Born in 1920.
Lived in the Volga Region – in the village of Neuenorg (Novaia Norgia), Saratov Region.
Father: Andrei Andreevich Rau. Leader of the kolkhoz farm. He was a highly respected man. Arrested in 1938, convicted to a 5 years’ detention in a corrective labour camp for having “propagandized against the Soviet power”. At that time they came to arrest many men from the village.
She cannot remember her mother.
She had a sister two years older than her.
In 1933 there was a terrible famine. The families were usually very big, with many children, and it would happen that even families comprising ten or more members were carried off by hunger. Two thirds of the village population died. The first who died were mostly men and people who did not like to work, but behaved sluggardly, for there was nothing on their little farms which they could eat.
They used to bury the corpses themselves; they were carried away on hay-carts. 5-6 people died every day.
It would also happen that they ate their own children. In one of the families the husband died. There were three children. By night the mother knived the youngest daughter. And the elder daughter later says: what kind of a meat is that? It looks as if these are fingers!? The mother replies that she bought it such as it was. Later the mother intended to slaughter the next daughter, as well. The elder daughter, however, woke up, and seeing what was going to happen, she ran over to her grandmother (her father’s mother). She is trembling and screaming all the time and does not want to go back home. I am going to stay with you know, she says. The grandmother reported everything to the village counsil. The girl’s mother had to appear there; the very moment, when she stepped inside – she collapsed right at the doorsill and died.
In the summer they used to cook soup from stinging nettle and orach. On the
kolkhoz farm each person received 200 grams of bread per day. They tried to
slaughter the cows a little more quickly, just to avoid that they were taken
away from them; but the sheep stayed alive till the summer. In order to fulfil
the plan, they were forced to yield foodstuffs to the state.
The sheep were also quickly finished off – four families allied; they
slaughtered a sheep at someone’s house, prepared it and ate it in a hurry; and
then they went over to the next family.
Foodstuffs were taken away from them. Lidia Andreevna recalls an incident,
when the authorities carried out a foodstuff revision with on eof the
neighbouring families. The husband was not at home at that time; his wife
refused to open the door, for she was sure that agang of bandits intended to
force their way in (in principle this was exactly the way it happened). One of
the arrivals, he was not a local, brutally thrusted her aside by means of a
butt. A shot rang out, and the bull penetrated his head from the chin up to the
back of his head. The man died on the spot (a dirty dog must die like a dirty
dog!). They dragged him into the storage room leaving him there till the
beginning of the winter. Nobody was willing to bury him. In the spring the dead
body began to thaw, and only then they would call people from the district town
to come and get him buried. They put up a stake with a red star on top. Nobody
commiserated with the man. The father said: “Well, the young man lost his life
by his own fault”. His wife was asked to appear before the village Soviet, where
she gave a detailed description of the incident. No legal proceedings were
instituted against her.
Every now and then they tried to steal something from the kolkhoz farm. One man tried to take home a whole sack; he got five years. An other one, Vasiliy, whose wife had died in the autumn and who had to feed two children, went mad – he ran away with a whole kettle of cabbage soup. “Where are you running?” – “I don’t know, everybody is running, so I am, too!”
The students (among them Lidia Andreevna) were chased to the fields; there they tried to get something to eat, by cooking corn. They managed to feed themselves during the time they spent at work in the fields, but he did not succeed to take anything home. They were chewing sunflower seeds all the time. Once, some plenipotentiary came over from the district town and said: “They have been cracking a lot of seeds, haven’t they?!”
She was working for the kolkhoz farm as milkmaid for one year. Lidia Andreevna and her friends finished the tractorists’ courses. In the winter they were studying, in the spring they successfully completed the practical training, and in the summer they were already working in the fields. She worked as a tractorist for the machine and tractor station for about one year.
In 1940 the military authorities would still mobilize the Volga-German men into the army. They ceased to mobilize them, when the war broke out.
In September 1941 there was an order to take all tractors to the machine and tractor station; there was an explanation that three days later all Germans were going to be evacuated. They did not believe it, but it turned out to be perfectly true. They were allowed to take along bedclothes, shoes and food.
The cattle was driven into some Russian village in the neighbourhood.
For about a week they were trapped on the train station. Two of the men tried to escape,but they were restrained from doing so. They went in heatable waggons equipped with two-storeyed plank beds; and right in the middle of the waggon there was a whole. The area around was in no way screened, so they had to empty their bowels for all the world to see.
They took along flour and slaughtered a sheep before leaving. The ate everything they had takenalong during the trip, for nobody gave them anything to eat. Sometimes the train would stop, they would light a camp fire and prepare some hot meal.
The men were not separated from their families. The members of the Rau family, who were forced to undertake this trip, included the mother-in-law, the elder sister and three little children. They were deported to the Tomsk Region, Velishansk Disitrict, to the hamlet of Kanash. Those who were working received a weekly ration of 4-5 kilograms of oat flour. After sieving just half of the flour was left. In Kanash there was no special commandant’s office, and there was no need to register. But the attempt to escape would not have occurred to anybody, either. Where should they run?
In the beginning they found accomodation in the clubhouse, later they were assigned other temporary quarters. The locals behaved quite well towards them; there was just one boy who used abusive language – he called Lida a “hitlerist”. She was unable to bear this insult and violently hit him right in the face. He ran away and complained about her, but the adults said: “Why do you insult her then? It is all your fault!”
A the time of their resettlement Lida was not able to speak the Russian language well, but she got used to it (first of all she learned how to curse –it was almost impossible to get by without swearwords). Nowadays, Lidia Andreevich speaks Russian quite well, buts he constructs all sentences the German way, and from all tenses she likes the nominative best.
In the autumn of 1941 all men were mobilized into the trudarmy. Those who later came back home reported that many had died; they used to take of the dead people’s clothes, took the corpses away at nighttime and piled them up on the ground. In the spring, when the dead bodies began to thaw, they were soused with fuel and burned up. Afterwards the remainders were buried.
In 1942, during the winter, Lidia and another woman went to the field. They looked for ears protruding from out of the snow. They cut them off, cleaned them, dried them on the stove and grated them. A neigbour saw this and reported to the militia what she had seen.
She was arrested and taken to one of the remand prison cells in the district town. She liked to be there, for on the kolkhoz farm you were either doomed to starve or forced to steal. Prisoners, who were kept in the remand prison cell, however, received a whole loaf of bread per day. Since her arrival from Russia (she did not consider Siberia to be part of Russia), she had not seen any bread.
Three days later the court hearing. Had the been in the field? Yes. Had they
cut off ears? Yes.
They were sentenced to a two years’ detention.
She had to walk on foot from the remand prison cell all the way up to Tiumen. She was accompanied by four guards. Lidia Andreevna saw swamps for the first time in her life. She was deeply astonished about why the people did not use such a huge field for cultivation.
She served her sentence in Omsk.
Having arrived in the camp she had to unload coal during the first time, then she was sent to some construction site (8 women altogether). The brigade leader – Shenia, was a Russian, the other – Germans). They were guarded by only one soldier. The daily work norm for two workers said – completion of one room. They took their lunch in the workers’ canteen, where provisions were much better than in the camp. In the camp they usually received some watery soup, cooked from bowels, while they were distributed real goulash in this place. In case they fulfilled the work norm they received a premium, additional food – either smoked fish or 300 grams of best fresh butter or even sausage. Once a month they were rationed out 50 rubels, half a kilo of sugar, one eighth of makhorka, two boxes of matches and a package of tea.
When the were taken to a place to unload cereals the women sometimes carried away up to a whole kilogram in their “sanctum” (i.e. they carried it “inside”). They usually sold half of it (they earned 8 rubels for half a tinful), the other half they used for cooking.
The barracks were equipped with one-piece plank beds.
On Sondays they did not have to work. And on Saturdays they wrre guided to
the bath-house in brigades. They received half a piece of soap per month. Their
were problems with combs: the metal combs had been confiscated, combs made from
other materials were not available.
Almost no woman had long hair at that time; Lidia Andreevna solved this problem
in an even more resolute way. She shaved off all her hair and kept this
hairstyle until she left the camp. She was never tortured by lice, she did not
need to spend valuable soap and did not have to cope with the combing problem,
either.
Due to poor rations and hard labour many women noticed the sudden absence of their period, for their organism had began to only holding up functions which would help to survive.
Instead of two years she just had to serve a one year’s and two months’ detention; then she was released due to the 1943 amnesty. She received a ertificate about her release, but she was not sent back to the place of special resettlement, as expected. She left for Krasnoyarsk, for the other women in the camp had advised her to do so. There she worked for a sovkhoz, where she ate away everything she could get hold of (she stodged herself with vegetables directly from the field), so that the others finally called her “fat Lida”. Later she removed to Momotovo she found work with a brick-making plant, where she formed bricks.
Kondrat (Konrad) Kondratovich Weber – born on the 25th August 1899, lived in
Momotovo as a special resettler; he was a German and also came from the Volga.
The got married in 1948 and lived together for more than 38 years. The children
adopted the family name of their father.
He was twenty years older than his wife, but managed to conceal his true age from her for a long time – Lidia Andreevna was convinced that he wasjust 12 yearsolder than her. They had no passports (Lidia Andreevna only receid hers a short time before going on pension, in the 1970s. The reason was that her birth certificate had gone lost when they left the Saratov Region). She learned the true age of her husband by poor chance when throwing a glance on his military passport.
As soon as they were married she was once again declared a special resettler, too: from this time she had to get checked and register with the special commandant’s office in regular intervals. She was quite astonished about this for, until that time, she had never been forced to register – not even in Kanash.
In Momotovo all men received a bread ration of 1 kilogram, women 800 grams, non-working family members 200 grams. The norm was the same for everybody, no matterwhether they were resettlers or lical residents.
She recalls some more Germans from Momotovo – Wasiliy and Yekaterina Kiselman(n), Ivan Schlein.
Interviewed by Aleksey Babiy, Yekaterina Berezneva and Valeriy Tsurov
(AB – comments by Aleksey Babiy, Krasnoyarsk “Memorial”)