to escape from Poland to East Germany (Soviet occupied GDR). Happy to be able to speak German again, they found a room in the ruins of a bombed castle in Klein Rosenburg, near Magdeburg in the province of Saxen-Anhalt. Our great grandmother who survived the dangerous and treacherous flight from Polish servitude died in the GDR at the age of 82, greatly due to severe malnutrition and starvation. There was hardly any food available, and she gave her small ration to her four young great grandchildren, saying, Eat, child, eat, you must grow and be strong. Finding no future in the Soviet dominated GDR with its ever present Secret Police, the family members took once more their lives in their hands and managed, one by one, to escape from the GDR to freedom in West Germany before the Berlin Wall was built.

My mother and grandmother fled to West Germany, but deep longing for their lost home, neighbors, and friends continued to fill their hearts. They never saw their home, their farm, their old neighborhood again after that fateful day when they had to flee. They carried deeply carved emotional scars as long as they lived,