Journey Through A Woe-filled Past

By Uta Gerber Shervin

Journey Through A Woe--Filled Past is the story of a family, my family, that lived through the terror of Hitler's war-torn Germany. Most of my family survived the horrific bombardment of Dresden, capital of Germany's state of Saxony, in the night of February 13 - 14, 1945. Then almost five, I still have the occasional nightmare of stepping out into the raging firestorm when our home, too, was hit by bombs. By March 1945, the family had found shelter in Graupa, near Dresden, where the composer, Richard Wagner, wrote parts of his Lohengrin. The brutal war in the spring of 1945 had almost run its course. In the coming month another crucial event, the entrance of the conquering Russian Army into the quiet little town would have consequences for decades to come. Food and any consumer goods all but disappeared from the stores\' shelves. An elderly couple died of starvation during the particularly severe winter of 1945 - 1946. Saxony became a part of the German Democratic Republic--Communist East Germany. Mother as so many others lost her teaching job and worked on a farm and nursery to put some food on our bare table. After four years, the District Superintendent of Schools summoned Mother to the county seat and offered a return to the classroom. All she had to do was join the communist party and take some courses--indoctrination into communism! Her resolve to flee to the West suddenly became rock solid when the superintendent ended the interview with, "we have been watching you and know you have a ten-year old daughter. Don't worry, we will take good care of her while you are away for your courses."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781642580969

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Journey Through A Woe-filled Past

Uta Gerber Shervin

Copyright © 2018 Uta Gerber Shervin

All rights reserved

First Edition

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc

Meadville, PA

First originally published by Christian Faith Publishing, Inc 2018

ISBN 978-1-64258-095-2 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64258-096-9 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

In Memory of

Mother, Katharina Gerber

and

Grandfather, Eduard Weiss

whose unflagging courage and keen assessment of danger saw us

through perilous times, without whose wisdom and resilience none

of us would be here today.

In memory also of the millions of innocent lives lost on all sides in this inhumane and senseless war.

… And he said to me: These are they which have come out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the lamb…

They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore…and God shall wipe away all their tears from their eyes.

KJV Revelation 7: vs. 14b, 16a, 17b

Introduction: To my Children

To my Children

Kathy and Andrew, the narrative that follows has been written for you. After Oma’s death in 1997, you asked me to write down my recollections of our life in Dresden during Hitler’s World War II, Germany, the years we spent in communist East Germany after the war, the history of our family, and stories and anecdotes that make up our past and give testimony to where we came from and who we are. You are the last in the family who remembers, it’s on you now, you said.

Your grandmother talked about writing this story, her happy childhood growing up in Germany’s Silesia together with her siblings, Hilde (Hildegard), Lutz (Ludwig), and Dordel (Dorothea); her parents, Eduard and Ida Weiss; and their life together in Breslau, Silesia’s capital then, today a part of Poland.

After her marriage to Rudolf Gerber, the Gerber family played an important role in our lives. So this is also about our many trips from Dresden to Goerlitz where the Gerber grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins lived. From Goerlitz, we often boarded the train which took us further East to Breslau for a visit with the Weiss grandparents. Then came the bombardment and near obliteration of Dresden on February 13 and 14, 1945. After that, in April 1945, the Russian army overran our part of Germany. Finally, there is our escape from communist East Germany in 1950.

Mother never wrote the story. She had made an attempt, I found some notes. By rights, she should have been the one to write this account since she and Grandfather Weiss were the people whose common sense, wits, intelligence, and ingenuity kept us alive during a time of great upheaval, which raged throughout much of Europe during and after World War II. In hindsight, Mother may have found it too difficult to immerse herself in the traumatic events of the past. She gave a talk once to a local group about this time in our lives. The experience left her aggrieved and saddened for days. Reliving a past that caused so much pain and suffering, not only for our family but for millions of people throughout Europe and in other parts of the world, exacts a price of considerable mental anguish and pain.

Even though very young at the time, here is my account of what I remember of the events that took place then, including the many conversations Mother and I had during the course of our lives. Etched into my memory forever are the experiences of leaving our burning house in the middle of the night while the city was under attack, our odyssey through the raging firestorm, which engulfed Dresden during that night of February 13 and 14, 1945. Later there were years of extreme want. Mother lost her job as a teacher under the rising communist regime in what had become East Germany after the country’s eastern region was occupied by the Red Army. For years, she worked hard on a farm and nursery which supplied us with produce, something to eat during a time when stores were empty. The Russian Army appropriated everything in the way of food and goods for its own use while people starved. Finally there is our escape from communist East Germany across the Thuringian mountain range when Mother deemed the political situation too dangerous for us to remain.

As far as I remember them, here are also recounted the many stories Mother, the grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends told when we got together.

I hope these pages will provide you with a glimpse of the people that came before you on your mother’s side of the family in the not so distant past.

00.a Greer. Spring 1970, Andrew, Kathy, Oma, and Snow-Joe

The Bombardment of Dresden and Escape from Communist East Germany

Chapter 1

A Glance in the Rearview Mirror from a South Carolina Porch

South Carolina is awakening to a warm summer morning. Birds are chirping, splashing in the bird bath, while the ever-present squirrels claim dominion at the bird feeder. Shoo, I yell, but they take little notice of me until I get serious and step off the porch into the small stand of mostly oak and hickory trees behind my house. Scat! I call out authoritatively, waving my arms about. At that the furry little acrobats disappear, scaling tall trees in seconds, seemingly flying through the air to catch the next branch to the next tree until they reach their lofty homes high up in the leafy green where my eyes can barely follow. They will return once the coast is clear, meaning I’m safely ensconced in my chair on the porch again. The birds have the field for now, but they as well as I know that this is a temporary truce—the charming little bullies will be back.

Scattered about my breakfast table together with the morning paper lies an assortment of colorful materials I brought with me from my last two trips to Europe in the fall of 2007 and spring of 2008. There are brochures; flyers; postcards; a playbill from the Wiener Staatsoper, Vienna’s ornate opera house; used train tickets; and maps, some of my hometown, Dresden, the capital of Saxony on the Elbe River in the former East Germany. The memorabilia on the table catapults me out of my summer paradise two decades back when events unfurled in the late 1980s which once more brought tumultuous changes to the divided Germany and Eastern European countries. In 1989 the two Germanys united once more after more than four decades under separate regimes. East and West Germany became simply Germany again. The once formidable Iron Curtain vanished into the annals of history as the former Soviet Union crumbled. Today the Cold War as we knew it then is all but forgotten. Generations Y, the Millennials, and Z know the Berlin Wall and the imminent threat the Soviet Union posed to the West post World War II only from the occasional spectacle on the silver screen, a history lesson in school, perhaps from a story told by those of us who lived the nightmarish terror. Today travel from East to West flows unimpeded again. Relatives, friends, and acquaintances living mere miles apart who often had not seen each other in decades due to high barbed wire fences along fiercely guarded boarders visit and conduct their business as they had for generations before this ghastly war and its horrific aftermath.

I remember watching President Ronald Reagan on TV at the Berlin Wall imploring, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! Powerful words, mere rhetoric many thought at the time, I among them. But then on November 9, 1989, the unimaginable happened; the Wall really did come down. Piece by piece, the people of Berlin dismantled the loathsome structure, the decades-old symbol of communist hatred and separation. East German and Russian border guards who had shot at would be defectors, stood aside, unable and unwilling to react. The country was in the process of reuniting. What many had not dared to hope happened live on television for all the world to see.

Mother and I lived in Travelers Rest, South Carolina, when these events took place. Incredulous we watched the drama unfolding on TV: West Germans and East Germans, Ossies as East Germans were called by the West Germans, Ossies for Ost meaning East in German, working hand in hand at the Wall. Mother and I hugged each other, danced wildly around the living room, tears of joy streaming down our faces. We, like millions of Germans, had waited and longed for this moment and had wondered if it would happen in our lifetime. I’m an American citizen since the early sixties and proud of it. Yet at the reunification of the country of my birth, my own emotions were riding high along with those of all Germans.

My cousin, Dietrich Holz, who lived in Markneukirchen in the former East Germany, close to the Czech border, took the first opportunity to go to Berlin during those heady days of 1989. Mother always called him the double doctor for his doctorates in forestry and music to distinguish him from my other cousin Dietrich. Dietrich Dewor is the son of Mother’s sister Dorothea, Aunt Dordel for short. When Dietrich Dewor was just a little boy, he told Grandfather Weiss, our mothers’ father, that he would open a pencil factory when he was grown since everybody needed pencils. Instead the adult Dietrich wrote computer programs for today’s pencil.

In Berlin, Dietrich Holz joined in with the jubilant throngs cresting through the liberated city. He witnessed the Wall’s demise, he walked Berlin’s streets, and he attended the concerts with people intoxicated with joy in the newfound freedom. My music-loving cousin sought expression for his own exuberance at the Berlin Symphony where Beethoven’s Ninth gave voice to the general euphoria. Freude Schoener Goetterfunken, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy filled the halls. Through my cousin’s eloquent descriptions, Mother and I participated in the unbound rapture and felt an intimate kinship with the people newly liberated from communism’s straightjacket, which Mother and I had escaped years ago.

Dietrich Holz at the time of reunification was the director of the Institute of Music for woodwind and brass instruments for East Germany located near Markneukirchen where he lived with his family. As early as high school, this son of Father’s sister Hanna and her husband Adolf had given vent to his dislike of communist doctrine and the constraints it placed on the lives of people. One time as Mother and I visited Goerlitz, the home of my paternal and Dietrich’s maternal grandparents, also the home of the Holz family, Aunt Hanna and Uncle Adolf were called to school. A teacher, putting his own safety in jeopardy, warned them, Mr. and Mrs. Holz, I can tell you in confidence that your son’s essay about our present communist government is brilliant. However, I can grade it only with a C. Please try to prevail upon your son not to show his anticommunist leanings quite so overtly. It would put his future in this country in jeopardy and endanger your own safety.

As an adult, his education behind him, Dietrich worked more covertly with groups who shared his pro-western leanings. His letters to Mother and me were filled with criticisms of the East German government, its policies, the hardships, and havoc it wreaked on East Germany’s people. Mother and I usually held our collective breath when such a letter arrived, expecting to hear from Hannelore, his wife, of Dietrich’s arrest. During our life in East Germany, the government routinely opened and censored private letters. After the reunification, STASI records (East Germany’s State Security Agency similar to the former Soviet Union’s KGB) were open to the public. Dietrich, curious to learn what STAS I had on him, obtained his record, a voluminous file. Among the many entries, he found this: leadership figure with the wrong political leanings. Keep under constant surveillance . . . . As we had feared, his arrest, had the communists remained in power, was not a matter of if but when. The record also clearly stated the reason why he was never awarded the professorship to which he aspired, for which he was imminently qualified.

As I examine my collection of mementoes on the table, I’m jolted back to the here and now, and my thoughts converge on the two most recent trips, which had reunited me with friends and relatives, some of whom I had not seen in decades. The trips led me through a number of countries and, finally, to a reunion with my hometown, Dresden. Arthur Shervin, my husband, a member of the US military when we married, informed me then that I would not be able to travel to communist East Germany for a visit with family at any time, even if I received permission from the East German government to enter. After the reunification, my work schedule and limited vacation days allowed only brief trips to Europe, two weeks in Austria with my father and my sister Lilly and a few days in northern Germany with Aunt Dordel and my cousins. Now, after retirement, there were no further time constraints. I could stay for a month, two, or for however long I chose. Yes, I would visit all the places that loomed so large in my memory. Dietrich Holz and I had made plans to meet in Dresden for the city’s eight hundredth anniversary celebration in 2006. Frauenkirche, the Church of Our Lady, one of Dresden’s foremost symbols had been rebuilt and re-consecrated. Unfortunately, Dietrich passed away before our planned trip could take place. Shocked and saddened at his untimely death, I resolved to make the trip by myself, albeit a year later than planned. Dietrich would have wanted me to make this trip. So in 2007, I went to Dresden for a visit to my hometown and the people we left behind when Mother and I fled East Germany in May of 1950.

Chapter 2

Escape to Freedom

The train pulls out of the great glass-domed hall which is Dresden’s main train station, Hauptbahnhof. It is gaining speed, taking a westward direction toward Thuringia and the West German border, away from the massive glass-domed depot where Aunt Hilde, Mother’s older sister, and Inge, my seven-year-old cousin, had lost their lives during the firebombing of the city on February 13 and 14, 1945. With every click of the wheels, the train brings us closer to the border, which we must cross to flee the communist regime that is threatening to ensnare Mother and me deeper into its ominous political apparatus. The year is 1950, the month, May.

Not long after the Soviet Army had overrun and occupied what was soon to become the German Democratic Republic, Communist East Germany, in the spring of 1945, Mother along with most other teachers was abruptly dismissed from her teaching position by the new authority. Times were hard. Everything in stores, which wasn’t much to begin with during wartime, was commandeered by the occupying Red Army. The occupiers led farm animals to their slaughter, confiscated farm horses, forced their way into homes, taking whatever caught their fancy while terrorizing the occupants, mostly women, children, and the elderly. During the especially severe winter of 1945 to 1946, some people in the town of Graupa were rumored to have lost their lives due to starvation.

After the bombardment of our home in Dresden during that cataclysmic night, we had found a place to stay in Graupa with the Behmel family. Then Mother’s teaching position had provided us with a small apartment, a nearly unattainable luxury with hundreds of thousands made homeless in nearby Dresden, not to mention the masses that had fled from the East ahead of the advancing Soviet Army. Now, without a means of support, in the spring of 1946, Mother found work at a farm and nursery, relatives of our new landlords in Graupa. She worked hard to keep up with the seasoned farm workers, bringing home produce from the fields, something to eat. Tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans, and onions grew in late spring to early summer, potatoes in the fall. Her arms became strong and muscled and her face suntanned.

One day in the spring of 1950, after four years of working at Heide’s farm, a letter arrived from the district school superintendent in Pirna. The letter instructed her to appear at Pirna’s Sonnenstein, a fortification on the cliffs above the Elbe River with a grizzly Nazi past, which housed government offices during the communist era. The letter stated a date and time when she was to appear. The superintendent, a woman, informed Mother that she had been watched during the last four years, and the regime was pleased to see that she had not shied away from the hard work on a farm. In short, the government authority wanted her back in the classroom. First, alarm bells rang in Mother’s mind. Being watched by a sinister government is not a comforting thought. Of course she would have to take a number of courses, the superintendent continued. More alarm bells—indoctrination into communism. And then, Yes, we know you have a ten-year-old daughter. Don’t worry. We will take good care of your child while you are away taking your courses. This was the final straw for Mother. Now they want to warp the mind of her daughter! Mother only nodded. The appropriate documents will be sent to you. Fill them out and return them promptly, the superintendent had said in dismissal.

The train chugs along the picturesque Thueringer Wald, stretches of wooded hills and mountains through which the border meanders, ever closer to Probstzella, the last station before the border. It is then that Mother overhears a conversation held immediately behind us in hushed tones. The speaker is saying in essence that people getting off at the last station before the border who do not have a legitimate reason for being in town or a name and address of someone they plan to visit will be arrested on the spot and taken into custody by the border patrol.

Mother has heard enough; she knows we were getting close. The next time the train stops, we get off, Mother with her yellow leather handbag containing our documents and I carrying my school backpack, the Schulranzen, which today does not hold any school books, only a change of clothes. We walk through the little town unhindered, unobtrusively, a woman with a handbag doing some shopping and a school age child. At the end of town, we walk down the highway along the mountain range. A farmhouse appears in the distance, a woman working in her yard right by the house. Mother calls out to her as we approach. Could she have a word with her, where is the border? The woman doesn’t even once look in our direction but says, Go and sit under the tree over there and make as if you are talking to your child. I will answer your questions. We can’t be seen standing together. They are watching us from up there with field glasses. The border goes along the summit of these hills behind you, she continues. It is patrolled by East German border guards and a number of Russians. She mentions the number patrolling that particular area. I seem to remember the number twelve, twelve border guards, seven of them East Germans, five Russians. They are armed and they have dogs with them, she warns. Your best chance of crossing is around twelve o’clock noon when they change the guards. Once you’ve seen the border posts, you must pass through a no-man’s-land where all trees and shrubs have been cut. You are out in the open then and must run until you see the posts on the western side. Oh, and one piece of advice, don’t stay on the paths. Stay close to the ground in the underbrush and have your child listen to the ground occasionally. You can hear steps a long way off on the spongy ground. And another thing, walk toward the edge of the woods through the orchard behind the farmhouse, stay under the trees . . . . The entire time she had been talking and giving advice, she was on her knees, pulling weeds. Mother thanks her and nods to me. We get up and walk alongside the farmhouse into the orchard the woman has mentioned and soon find ourselves under the fruit trees. Their leafy branches provide cover almost up to the tree line of the forest. We quickly cover the last few steps and disappear into the trees and the dense underbrush.

Cautiously we begin our climb upward, staying close to bushes and small trees. I don’t know for how long we had climbed when we hear a dog barking at a distance above us not too far away. Mother and I sink to the ground among ferns and young spruce trees and freeze. For an indeterminable time, we crouch motionless, hardly daring to breathe. The barking finally becomes fainter. Mother has me place my ear to the ground. I don’t hear anything, no vibrations on the ground, only the soft breeze through the forest above us. We wait a bit longer and slowly get off the ground to resume our assent. There is a path ahead of us which we must cross. Bushes, trees, and grasses have been cut back to make it more accessible. From our hiding place, we check in both directions. I listen to the ground again. The coast is clear. Nothing but the birds chirping high up in the trees can be heard. We hastily cross to the other side of the path and disappear into the sanctuary of the underbrush.

It is getting warm for Mother in her coat and me in my gray felt jacket as we climb higher and higher through bushes and brambles. At one point I look behind and try to see the farmhouse and the orchard through the branches. Nothing is visible but trees and the vegetation we just struggled through. Mother is moving on; I stay close behind her. Suddenly there is a loud noise like the cracking of a whip. Mother pulls me to the ground and is on top of me, a gunshot not far away. We stay very still in our hiding place; again our breathing has all but ceased. Mother takes my hand and hugs me tightly. My heart beats so fast and so loud I feel it must resound through the forest for everyone to hear. We stay in our position under the brush for a long time. When everything is quiet once more and only the noises of the forest can be heard, Mother motions that we are moving on. A few feet further above us, we encounter another path we must cross. Again I listen to the forest floor, which does not give off any ominous vibrations. The path in both directions is clear. We cross and disappear into the brush again. By now, as the noon hour approaches, it has become quite warm. Still, it is easier to keep our wraps on rather than carry them.

Our progress is slow but steady. At one time, we hear voices in a distance. They are still too far away to make out what is being said or the language spoken but close enough to make us stop in our tracks and duck down. This time a grove of young spruces provides cover. The voices come closer and closer, then become fainter again until they fade away, the signal to continue our journey. We stealthily inch further up the mountain. The summit can’t be too much further up. Mother checks her watch and looks toward the sky when there is an opening between the tall trees. The sun