History can be best understood when one can quote
from real-life personal experiences. Therefore I will describe a true
case for condemnation and what could be better than my own story.
After
the war my mother lived with my grandmother in Berlin. She was 19,
almost 20 years old and survived the hard times quite well. That is
until early 1946. When she returned to the flat one day in February
1946, she found my grandmother dead. In the end, at her age of 58 she
had not been able to fend off two soviet men who had first raped then
strangled her. Both the culprits were still lying drunk and fast asleep
in the flat. My mother went to the police in good faith and reported
the murder, after all the war had been over for almost a year and law
and order had been re-established. Perhaps she also felt sure about it,
as she lived in the American Sector of Berlin. The State Prosecutor
took the case anyway and began to make enquiries.
Three
weeks later, on March 25th, the Headquarters of the Soviet
Military Command in Berlin requested the file, which since then has
disappeared. At the State Prosecutor's Office there is only a memo of
the request and a note that the file was never returned. Only five
weeks later my mother was arrested by Soviet soldiers in Senftenberg
and sentenced to 15 years hard labour by Soviet Military Tribunal on
July 11th 1946 for alleged spying for a foreign
intelligence service.
In
order to serve her sentence she was sent to the special camp at Torgau.
Here she got to know a young Ukrainian, who was serving as a guard
there. The guard came from the small town of Grischki in the Ukraine,
where he had been born in 1925 as the youngest of five children. He
started school at six, but had to leave after two years to work on an a
farm as a shepherd boy. At this time in the Ukraine there was a wave of
hunger of unbelievable proportions due to Stalin's methods of forced
collectivisation, which claimed about 7 million lives. By making him
work at this age the parents could ensure that the boy survived. When
the German Army invaded the Soviet Union he was 15 years old and had
direct and close experiences of the horrors of war. In 1943, at the age
of 18, he was brought to Germany as forced labour. First of all he had
to work in the town of Brandenburg in a tank factory. In August 1943,
together with other forced labourers, he escaped from there, but was
recaptured on the German-Polish border and handed over to the Gestapo.
He was imprisoned in the Gestapo-prison in Schneidemühl and thereafter
in Deutschkrone, where he was set free at the end of the war by the Red
Army.
Following his release he was first threatened with the fate of all
Soviet forced labourers, as a traitor to the fatherland he should be
shot. By a lucky circumstance he managed to avoid this fate. Just
behind the front a new unit of stragglers from the Red Army was being
formed, so instead of being shot he was pressed into the Army. However,
first of all he had to go into a military hospital, where he still was
at the end of the war, then after a short period of training was posted
as Sergeant of the Guard to the special camps of Buchenwald and later Torgau. Former prisoners describe him as a shy and pleasant chap.
Despite his previous experiences this man fell in love with a prisoner
at Torgau, my mother. Although both
of them must have known the risk they were taking, a relationship
developed between them. Whenever it was possible, they met. Therefore,
during his watch, he was always leaving his post, which was then
unmanned, whilst my mother was always breaching the rules and
regulations so that she might be put into solitary confinement as a
punishment.
All this came out at the trial before a Military Tribunal of the
Internal Troops on February 28th 1948, a copy of which I
managed to get hold of a few years ago, as eventually their
relationship resulted in my mother becoming pregnant, of which the camp
administration became aware. Someone betrayed them however and my
father was arrested and also imprisoned in Torgau. Both of them
underwent numerous interrogations but my mother refused to name the
father right to the end. However, he confessed to the relationship in
order to bring an end to the matter and in the hope of a light
sentence. For the crime of having sexual relations with a German woman
he was sentence to 6 years in the Gulag and deported to Siberia. He
left Torgau on 17 April 1948 with 900 other prisoners and was deported
to a camp in Sukhobesvodnaye in the USSR. He and my mother never saw
each other again.
One day
later I was born. A few days prior to the birth my mother had been
transferred to Bautzen, where I came into the world. When I was 6 weeks
old, we were send to Sachsenhausen. We lived there in two barrack huts
at the edge of the camp in miserable conditions. One of three prisoners
died, regardless of whether they where old or young. It was left up to
the camp authorities to decide how to deal with the fact that there
were children present. We had no cloth, no nappies, no shoes or
anything else. One woman told me that we used clothes from people who
died. The mothers had to make do somehow and so it is no surprise to me
that not all of the children did survive.
In 1950
the special camps in the GDR were shut down. But the nightmare story
didn’t end for all mothers and children. Nearly all the prisoners who
belonged to the so-called special contingent, amongst them 11 mothers
with their children, were released, but those who had been sentenced by
Soviet Military Tribunal were handed over to the DDR authorities
to complete their sentences. It was freezing cold when we left
Sachsenhausen in February 1950. Over 1.100 women and 30 children and
babies were taken, some by lorry, some on foot, to the railway station
at Oranienburg. They were transported in cattle trucks, with no heating
in the icy cold, lying on the bare straw, with insufficient food and
toilet facilities, to the town of Stollberg, from where they were taken
to Hoheneck prison located high above the town. For the women it must
have been a dreadful journey into an uncertain future. What this
journey really must have been like can be ascertained from the final
report of the People's Police. It does not just contain the actual
details about the exact number of persons handed over to the GDR
authorities, but there are also statements about the transport
arrangements. First of all we can find out from German sources
something about the existence of the children in the camps. „About 30"
it says in the report by the People's Police regarding the transport on
11 February 1950 and a further two women with suckling children were
checked in at Waldheim as being on the transport before it was diverted
to Hoheneck. No more was mentioned but all the same there were many
pregnant and heavily-pregnant women amongst them. So it was that on 6
March, that is 4th weeks later, Johanna R. gave birth to
her son Gert in Hoheneck. Then on March 26th he was
followed by Viktor Harald and then on April 6th by the
child of Hildegard B. who died the same day. The child of Lieselotte H.
also died in the same year in Hoheneck. On April 12th a son
was born to Erika R., on June 4th Heinz-Rüdiger, on July 1st
Dorothea, and so on. The last one of those who had arrived from
Sachsenhausen to give birth was Elfriede L. on November 13th
1950. The child was still-born and therefore not officially registered
but a hand-written note made on the prisoner's card kept in the prison.
When these women, alongside the approximately 30 babies or small
children, who, in the space of a few days, had arrived in Hoheneck from
other camps, were admitted to the prison it was completely
overextended. Children had not been catered for in prisons in the GDR,
so the prison had a problem when it took over those sentenced by Soviet
Military Tribunal. They could not release the mothers as the power of
disposal of the women so sentenced lay in the hands of the Soviets
until 1954. They were unable to make a ruling solely about the
children, who had not been sentenced, but were „appendages" to the women. A solution was sought and it was
probably Ellen Kuntz from the Land administration of the SED in Saxony
who found this solution. At least she was named in the records of the
People's Police as having been responsible for the following: One day
small buses drove up to the prison and then several things happened:
some women were told that the children had to be examined by a doctor,
or had to be photographed and whilst the women were waiting in their
cells, the children were led out of the prison and loaded onto the
buses. Later, the mothers themselves had to put the children onto the
buses, this was frequently done by force. At this time the youngest
child was just eight weeks old and the eldest 3 years.
Without any sort of consideration mother and child were torn apart and
parted for years. All the women I questioned found this a massively
traumatic experience, that only healed years later, a long time after
their release from prison. These actions had been instigated by the
then State Secretary for Ministry of the Interior Hans Warnke, and
carried out on February 28th 1950 via the Mother and Child
prison governess and in the ministry for Work and Health by Käthe Kern.
For all the mothers, including mine, the world fell apart.
The state of the women after they had been parted from their children
was described in a moving report by a member of the Evangelical Church
in 1953:
„Amongst the women who had been robbed of their children was a Mrs. D.
from Sachsenhausen. Her small daughter had died in Sachsenhausen.
Shortly afterwards her friend gave birth to a child but died shortly
after the birth. Frau D. took the small girl to the nursery and looked
after her lovingly. She had a small picture of her own daughter, which
someone had drawn for her on a piece of paper. She was very attached to
this picture and kept it hidden away as drawings of this kind were
forbidden in the camp. After the child she had adopted had been taken
away from her, the guards also took the picture of her own daughter.
Fran D. suffered a nervous breakdown. The despairing cries of the woman
could be heard all day long even outside the prison."
I do not know how much the loss hurt my mother. She did not say very
much about it later. From the records of the prison, which were made
about her, it emerges, just how much she missed me. Was she, as I can
gather from the documents I have managed to acquire in the meantime, in
the beginning always full of resistance to her tormentor, as can be
seen from the punishment book, of the prison, where all the talk is
about rebelliousness towards the guards, but this resistance was broken
down more and more with time. Added to that, as with all the prisoners,
her health slowly deteriorated, due to long years of under nourishment.
In the end her resistance was broken and, like all the others she went
around during the day in silence. As she stated in her personal record
written for the prison on her release: „After my release I want to
work in a mine or some other like occupation and thereby ensure a
secure future for my son..... [and] in doing so, also prove that I am a
full person." I think she was a full person her whole life long.
The children were taken to a hospital in Leipzig. The report of the
then matron of the hospital lies in the archives of the deacon of the
Evangelic Church of Germany in Berlin. She herself fled to the West in
1951, and in January 1953 wrote about her experiences. So, in early
1950 she had received instructions to install a children's ward in her
hospital immediately, and to expect 20-30 small children that very
evening. The hospital on Waldstrasse at that time had 350 beds. The
hospital did not cater for babies.
She succeeded in procuring the most necessary items such as nappies,
blankets, milk bottles and beds and made one storey of the hospital
into a children's wing. Late in the evening the next day the first 10
children aged between 9 months and 3 years arrived. The accompanying
officer told her that the children did not have any names and should be
handled under the heading „Children of the Land government”. She was
forbidden to raise index cards about them. Apart from that she was to
ensure that no word of this was made public.
On the following day the matron of the hospital tried to acquire ration
cards for the children. At first the ration office refused to issue
ration cards for children with no names. She then managed to get some
metal plates with a number for each child from the People's Police,
which were hung round the necks of the older children and on the beds
of the babies. Only then was the ration office prepared to issue ration
cards and later tickets for shoes for the children, as none of them had
proper shoes. They had primitively-fashioned little shoes made from
canvas. The name “Sachsenhausen” had been sewn into the children's
socks.
After a few days a further delivery of another 15 children arrived. The
matron of the hospital sized the moment when she was alone with the
police doctor to ask urgently for the names of the children. She
realised that a child could die, and that the manager of the cemetery
would never accept a body without a name. That made everything clear to
the doctor, who placed the files at her disposal for an hour. Humidly
she wrote down the names at the same time establishing the fact that
the mothers were prisoners in Hoheneck prison near Stollberg. The files
also stated the crimes the mothers had committed - illegal border
crossing, spying, sabotage. The mothers had all been previously
imprisoned in Sachsenhausen.
Nearly every child had a bundle, in some cases with adult things and
frequently with a heartrending letter from the mother, written on torn
scraps of paper with a piece of plaster or coal with details of the
habits of the child as well as a request to treat it kindly. There were
also wishes for the child to be handed over to certain relatives. Tips
such as „Sascha has only ever slept in my arms, be good to him,” or „Be
nice to Dag, he has never known a bed”, these and other such deeply
moving requests were frequent. The staff of the hospital tried to keep
up with everything, but at the beginning it was very difficult, because
the children were crying night and day for their mothers. It was also
difficult to calm the babies, as some of them had only just been
weaned. Five of the smallest children, whom the mothers could not wean
so quickly, without avoiding doing them harm, did not come on the
transport. They were later taken to a children's home in Dresden.
Naturally the existence of the children could not remain a secret and
after a little while the grandmother of one of the children turned up
from Gera demanding the child be handed over to her. The matron of the
hospital had to refuse this request, but reported it immediately to the
Police President. Very soon afterwards a second incident occurred. A
father from Hamburg arrived and demanded his child. He had been
arrested with his pregnant wife in 1946 and taken to Sachsenhausen. He
had been released in January 1950, but his wife and boy had been taken
to Stollberg in February 1950. At the hospital in Leipzig he went at
once into the garden and called his son. The little one ran to him
immediately and they threw their arms around one another. But he too
had to leave the hospital without his child, and was lucky, one could
now say, to be pushed back across the border to the West under guard by
the People's Police.
After these two incidents “the children of the Land government” could
no longer be concealed. The matron of the hospital was now permitted to
write letters to the relatives and very soon thereafter 9 grandparents
or other relatives arrived to take the children away. The father from
Hamburg sent a sister from the evangelical mission to pick up his son.
At the end there were 16 children left in Leipzig hospital, whom Police
President scornful said no-one wanted. Eventually, in November 1950
there were transferred to three children's homes in Leipzig.
On the instructions of the Police President each child was given a
change-of-address and ration card with their full names. The
Waldstrasse hospital served as the last place of residence and also the
place of birth. The children were termed as orphans. The whole exchange
of letters with the authorities and the relatives was handed over to
the Police President. According to a decision made by the Ministry of
the Interior in 1952 these children were to remain in the GDR.
The mothers in prison were told that their children were now in a
children's home, that they were well and that the State would be
responsible for their upbringing, by which an upbringing in the
socialist spirit was guaranteed. In some cases the mothers were permitted to write to their children occasionally, but any visit by
relatives of the family living in freedom was prohibited.
Now and again during their term of imprisonment some mothers received
photos of their child, which had probably been taken by supervisors in
the children's homes on the instructions of the State. The women said
they were only allowed to keep these photos for a few hours to look at
before they had to be handed back and placed in their files.
From this point onwards all traces of the children disappear, as, in
the meantime, all documents concerning them cannot be found. In none of
the town-, district- or state-archives, nor in the Federal archives, to
whom I wrote, could any documents concerning the homes be found. In
response to a request the mayor of Naunhof wrote to tell me that the
files concerning the children had been burnt in 1966/67. According to
him, this happened: ,As they were in unusable, mouldy condition". Much
the same happened with the documents for all the other children's
homes.
From 1954 the GDR received the right from the Soviet Union to dispose
of those sentenced by Soviet Military Tribunal and they began to
release them in instalments. In July 1955 my mother's sentence was
reduced to 10 years and on 31 March 1956 she was released. During this
time she had only been allowed to write to me on a few occasions but
she had received, like the other mothers, four or five photos of me.
A few days later she fled to West Berlin and reported to the refugee
centre at Marienfelde. There she met a man, who also had returned a few
days earlier after 11 years as a prisoner-of-war of the Russians and
they married the same summer.
From the very first day after her release my mother tried to get me
over to the West. She wrote to the Red Cross, the Federal Government,
the GDR-President Wilhelm Pieck etc ...I do not know how many letters
she wrote, but no-one could or wanted to help her. Then, at some point
in time, because of the pressure she had created, she was directed to
an organisation in Limastrasse in Berlin by the Headquarters of the
Association for Political Refugees from the East. There they together
planned my abduction. A middleman was to speak to me on the way to
school in the town of Seiffen and bring me to West Berlin. As
authentication, that I really was her child, she had to produce my
birth certificate. That she could not do! We children had not been
registered in any of the camps or prisons. We' existed only as an entry
on the prison file-card of our mothers.
How she then managed to get me over to the West quite legally I do not
know. One day in January 1957 I was suddenly told that I was going home
the next day. The following morning I was woken very early, given a
rucksack, into which were packed my few personal possessions, and taken
to East Berlin. I arrived there late in the evening and was handed over
to a woman who was a stranger to me, my mother was not there. It was
only later that I discovered the reason for this somewhat strange
course of action: the GDR authorities were only prepared to release me
in East Berlin, where my mother, who had fled to West Berlin so soon
after her release, did not dare go. Therefore she had hired a woman for
a lot of Western money, and whom I did not know whether she was really
my aunt, to pick me up and bring me to the West. I was handed over to
this woman without any transfer of papers and we travelled by S-Bahn to
the West. We arrived in Friedenau, a suburb of Berlin, I think it was
after midnight. The train was almost empty and we walked along the
empty platform towards the exit. The station was raised above the
normal level of the land and a long set of steps led downwards to the
entrance hall. When we had taken the first steps downwards and could be
seen from below, a small woman in a brown leather coat ran up the steps
and wrapped me in her arms. In the whole of my life I do not think I
have ever seen anyone run up steps faster than my mother did that
night. At that time I was just 9 years old.
My
mother had been pardoned by the GDR because she was very ill with
tuberculosis. Six or seven years after her release she was diagnosed
with cancer. There followed a long series of periods in hospital and
ten years after we had found each other again she died in March 1967 at
the age of 41.
Since
then I have led a so called normal life. I studied, married and today
have two children. Since 1990 I have worked as a historian and training
consultant. In the meantime in the course of my work I have found more
then 80 children, who were born in soviet special camps and some of
them meet their mothers now and again. We exchange remembrances and try
to help each other.
So,
finally, there just remains the question of what happened to a small
Russian sergeant, who had been sentenced to six years in a prison camp
in Siberia for his love of a German prisoner. He survived the Gulag and
was released into freedom after six years. However, he had no money and
therefore was unable to return to his mother and sisters in his home
town. They were still alive and he had not seen them since he had been
transported off to Germany in 1943. They had written to tell him that
his father and one of his sisters had starved to death during the war.
So he remained where he was and started work for the railway. During
the time he had spent in the camp he had got to know a woman, whom he
then married. Together they had four children.
He had
not thought about a certain German prisoner for a long time, nor about
the child that he had never seen. In all the years I too had never
looked for him. I lived in the belief that he was dead, as my mother
had been told he had been sentenced to death for his crime. It was
1997, when I received some documents from Moscow by the German Red
Cross, that I found this was not true. I began to search for him and I
was very lucky to find out where he was living. In 1999 I visited him
for the first time in Russia. In 2000 he returned to Germany on a visit
for the first time after all the years, because he wanted to see his
grandchildren. It was not an easy visit for him and he had hesitated a
long time before making it. After that all he only had one more wish:
After my grandmother had reached the incredible age of 102 he wants to
live one year longer so he can tell everyone this story. His wish
didn't come true, he died on Christmas morning 2004 in the age of 79.
