Erich Koch signed a “humanitarian” sentence in Białystok: for providing assistance to the partisan movement in the Białowieża Forest, a family living in Skupowo was sentenced to indefinite forced labor in East Prussia. The Third Reich, fighting the Russians, had to increase its war effort; trenches had to be dug in conquered lands, work had to be performed in armaments factories, and the future of the great Germanic empire had to be built through the slave labor of millions of foreigners, mainly Slavs. It did not matter that guilt had not been proven, or that the convicts had not admitted to the crime of resisting the occupier. They were simply outlaws. They were human animals, capable only of physically debilitating labor—robots deprived of a human psyche. Enslaved, despised, passive and powerless.
I remember the long, seemingly endless journey north and east in so-called cattle cars. This was a special type of railway transport used during the war, mainly for moving enormous masses of people, but also animals and other “goods.” Wooden carriages bearing Nazi symbols, with small barred windows or windows secured with barbed wire for ventilation, and wide doors bolted from the outside. A great cage rolling along the rails, crammed with several dozen families with children, making a journey of several weeks into the unknown. For the slave market began at several destination stations, such as Tilsit and others. There, future owners of free “labor” collected their promised “quota,” the “living commodity,” in accordance with their needs.
Earlier, the departure date and the extent of hand luggage had been specified: as much as one could carry in one’s hands. Bedding and warm clothes had to be tied into bundles, and, above all, one had to take rusks, a few spoons, and some unbreakable vessels—cups, plates or pots. Typically Gypsy equipment: portable, light and durable. The most important were the bread “rusks”—they made it possible to survive and satisfy the gnawing hunger in one’s entrails... They were a true elixir of life, protected like the most precious treasure. Thoroughly dried, they hardly ever grew moldy, and when covered with boiling water, they smelled of fresh country bread. They then became a thick soup, and after saccharin was added to the thick mixture, they tasted like dessert. I learned the taste of goosefoot and nettle soup, potato soup and kohlrabi soup, always meatless and salted to taste, forming the main course of the midday meal. Not for a day or a month—we ate that way for years, because the time of agony had come not only for the slaves but for the entire Third Reich: cannon fire continued from the east, while our “owners” and “rulers” became increasingly less swaggering. But that happened much later.
So we traveled in cramped carriages to East Prussia. Cold, terrifying. Hunger, fear and death accompanied us without end. There were also the gendarmes’ shouts, inspections, curses, beatings without reason, and sadistic abuse, especially of the men. The daily horror of war. Long, unnecessary stops at small stations, shouts of “Raus!” and driving us out of the carriages, a brutal inspection of our luggage, permission to drink water from the station pumps, then forcing the travelers back into the carriages, whose doors were slammed shut, and waiting for the locomotive’s whistle and further travel, usually at night. Beyond the tracks were pine groves, wetlands, the red roofs of passing villages, plowed fields, and then the same things again—as in a kaleidoscope. Small children cried, ran fevers, vomited and fell ill. They also died in the stifling air, in the cold of the rainy autumn, in the chill of night frosts. People were dirty and lice-ridden, emaciated and desperate. For many, this strange and lengthy journey was the last journey of their lives. No doctor or nurse came there. The stench of excrement blocked our breathing. “Cattle!” the soldiers escorting the transport said contemptuously, covering their noses when they opened the carriage doors during stops.
My brother and I ran fevers, coughing made us choke, and delirium became a true blessing. The gaunt faces of our parents, looking into our eyes and laying their hands on our foreheads, became a daily ritual: this was how they measured drops and rises in temperature. We did not care about anything: the subtle caress of our mother’s hand wiped away beads of sweat, briefly cooled our burning foreheads and gave us a sense of security. Then we remained in an exhausting half-sleep. Death? We had not yet fully grasped the concept. The agony continued; we were dying in the face of our parents’ helplessness and powerlessness, amid their despair and suffering.
But this was not yet the end of the painful experiences, because our tormentors had written a long death sentence for us—a programmed death by installments. We reached the final stage and the end of the journey. At the station platform, we were collected by an agent of the farmer Dawid Penschuck and taken to his ancestral estate in Schomingen (Kreis Elschniderung). The place seemed like paradise on earth: decent barracks divided into family sectors—one-room “apartments” with built-in kitchens—were true luxury compared with the health-destroying conditions of the journey. The “good German” also provided a shared dinner for several dozen of our families: cold potatoes peeled from their skins and covered with some sauce made of cream or soured milk mixed with salt. The taste stayed in my memory for more than half a century and remains there to this day: I can reproduce it precisely, although I would not be able to recreate such a culinary composition... The first dinner after many weeks of travel, and tasting rusks with water—this was an experience of exceptional importance... We were hungry, dirty, lice-ridden, ill and at the limit of our physical endurance. This was how the hated German soil welcomed us; later, it took its spoils in the form of my brother’s and father’s lives.
But now the ethos of work began, for adults and children alike. The German farmer allowed no luxury of rest and organized activities with clockwork precision—from dawn until nightfall, across the entire estate. My duties included herding horses, helping in the vegetable garden, gathering brushwood in the forest and assisting the older farmhands with loading and transporting wood. The humane master caught me idle only once, when, hidden in tall grass, I was lying on my back, staring at the clouding sky. He approached noiselessly, and only the searing pain in my abdomen announced the misfortune. The blows of the bamboo cane were painful and accurate, and the beating resembled a terrible ritual: methodical, place by place, without a trace of mercy or compassion. I covered my face with my hands, protected my head with my elbows and tried to get to my feet—all in vain. It burned, it hurt unbearably; I cried, screamed and called for help—to no avail. Blood dripped from my split elbow onto my face and soaked into the meadow; my back was bleeding, and the execution continued and continued. Red and black circles before my eyes, ringing in my ears, and everything covered by darkness. If this is what death looks like, then I experienced it in childhood. Workers returning from the fields found me beaten unconscious in the evening. I awoke on the bunk of a wooden barracks bed. With my bruised and bloodied body, I felt every blade of grass in the mattress. Everything was swollen, painful, blackened, pressing and pricking. I ran a fever for several weeks. Then I stood on my feet again...
What else do I remember from that execution? The horses really had caused damage to the grain. The farmer’s son had been killed near Stalingrad, so he was seeking his own reckoning for his grievances(?). This was the only case in which a German used a hard cane to write the decalogue of the duties (rights?) of a child-slave onto my skin. I was nine years old and remembered that lesson for the rest of my life. The consequences? At 17, I lost 65 percent of my physical capacity; discopathy followed. My mangled body defended itself against death, but the effects of the precise, calculated blows of the cane proved tragic for my skeleton and nervous system. I understand this today; I gained this knowledge from accounts of the extermination of the Polish population and its consequences, and from the medical opinions of authoritative experts. Why did I have to suffer, and what did we all suffer for? Can such harm be “compensated,” can tears and pain be wiped away with money, with West German marks?
Another “souvenir” of forced labor was frostbitten ears during the freezing winters in East Prussia, which could not be healed despite the passage of time. Bitter frosts and insufficient clothing decimated the weak: it is difficult to count the wooden crosses on mounds of earth that, after months, became anonymous graves, most often of children who had died. Such was the law of the day in a foreign, hostile land, such was the measure of the disgrace and crime of genocide. Many have forgotten this or do not want to remember it. And yet it is a tragic warning against collective hatred and national chauvinism.
In this four-year childhood martyrdom, there was no shortage of bright moments, warm memories and memorable events, as in every life. One day, while drawing water from a channel overgrown with reeds in a large bucket to water the horses, I scooped up an entire shoal of golden-red crucian carp. What a feast it was at home, how delicious the fish tasted—we could eat our fill of them for the first time... The next day, in the same place, I caught only a few fish; the following day, none at all: the aquatic pantry had dried up... But I learned to hunt pike standing motionless in the water: it was enough to gently muddy the surroundings, and the fish became easy prey. As time passed, we reduced the farmer’s vegetable garden by taking cucumbers, carrots, peas, kohlrabi and other vegetables. This was instinct and a condition of survival: the rationed allocations of bread, beet marmalade and saccharin simply were not enough. We gathered mushrooms, sometimes found a few handfuls of berries, and somehow existed. Always hungry—for four long years.