Memoirs: three different fates of women, entirely different from eachother – and yet so similar.
I recall a hot summerday. My father was working on the roof of our new house, when the only loudspeaker in the village announced the impending resettlement. They gave us 24 hours to pack our belongings. Crying, shouting, tears. It was not allowed to slaughter the cattle, we had to pass it to the authorities, leave it behind. In front of the registration office – a long queue. Our neighbour passed her cow – and received nothing but a piece of paper without official stamp in return.
On our way, up to Kamyshin – there was one cart after the other, one for each family. We only carried a few belongings with us, clothes, six children. During the last night at home mother baked bread and slaughtered a chicken with great secrecy. If this would do for all of us? I also remember the conversation of the old people – they were to depart on the next transport, they would be taken into the steppe and then – down the precipe with them! Nobody cherished the slightest hopes to stay alive.
They crossed the Ural Mountains. Towards the end of September we reached our place of destination in the region of Omsk. It had got colder, the area around was swampy and – remote. The local residents did not know anything about us; they believed we were prisoners of war and kept away from us. We had to get off the carriadges with our belongings and were distributed on the surrounding villages.
A hut, half built into the ground, no firewood. They fetched father away to the labour army, to Vorkuta. Our family was left behind without means. Father returned as a cripple five years after the caving in of a drift. And now I was the breadwinner. I worked for the kolkhoz like a man. The others did not behave badly towards me, the chairman took pity on me. In secret I collected frozen grains from the threshing floor, hid them in my felt boots and stole away. Since that time I have serious pains in my legs – rheumatism. I was terribly frightened. They had already arrested my aunt for having pocketed a handful of wheat. But at home there was nothing to feed the little ones with. They had to be fed up, because very soon they would certainly arrest me , as well. What would happen to them then? I knew instinctively what would happen, and, in fact, both my sisters died that very same year.
They forced me into the labour army near Ufa. A huge camp, the prisoners came from everywhere. They were between 16 and 55 years old, and many women got separated from their children. The gang was chased to its working place through the whole village; some people threw stones at us, others – beets. The war was on, funerals took place everywhere. They do believe we are fascists.
I worked in so many different places – I dug out trenches underneath the military aiorport- my hands froze to the haft of the spade. I worked with gas welding equipment near an oil pipeline – there I received a bigger food ration; I dragged a long a 90 kg gas bottle. We were forced to slave away 16 hours every day. When we went to sleep, we were dressed int he same clothes we had worn at work. The people grew ill and died, mainly the townspeople. To be taken to hospital brought ruin upon the people for sure; there, they ill people did not receive any food anymore. After the war life became a little easier.
I suffered a lot in the course of my life. When I did not have to regularly register with the commandant’s office anymore, I decided to go to school. During the days I went to work for the factory, in the evening I attended school to learn Russian. I became an engineer. I brought up my own children, grandchildren. Everything is fine now. But the mental agony caused by all the humiliations deeply stuck in my memory. What was all this good for? And each time one of my grandsons has to fill in the questionnaire to receive a new passport, he also has to make an entry regarding his „nationality“, and this is when I start to live through all the past misfortune once again.
Our village was evacuated on the 7th of September. They accepted one horse and one rack waggon for each family: our family consisted of me and my three-month old daughter, my husband, his brother with his wife and mother-in-law. The left behind cattle lowed in the deserted village. In Saratow all people were loaded in a train. We went southwards. I recall a lot of sand, heat and camels. Our foodstuffs got lost, there was no water, scarlet fever broke out. Many suffered from nosebleed. I was terribly afraid to lose my child.
Later I often recalled the trip. When we needed to go to the toilet, we were always accompanied by guards. And all the people that died en route. We arrived in Biysk and then continued our way to Pushtupim. The accomodated us in the houses of local residents, who received us watchfully. It took some time, until we finally settled into our new surroundings. I am a rather energetic and strong woman, who does not evade work. The put me into a brigade. The other girls there did not understand me – they laughed, but I did not feel hurt or offended.
Hardly had we become used to our new life, when they arrested my husband and my brother-in-law and conscripted them into the labour army – to Kotlas, a forced labour camp with an intensified regime. There they almost got nothing to eat. The people soon became exhausted by the hard, inhuman work. The dead bodies were simply thrown into the nearby mountain gorge.
My husband worked as a driver; he was not having such a bad time as most of the other prisoners. He held for about one year, then they released him – entirely exhausted and weakened. His brother Andrey, a blacksmith, grew seriously ill, due to mulnutrition; he died soonafter.
Andrey’s wife also passed through the labour arm – she had to fell trees for a period of 5 years. She had loved her husband with all her heart. Later she lived in our family for the rest of her life. She brought up my children, but did not get married again.
She bore his name until she died, just on Christmas. She had been a holy woman, deeply religious. Her husband was nursed back to health by our landlady – she regularly fed him with milk. I will never forget the goodness of her heart.
As far back as I can remember, I was an orphan. At first I lived in an orphanage for little children; later they took me to a children’s home in Halbstadt. I did not know anything about my parents. The others teased me and called me a fascist. In case they were of my own age – I „tore them into pieces“, if they were my educators – then I would give them sharp replies. In early years I got used to hold my own stand.
The year 1958. I was working for the college of pedagogics at that time. One day the asked me to come to the district department of national education: ! Your mother found you“.
I did not intend to go to the station – my mother did not mean anything to me, She, who had put me to the orphanage and now found me here. The landlady was a good but simple woman. She poured me a glass of milk and said: „Go and meet her. Do not give a rush jedgement, until you know all the details, the background. The first meeting – a tall, very skinny, exhausted woman with a strong-willed look; she spoke Russian very badly. And I – I was unable to embrace her immediately, and this is what I will never forgive me.
Only later I learned that she had spent 19 years in the KarLag, one of the cruellest camps of the NKVD – without having the right to receive and write letters. At the age of 49 she was a total invalid, suffering from rheumatism in her legs, her joints being irrevocably damaged, one single tooth was left in her mouth and her heart was so used up, as if she were a hundred years old. She was not able to cry.
It tuirned out that my parents, German Communists and anti-fascists had come to Russia in the 1930s at the invitation of the government. They had come here together with Wilhelm Pieck. Father came from a textile manufacturer’s family – „Raff & Söhne“, a company with its registered seat in the town of Algebirg. Due to his Communist attitude the grandfather disinherited him. Mum was a locksmith’s daughter, there were eleven children in her family, where enthusiasm for Communist ideas were more likely to understand.
In Moscow they both passionately worked for a famous internatonal children’s home near Lopastnaya station; there first child was born there. Soonafter the family was sent to Halbstadt in order to organize a German national district: Dad – as the director of the boarding school and honorary editor of a newspaper called „Red Flag“, and Mum – as the head of the district public health office.
This task was a new and thrilling matter. Dad, enthusiastic about his work, took everything from his home to school – his violin, a furcoat, cushions. My parents got used to the new surroundings; they were well-known all over the district and the people loved them. I was born in 1935.
Father was arrested in January 1938: „ ... because he tried to prepare a revolt against the Soviet power by means of the mass media“. They confiscated 147 photographs, more than 1000 books – he, in fact, had less personal belongings than books.
Exactly two weeks later they came for Mum, in the middle of the night. She was eight months pregnant at that time. The representative of the secret police tore the only precious object that had remained with her into pieces – directly in front of her eyes. But there were merciful people, too. They showed her, where her husband was - her husband, who she could hardly recognize, because they had beaten them up and crippled him. She gave birth to her child in a freight car, during a transport of male prisoners; a veterinary attended at the birth. The child died after three months. The worst was yet to come – long, terrible years – a story, which, believe me, not many people can bear to listen to till the very end.
The material was selected and drawn up by Svetlana-Yadrishnikova-Fribus, Press Center of the German-Russian House of the Altai region.
Sibirische Zeitung (Siberian Newspaper) plus No. 8 (38), 8/2001
(newspaper published in Novosibirsk)