Tired of waking

I long for the night.

Undressing shadows

Folding their gowns

U. T.

PROLOGUE

With tiny steps she tip-toes along the edge of that dark hem, retracing fading stitches of a gown worn out over time. Careful, not to stumble on that garment her shadows have woven those past fifty years. Unable to shed the past, unwilling to forget she moves along. Still waiting after all this time.

She realizes, history is a matter of opinion depending on geography. The chronicles of victors remain meticulously stored in archives for generations to come. Don't you dare question what is written. Oh yes, she knows. Don't doubt, for they know better. Although they were not there. So what about the suffering of women and children who mind landscapes when men battle on foreign soil? Anywhere.

Most of their stories stay hidden. Untold and unwanted within the big picture of world events. A nuisance. And, in particular, deemed mathematically unimportant.

Victors and losers, friends and enemies. Where to draw borders, permanent lines? At the end it’s all the same. For all involved. Despite written documentations, one way or the other. The past doesn't care. It just is, as all stories.

What began by pure chance later unfolded by necessity, because in those days choice was a luxury few owned. I did not witness the beginnings, because it happened before my time. But I saw enough later, as a child. And the talk, the terrible gossip and degradation of displaced people. A nation divided among its own people and wounded so deeply, leaving scars for generations to come.

The end of the Second World War is only the beginning of unspeakable brutality for many civilians. In particular in Germany, the loser of the conflict. Fourteen million Germans flee from the Red Army in East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia and other German territories beyond the rivers of Oder and Neisse in the middle of the winter. A war lost and with it the soil of their forefathers.

Expelled by the Russians, who are now master of one fourth of German territory in the east. The Soviets want those lands vacated. Promptly and without delay for a Polish population, which is being chased further west out of their own country to enlarge the Soviet territory. Joseph Stalin is enacting the resolution of the Allied Forces from the 1945 Potsdam Conference to shift Germany's borders westwards with the expulsion of all Germans from areas in the east.

Stalin has permission by decree. And although the excess of brutality is not part of the Allied order, it is not prevented during actualization. There is no pardon when it comes to kin liability of Germanic peoples. That's the idea, the thought and the deed which follows. For the victors, every German is guilty. Even if they were only bystanders.

And Stalin is clever; five months before the Allies give the official go-ahead of expulsion in the east, his soldiers get to work. The same happens in Czechoslovakia where 2.5 million Sudetenland-Germans are banished. Not orderly, but in savage ways which include rape and execution at random. Many captured Germans, not only soldiers but civilians as well, are shipped to Siberian labor camps to rebuild his communist empire.

Germans know what it means when people fearfully whisper: “The Russians are coming”. They run for their lives.

In haste they leave all possessions behind to trek on foot toward the west. Outlawed, chased like cattle by the Red Army. Ahead of the gunfire but often within. Many too old and weak to escape unimaginable cruel revenge.

Fourteen million civilians on the move. Displaced and deported, dishonored and starving while low-flying planes spill their firepower with machine-guns on anything that moves below. To kill. Mostly women, children and old men.

Two million expelled Germans die on the long walk to the west. And the living? At a loss of their land, homes and loved ones. Dead souls marching.

Blunted, desperate. Demoralized and dammed. Stripped of self respect over and over when they arrive after the war in West Germany in the rubble of Hamburg, Cologne and Düsseldorf where nobody wants them.

“There are three curses: Wild boars, potato beetles and displaced Germans,” many in the West say of their fellow Reichsdeutsche (German Nationals) upon arrival.

The west cusses the overwhelming number of expelled Germans from the eastern Hinterland. Those people are considered an additional burden in a landscape already crushed, flattened and on its knees.

In the west fifty percent of all houses are destroyed while food is rationed. Hunger a constant companion. A war lost, two million German soldiers are still missing.

Perhaps unbearable grief can be shared, but how do you feed an additional twelve million people from the east? Survival is a lonely task few are willing to share. But then again, desperation creates more than bystanders. Didn’t the famous German composer Richard Wagner say, when man has it good he is bad. And when man has it bad, he is good?

Those words of an artist will put a nation to the test.

But where to begin? And who takes the lead? The women, of course. How could they not? Millions of men have died in the war, several millions are still missing, most of them in prisoner of war camps.

Men who survived are haunted by guilt. Many are mental wrecks after years in the trenches. And later at home, rejected by their own children. It’s up to the women as after every war. Not by choice but out of necessity a new self-confidence leads to female domination in postwar Germany. The burden of a country in rubble, hunger, demoralized men and neglected children weigh heavy on their shoulders. Meager food supplies, surrounded by nothingness force women to rise to the task.

Inventive, they join forces. And prevail. Despite human nature. Like in America, where women across the country cook, can and pickle food to be shipped to the starving people in Germany right after the war. Women demonstrate for months in front of the White House when politicians delay shipments for nearly a year. They picket and shout their demands until freighters finally sail from New York to Bremerhaven to ease the hunger of the former enemy. An event which marks a return to humanity.

The question of easing hardship is no longer tied to culpability.

What can be more forgiving than sharing bread with your former enemy?

LOTTE WON’T TALK about times which bear those horrible memories of displacement, fear, looting, death and hunger. Not today. She won’t even complain about the rejection and treatment by her fellow West Germans upon arrival in the Rhineland. They have said it all. Let it be done and rest.

“How do you undress shadows?” she once asked me. “How do you fold their gowns before going to bed? I can’t figure it out.”

And I don’t have an answer either. So when I visit her for the third time that week in her small cottage, which she is sharing with her son Albert and daughter-in-law at the outskirts of Düsseldorf, I simply hold Lotte’s hands. So boney, pale and cold. Hands, which did the work of a man but also comforted and caressed like a woman.

“You came today, what joy,” Lotte says while leaning back on the couch, hugging a pillow like she used to hold me when I was a child.

“Isn’t it Monday? Shouldn’t you be in school?” she asks.

“We have the day off,” I reply quickly. And I will not make the mistake again of reminding her of the present, more than three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification of Germany.

Officially I am here in my former homeland on assignment for American newspapers. I have three months to file newsworthy stories. Foremost however, I am looking for mine. I am on a quest to solve the riddle of a family secret. And Lotte is my gatekeeper to the past. The last and only one who survived. All others of her generation in my family are gone.

Only Lotte is left to break the silence. She knows, I am certain. But will she tell?

“Don’t ever skip school. Do you hear me! Never. It’s education, ah yes, education, not the land you own. There is no eternal entitlement to land. Never. Even if you own the soil under your feet. Haven’t we seen that over and over, especially in East Prussia and Pomerania. My father never understood that education and not simply the possession of acres is indestructible. How could he? He was a farmer. The land under his plow was like the flesh to his bones. And my husband was just the same. Earth and blood. Ach ja,” she sighs.

Lotte closes her eyes for a brief moment, searching for memories. Pictures of a landscape, her homeland Pomerania once part of Germany, surface. She visualizes her family’s estate with hundreds of acres of healthy crops beyond the stonewalls of the farmhouse. Fields with potatoes and golden grain, edged by poplars along the horizon cross her mind; lands owned by her ancestors for generations. And Lotte as a young girl, glowing with expectations.

She smiles and I detect a sparkle in her eyes when she goes back there in time, before the war, remembering abundance and the lightness of days. She won’t go any further forward in time to that winter of 1945 when they lost everything; when they ran ahead of the gunfire and were chased off their land. They were among millions of civilians fleeing from the hatred of the Russians, an angry nation who now wants revenge.

Lotte’s pictures of the past stay simple. It’s Pomerania before those dark days and then the postwar camps in the Rhineland. There are no landscapes, places or persons for the times in between. Just attempts of survival spiked with shadows which linger day and night. But she won’t go there. Not today, not for some time. I have to guide her carefully one year at a time if I want to learn the truth which sealed the lips of my forefathers.

“Tell me again how you met them after the war,” I ask her in order to fast forward those years of horror before she came to the West. “But not just bits and pieces. I want to hear the whole story.”

Softly she strokes my cheeks. “Of course, Christina. You need to know. But where should I start? My generation learnt too late that we lived in a hypnotic state of deception. Hypnosis by free will at first but manipulated by leaders who knew where to push buttons. Like in trance we marched along. Cruel events happened during that war, that’s true. But does that justify the massacre against German civilians by Russian troops at the end of the war?”

“If you talked about displacement and numbers, politicians were quick to point the finger at German concentration camps, at war-crimes of our own nation. We had to shut up and sulk in our own sorrows. No, we could not expect empathy. How our people suffered is only an addendum in history books. Losing a war should not minimize what we endured. But even today the guilt-factor suppresses open discussions.

“You see, before you were born in the fifties, this was a country in ashes where everybody just tried to survive. Hungry, exhausted and shamed, stripped of dignity and self-respect after Germany lost the war.”

“We were the walking dead, like ghosts we searched for new directions but most of all food. Yes, there were moments we envied those who weren’t among us any longer. And before that many in our country were brain-washed. They were told stories over and over until the lie became the truth.”

“We didn't know any better, we were in denial of reality.” She glances at her hands. Pale and skinny. They look just the same as fifty years ago when she arrived in the Rhineland. But it was hunger then, not age that marked her body.

That was after the war in the summer of 1945, when Germany surrendered to the victors USA, Great Britain, France and Soviet Union. Those nations took supreme authority and divided Germany into four sections.

One area, the Rhineland which initially was under the control of the British became a dual-zone by '48 when the Americans joined their administration. At that time millions of expelled Germans had already arrived in the west. The Allies were overwhelmed by their numbers. The logistic of building temporary camps was an enormous task. Feeding those new Germans became a nightmare. Until the fifties temporary shelters turned into permanent slum housing.

What about those West Germans? Didn't they care about their own countrymen from the east?

How do you stay compassionate and willing to share on an empty stomach? How do you split nothingness? That is the question.