Die Flucht: Escaping the Soviets

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The Flight

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December 15, 2002

 

I, Regina Röhrle, née Kurzmann, come from Silesia, specifically Lower Silesia, Grünberg, a town that numbered about 30,000 inhabitants. It was a sandy, hilly area with pine forests about 20 km away from the river Oder. My father became a semi-orphan at an early age; after the war of 1916-1918, his father married another woman, "the Grandmother". My mother was born in Upper Silesia (Pless); her father was a Landjägermeister, which meant "police" in the countryside. He was transferred several times within Silesia; after the vote (plebiscite), they actually became refugees for the first time.

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Mother's mother married at 20, as did my mother, though my father was 10 years older. Mother had three siblings: Margot (born 1912, died 1994), Ilse (born 1917, died 1990), and Gunther (born 1918, died 2006). I had a carefree childhood with my two brothers, Hans and Stefan, until the war reached us all. Yet even before that, I remember exactly the Kristallnacht in 1938, when the sewing machine of the Jewish cobbler down the street stood in chaos, his shop windows shattered, and the synagogue was burned.

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Start of the war, September 1, 1939; excitement and unrest in our families. On September 2, my mother sent me to buy sugar. I came home without sugar; I had no ration coupons! Food was rationed for everyone. Further consequences: Father had to go to war, Aunt Margot was conscripted to work in the office of a munitions factory. Aunt Ilse was first with the Red Cross, then became a signals auxiliary, known colloquially as a "Blitzmädel". She was sent to occupied France, to Arras near Lille, where she met her future husband, Ernst Grossmann.

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Ernst was in the Luftwaffe. Uncle Gunther had to go to Russia as a Luftwaffe soldier, where he was wounded and then sent to the rear area. On January 17, 1944, there was a big wedding despite the war; Aunt Ilse married her Ernst from Swabia. His parents did not like it at all that their son was marrying a Prussian woman. I remember this wedding as if it were yesterday. Uncle Gunther pulled strings and procured a whole deer, crates of wine, and other delicacies. By the way, Gunther was a jack-of-all-trades, a joker, and the darling of the family—as well as of the ladies of Grünberg. A cook came to the house and provided for all the guests, about 30-40, in the finest manner.

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The Catholic wedding took place in St. Hedwig's Church in Grünberg town; it was an event. From Ernst's side in Swabia, only his father and two of his sisters, Elisabet and Angela, appeared. They didn't get along so well with the "Prussians". Afterwards, Ilse and Ernst had to return to France, and it took three months before Ilse finally became pregnant and was discharged to Grünberg. She lived there with her mother (Omi). In August, a package came from Swabia from Ernst's sister Elizabeth with baby clothes and a letter saying the child must have been born by now.

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Notburga was born on December 4, 1944. Until then we were doing quite well, only the Battle of Stalingrad—where 100,000 German soldiers fell or were taken prisoner, 80% of whom never returned home—impressed me strongly; after that, I already feared a bad end for us Germans.

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When early January 1945 came—it was an extremely cold winter. Treks of refugees from the Warthegau passed through the city; Omi and my mother boiled "fake coffee" and tea, because the fleeing people were frozen through. We didn't believe that we ourselves would be refugees four weeks later. Aunt Margot had an acquaintance in the police who urgently advised us to leave the city and Silesia. We could already hear "Stalin's Organ" (rockets), the front was 4km from Grünberg, the Russians had just crossed the Oder.

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Trains were no longer running, so a military truck took us as far as Sagan. We, that was Omi (Mother's mother – Elizabeth Wansky), Aunt Margot, Aunt Ilse with her eight-week-old baby Notburga, my mother, my 9 and 4-year-old brothers Hans and Stefan, and I (14 years old). In Sagan, we were able to board a goods train heading west; the wagons were riddled with bullet holes, some straw lay on the floor. On the platform, a Red Cross nurse ran around with a crying child, desperately looking for its mother.

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Shortly before Eilenburg near Leipzig, the locomotive was uncoupled and we stood in the freezing cold—how long, I don't know. Eventually, a locomotive pulled the train to Leipzig. There, baby Notburga was cared for; Aunt Ilse could no longer breastfeed her child. A woman begged my aunt with tears to take her with us, she didn't know where to go. But we were 8 people ourselves, and the greatest fear—besides the air raids—was that we would lose each other.

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Coming out of the bunker, we waited for hours for a train to Stuttgart. My brother cried from cold and exhaustion. We feared the train would be overcrowded because it came from Berlin. Two soldiers were also sitting in the compartment, and when Omi opened her suitcase with sandwiches, both went out. They were hungry. Omi gave them bread to eat too.

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In the middle of the night, we arrived in Kirchheim and were well received by Aunt Ilse's unknown in-laws. Eight people: after a week, my mother and Aunt Margot traveled back to Grünberg under adventurous circumstances. They came through Dresden one night before the great attack plunged all of Dresden into a sea of fire and destroyed it. If Mother and Margot had had to witness this inferno—I would have lost Mother back then. But a return to Grünberg was no longer possible.

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Finally, a field post letter came from Father in left-handed writing; he was severely wounded and asked in Kirchheim if they knew anything about our family. He lay in a military hospital in Denmark; he had escaped the East Prussian pocket with one of the last ships due to his wound. Gradually, all family members who were soldiers arrived in Kirchheim; no one had fallen.

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On April 20, 1945, Americans (7th Army) occupied Kirchheim. We (Father, Mother, children) sat in the cellar with Catholic nuns. By candlelight, a tub full of food, mattress camps in the anteroom. At the last minute, the head nurse put my... Father behind a tin bathtub when Americans searched the house. I had never seen my father tremble before. Quick, quick, he had to jump over garden fences with strange trousers and a cap and got into the back of the hospital; the front was handed over by the Germans to the Americans.

Afterwards, he was a broken man: he mourned his homeland... and Mother had to tell him to look for work. He had to drag tree trunks at a furniture factory with his severe injury (his right hand was shattered), which caused him great pain. The owner saw it and took him into the carpentry shop.

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In the meantime, we had found a teacher's apartment, but only thin blankets and wooden boards for sleeping. Finally, we found a better place to stay, low rooms with a cannon stove, the floorboards bowed, the kitchen stove could only be used with smoke, but the landlords were warm and good. If it hadn't been for them, one of us would have died of hunger.

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The post-war period was worse than the war; we had no connections, were refugees, lived on nettles and spinach and bread rolls. There was bran bread, corn bread... everything tasted terrible. My mother was finally able to go to a relative of the landlady and worked there all day for a loaf of bread and five marks.

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After the flight in January 1945, baby Notburga became seriously ill, had cramps, and Aunt Ilse had to fetch special milk from a nursery home five times a day. But she recovered.

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1947 – in the terrible post-war period – the twins, Gudrun and Ingrid, were born. Aunt Ilse didn't fit into any shoes anymore, her legs were so swollen, and my mother gave her the last pair of shoes she had. Later the twins got whooping cough; there was no medication, so Aunt Ilse collected red slugs, put them in a sieve, sprinkled them with sugar, and the juice that ran through the sieve served as medicine for the twins.

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Uncle Ernst had meanwhile set up his own business as a master dental technician and literally worked day and night for many years. I remember that after the currency reform, he bought a motor scooter and then a Volkswagen Beetle, for which I lent him 400 DM at the time. Omi, Aunt Ilse's mother, was meanwhile living in the Grossmann household, and because the dentists often delayed paying Uncle Ernst's bills, Omi had to help out with her pension. Finally, Uncle Ernst's diligence paid off and he bought a house, where the laboratory was also housed.

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Notburga was in a boarding school with English nuns in Günzburg for some time – but she can probably tell that better herself. This is, roughly speaking, a small family history, which I have written down to the best of my conscience.

Stuttgart, December 15, 2002

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Regina