From memoirs of Amalie Kondratevna Fritzler (Muth) born in 1936.
When our family was facing repressions, I was a little four year-old girl. I learned about these occurrences from memoirs of my parents, but I also recall a few things that happened in those terrible times. My mother Amalie Kondratevna Muth (father insisted in giving me the same first name in her honor) and my father Konrad (Kondratiy) Kondratevitsch Muth lived in the Saratov Region; unless I am very much mistaken the hamlet was called Grimm. They had three children, two daughters and a son. The family became victims of repressions in 1941; this is how they dealt with all Germans. They came for father and deported him to Sverdlovsk to fell trees; he never returned home. My mother and we, the children, were also forced to work in a wood harvest area 12 km away from Krasnoyarsk. My sister died during transport. At first they ferried us across the river Volga, then sent us to Krasnoyarsk by train. It counted many wagons, some of which were uncoupled in Krasnoyarsk, some in Nizhne-Ingash, the rest went on all the way up to Kazakhstan. We were fed inadequately. Mum and I were dwelling in a shack, which disposed of numerous rooms; each family had its own little room with a stove, and there was a long common corridor. Mum told me that the trees were felled by men only. Mum had to saw the wood up by hand. The laborers were rationed out bad food, they were insulted and abused. Those who did not want to work were pushed from their plank beds and driven to work by force. They used to cook beets for the workers, which every now and then were flavored by vegetable oil. Once, when Mum was whitewashing the walls of the canteen, the cooks were kind enough to quickly pouring her some beet soup with vegetable oil into a jug; we were so happy about that and ate up all to the last drop.
In the summer the children used to be sent to the kolkhoz farm with their mothers. There we cultivated cabbage, potatoes and other vegetables. We also had to weed. During the summer we lived in earth-huts. Once such a dug-out caved in; only too well that nobody was killed. We found accommodation in a horse stable associated to the kolkhoz farm; but what could we have done about it – there was no alternative housing space available.
After the war we left for Mum‘s sister Frieda Dynssis (she was married several times) to Taramba. There we stayed with Maria Mikhailovna Fritzler. At that time many people were affected by repressions. Mum’s brother Jakob Yakovlevich Lefler was one of them. Jakob Alekseevich Salzman was also subject to political persecution, Andrej Schwarz (I do not recall his father’s name) was deported, as well. My brother Fyodor Kondratevich Muth was exiled to Ingash. In Taramba I met my husband to-be, Alexander Fritzler, who was a victim of repression, too. Sasha‘s brother Karl Karlovich Kaiser was repressed. as well; he worked somewhere in one of the separate forced labor camp sub-sectors called Savodovka, which was situated in the Ingashsk District; later he happened to get to Taramba. My husband’s mother, Emilie Yakovlevna Fritzler and her sister Rosa were also victims of repressions; they worked for a wood chemistry enterprise in the camp sector of Savodovka. Later they moved to Taramba; that was in 1948 – and that was they time we first met each other. Afterwards my husband and I moved to Yushnaya, where we stayed for 40 years. Well, there were so many repressed Germans, but Lithuanians, too, had to bear a lot of misery. There were so many of them.
Some of our relatives lived in America; mother had known them, but I just do not remember them.
Early in the 1990s, after mother had already died (she died in 1990), Lithuanians came here to visit the place and to take the mortal remains of their relatives back to their home country. I do not remember anything, I was just a little girl at that time, but A(u)gust Felde and his wife know all of them; they have all toiled for the labor army, they have to remember everything. They live in Yuzhnaya in Mechanisatorskaya Street. Their daughter Irma knows a lot of things about those difficult times. And whom were those times easy for? But for as those times were particularly hard – what did the deport us for?
Recorded in the words of Amalie Kondratevna on 19.01.2014
by T.A. Mileshko