My mother, Maria Andreyevna Gartwig (Hartwig; maiden name Legler) was born in
a village of the Saratov Region in 1926. I recall that Mum called the village
Krasnaya Polyana“ („Red Glade“; translator’s note). About half of the villagers
were Ukrainians, the rest Germans. They all worked for the sovkhoz; they were on
friendly terms and lived in harmony.
Mother’s father – my grandfather Andrey Bogdanovich Legler, was chairman of the village soviet. There were four children in the family: my mother was the eldest daughter, followed by three younger brothers. In the summer of 1941 mother was already working for the sovkhoz as a milkmaid.
After the ukas about the deportation of the Volga-Germans had been passed in August 1941, my grandfather began to organize vehicles for the evacuation of all German families; they were to be taken to the train station. His family was the last that left. But when they were on the point to leave, they were missing their daughter – my Mum. They had to depart without her. When the daughter returned to the village, the Ukrainian neighbours were all sighing and moaning: „You should have seen, Maria, what they have done to your Mum! They have been calling and looking for you all the time, but were finally forced to leave without you, in order not to tear apart the entire family.“.
The Ukrainians recalled that the chairman of the village soviet, due to the hecticness, did not receive the allowance of travel expenses he was entitled to. Hence, they lifted her dress and wrapped the bank notes around her body. They got her a horse from the stables and, accompanied by one of the neighbour’s boys, she went to the train station on horseback.
She was trembling, her heart was palpitating – either, because they had been galloping all the way from home or because she feared that she would never see her family again. How would she be able to exist in this world all alone? And where was she supposed to live?
Fortunately, the Germans had not been loaded on board of the freight cars (for cattle) yet, so that Mum found her relatives after only a short time. They were all overjoyed, shed lots of tears. When everybody had calmed down, my Mum took her father aside and handed the money over to him, which, in the following, turned out to be very useful.
It was a very long trip to Siberia, and they had to cope with lots of difficult conditions; many people already reported about how many exiles fell ill and even died, how hard it was to orient oneself in the new place of residence, how they had to start from scratch, after they had been deported from their homes having to leave all their property behind. It is now my tasks to inform about the hard lot my mother had to experience personally.
They had just managed to slightly settle in, when the grandfather was mobilized into the „trudarmy“ – the labour army, some gang within the GULAG system, which was attached to the corrective labour camps of the NKVD USSR. He got to some pit on the Pechora river. Mum worked as a milkmaid as she had done before, but this time in the Omsk Region.
On the 28 June 1928 Mum completed the 16th year of her life and was affected by mobilization into the trudarmy already in the first days of July, just like her grandfather! However, she got to the Volga Region.
(The government of the country, which by all means tried to justify forced resettlement, accused the Germans, as it was explained in the text of the ukase about the deportation of all Germans, of having treated their fatherland and called them complces of the enemy. But instead of keeping them away from the front and from the Fascist army, in order to avoid contacts with the Fascists, they sent men and young people back to the places where they had been evacuated from, nearer to the frontline, while displacing mothers and their little children to districts far away from the front. Where is the logics about such a decision? The very thought shows all the mendaciousness of the unfounded accusations).
... My Mum came to the Tshuwash village of „Ibryaikino“ in the Kuibyschev (at that time Samara) Region, where almost nobody spoke Russian. Even nowadays, there still exist numerous village in the Samara Region, which are predominantly settled by people of just one nationality (Mordwines, Tatars, Tshuwash and others). Mum was the only German who got to this place; they simply abandoned her and then she fell into oblivion. For about a month she was roaming through the village – without food, without shelter. She went from house to house asking for labour. She began to job chopping wood, wiping floors, weeding pest plants – and in return for services she received food. Even though it was summer, it was quite cold at night-time, and when she lay down on the naked ground to sleep, she would begin to shiver. Moreover, she was all scared to spend the dark night under the open sky.
Sometimes, when the weather was really bad, someone had pity with her and allowed her to stay in his barn overnight. Finally, she was no longer able to stand this humilitation, this indignity, this dirty starvation existence – and she decided to leave for the train station. Without a single penny, she managed to board a freight car and get to the place, where hermother and brothers lived. It turned out that her cows had not been taken under anybody else’s wings yet, and so she started to work as a milkmaid again. However, the joy of her successful return to the family did not last long ...
Not even a month had passed, when NKVD people arrived; they arrested her and left with her to an unknown place of destination. Mother and daughter never met again, nor did they see their father / husband. (And I never got to know any of my grandparents; at the time when family members were finally permitted to get reunited, they were dead since long).
An action was brought against my Mum. She was sentenced, because she had deserted. She had to serve a one-year sentence in on e of the camps. Afterwards, accompanied by guards, she was taken to the Kuibyshev Region again, to the town of Pokhvistnevo. At that time they had already built barracks behind barbed-wire fences, there was labour and they received food. Labour, however, was the hardest one can imagine – up to 16 hours per day; and the food rations – well, no doubt, what kind of food it was (especially made for enemies of the people living behind barbed-wire fences). Mum lived in Pokhvistnevo for the rest of her live.. And the place where, at that time, were settled so many German trudarmists is nowadays still called Berlin by its inhabitants, although there now live people of all kinds of nationalities.
... Mum talked about her past in a quiet voice; however, there was one point, when she broke into tears – when she began to talk about my unhappy childhood, which I am hardly able to recall myself. She was weeping all the time, when talking about me, as a two-year-old girl: we lived in a dugout then, and every morning, before leaving for work, my Mum would tie me up to the bedframe; and then she left me all alone, in order to do forced labour ... Nothing is worth for a mother than seeing her own child suffer. Evean half a century later, she recalls this again and again, and it seems that the unhappy childhood of her daughter lacerated her heart much more than all the other afflictions and sorrowful situations. This report given by my mother put me into a state of shock. However, there was one thing I was very happy about – the fact that Mum got off comparatively lightly, for she was just sentenced to one year of camp detention.
But now, having studied all thes ukases and orders of the State Committee of Defense about the deportation of the Volga Germans and the mobilization of the German resettlers myself, I discovered that in July 1942 they neither had the right ti mobilize a 16-year-old girl to the trudarmy nor sentence it for desertion, for the first command of the State Committee of Defence „About the mobilization of German resettlers“ dated the 10 January 1942 clearly without ambiguity says, that only men at the age of 17 to 50 years were to be mobilized, and this command was effective until the 7 October 1942. It was only by the coming into force of the second command of the State Committee of Defense „About an additional mibilization” on the 7 October 1942, that the authorities were allowed to mobilize women at the age of 16 to 45 Jahren and men from 15-16 to the labour army.
I assume that my mother’s case was not the only one of its kind. But many people, up to this day, have not read these commands themselves. Hence, they were and are not in a position to reveal this „little“ arbitrariness against the background of bloody terror in the country.
I was naive enough to believe that the repressions of the totalitarian system are only considered illegal from the point of view of today’s common norms of human life and that, at that time, the juridical norms prevailing in the former USSR were absolutely legal. I was mistaken.
Let me draw the conclusion that, even though the norms of that time were already utterly dragonic, there still was enough “tolerance” to violate them, and nobody had to fear to be made responsible in the end.
I wish from the bottom of my heart that all people who deliberatly inflicted damage on someone else, will one day get what they deserved.
E. Tsutsareva (Gartwig/Hartwig)
City of Krasnoyarsk
25.03.2009