Second letter to Kari at Farm Hill School , part 3
Walter Felscher (walter.felscher@UNI-TUEBINGEN.DE)
Sun, 8 Feb 1998 14:44:47 +0100
part 2 ==>
3. What was it like after you learned the war was over with ?
I do not quite understand what you mean by the time that I
"learned that the war was over" . That the war could not be
won by Germany anymore was my parents, and my, conviction the
latest by noon of June 6th, 1944 - when it became clear
that the American troops hat landed in Normandy. But first,
in the following months, the convulsions of war would hit us
more than ever before. The war ended for us the day the
Russian troops arrived in the village where we had taken
refuge. And this was May 4th, 1945 - a friday (but not
that this day of the week particularly mattered). What
happened on that day can be told in a few words.
My mother woke me early in the morning, saying I should get
up, the Russians were coming. And soon they were there; my
father had barely found the time to throw his handgun into the
sewage basin in the yard, a gun he had hidden all the years
since 1933. They marched into the village on the street (no
pavement, just dirt) of the house in which we had our two
rooms, in an orderly column, at its side additional soldiers
with guns drawn, entering every house and looking whether
there were any hidden German soldiers (recognizable by
uniforms). There weren't, and so they left after minutes. In
the meantime, the short marching column was followed by an
endless succession of trucks, drawing cannons or other
equipment behind them. They looked very modern, with
slightly streamlined headlights and engine hoods. At the
side of each hood, the metal was pressed into words, saying
in latin letters "Studebaker". So all these trucks were
American made, having been shipped to Russia via Murmansk or
even via Vladivostok; only in the days afterwards we also
saw trucks of Russian make - not so elegantly streamlined,
but square and higher.
After about an hour maybe, the line of trucks came to an
end, the troops moving forward to the next village
westwards. No shot had fallen, nobody been hurt. A highly
untypical conquest. There was a small number of Russian
soldiers left back, but we could go outside again, visit my
mother's cousin's family having their tiny house and stables
the next street down ... : normality seemed to have
returned. After a few days, the farmers could go out on
the fields again which they had not been able to do since
mid-April - because of the occasional American fighter
plane shooting at everything that moved - and given the
time of the year, planting potatoes and cutting the first
meadows was overdue. And after about a week, my father
managed to arrange a deal with the Russian commander, who put
us, with all our possessions, into one of these Russian made
trucks that drove us to our home town, about 16 miles away,
where the house with our apartment still stood. Half of the
town, however, had burnt down to the ground walls, as the
effect of artillery fights between April 24th and May 3rd.
And the conquest had been a bloody one, with men shot and
women raped ...
Returning to that village, there lived maybe 200 families,
but I know of only two of them which fled before the
Russians arrived. The one was that of a large farmer, the
"Ortsbauernfuehrer", an NS-position to which he had been
appointed having been a NS-party member; I never met him and
do not know more of him either. The other was the village
teacher and his wife, and the - quite private - consequences
of his disappearance are what I shall today's letter
conclude with.
Because the village had a school, a small red brick house
standing just across from the house of my mother's cousin.
The school had one teacher only, Mr. Senss, a man of maybe 45
without children of his own, and also a NS-party member.
Being literate, he certainly read the papers, and so he knew
about the violence Russian troops would exercise should they
find resistance. As I said above, the Russians arrived on
friday, but they had been expected for days, having already
occupied the neighbouring villages five miles away. And on
the morning the Russians arrived, Mr. Senss and his wife
were not there anymore. Obviously, they had fled on foot ar
on bicycles (no: teachers did not own a car then), and
nobody heard of them again. They may have committed suicide
in the woods; they may have succeeded to cross the river
Elbe westwards and reach the American occupied territories
where they would have been safe.
They were not there anymore. The door of their house was
unlocked, and people had gone in and looked for them. In the
kitchen the pots stood clean on the stove, in the bedroom
the beds were made, the closets were full. Maybe they would
return ? But they didn't, and after a few days the first
villager began to go in and loot: kitchen utensils,
tableware, blankets ... .
The village did have electricity, but neither freshwater
pipes nor a sewage system. For my relatives, water came from
a pump in the yard, and there was a rickety outhouse with
dumphole below, connected with large basin for the animal's
sewage. Toilet paper was considered an unaffordable luxury;
old newspapers wer used instead. One day then, sitting in
the outhouse I found there new paper consisting of finely
printed pages torn from books. My relatives, clearly, had
begun to empty Mr. Senss' bookshelves and to use the content
for their more down-to earth purposes. I had seen the
bookshelves before but had not dared to loot them; now,
however, I said to myself that if I were to take some books
then at least they would be read. Thus I went across the
street, most books seemed to be still there, and so I took
some 30 or so of them along for future reading.
Of course, my choice was accidental, and who knows how it
would have influenced my taste had I found literary authors
such as Shakespeare or Goethe. As it was, I had found two
volumes on geography (which did me good next year in
school), some picture books with photographies of old German
architecture, a novel by Tolstoy which I never read to its
end, a small book with folk poetry, edited by Hermann Hesse
which I have kept and cherished to this day ... . And five
leatherbound small volumes on very thin paper with the works
of a certain Schopenhauer, a so-called philosopher from the
first half of the 19th century. Of course, they were way
above my head - but three years later, I started to read in
them. And while I did not find everything convincing, this
Schopenhauer quoted other authors with obvious admiration,
and so at the age of 17 I began to look for their books and
to read them - and so on and on and on. For a while, it went
so far that I considered to make philosophy the field of my
profession. Yet in the end - I now can say: fortunately -
I did not do that. Nor do I harbour so high an esteem of
Schopenhauer anymore. But only few other books have
influenced my mental curiosity, my further reading,
to such an extent as have those five volumes of his.
The loss of his library no doubt was one of the smaller
losses Mr. Senss suffered when fleeing his house and his
teacher's position. And I can only hope that he did not
loose his life then. In those days, in May almost 53 years
ago, fate took away from him what it accidentally dropped
into my lap; for me that developed into a treasure. Yet
beware of fate: it will always be gruesomly unjust, on large
scales as on small ones.
So much for today ...
Your
Walter Felscher
* * *
Footnote for Grownups
As you may recall, Kari, a ten year old girl from
Connecticut, posed some questions here, and about three
weeks ago I tried to answer some of them. In the meantime,
Kari has asked me further questions, and the above is my
reply to these.
I very much doubt that a child of ten can understand the
details and the distinctions I found it necessary to
explain. In so far, what I wrote is destined at least as
much for the teachers of such children than it is addressed
to the children themselves. Because I cannot conceive what
possible good it shall do if a teacher tells his pupils the
gruesome fact that millions of people were murdered - and
that in a most appalling, cold-blooded technical manner -
but does not tell them the background about how it could
come to that at all. And the naivity of the questions, posed
here by various American schoolchildren, makes it obvious
that their teachers have not provided them - and may not
have been able to provide them - with any background
information whatsoever. It is a world of differences between
the Europe of the 1930ies and the America of the 1990ies,
and while I have attempted to point out some of them, the
more delicate matters still remained untouched.
In concluding, I quote a poem which just came to my mind.
Its author was a communist who fled Hitler and survived
Stalin's hotel Lux; after he had written the poem, he became
minister of culture in the communist dictatorship of East
Germany during the time of the purges against Rajk, Slansky
et al. I shall leave it to the reader to draw conclusions
from the poem's text and its author's life.
Wenn wir abends sitzen und bedenken
Miteinander, wie das alles kam,
Und wir ploetzlich unsere Blicke senken
Und wir werden alle still vor Scham,
Denn ein jeder weiss
Hier in unserm Kreis,
Wie das Unheil seinen Anfang nahm -
Wenn wir schweigend sitzen und tief innen
Ueberzaehlen jede Jahreszahl
Und uns des Vergangenen entsinnen
Und wir fragen noch und noch einmal,
Und es wird gefragt,
Wird auch nichts gesagt:
Wie ein neues Leben wir gewinnen -
Alsdann ist es oft, als tritt ins Zimmer
Einer ein, wie ist er leis genaht,
um sein Haupt, das dunkle, fliesst ein Schimmer -
Sei willkommen du in unserm Rat !
Wird die Hand gedrueckt,
Wird ein Stuhl gerueckt,
Denn es ist ein guter Kamerad.
Einer ist es von den Namenlosen,
Einer aus dem grossen Totenheer,
Und es wird das Fenster aufgestossen,
So als weht ein Wind von Graebern her,
Und der Tote spricht,
Und er haelt Gericht,
Und der Tote weiss vom Leben mehr.
Und wir fragen ihn nach unsern Toten,
Und in ihr Geheimnis eingeweiht,
Denn sie sandten ihn als ihren Boten,
Gibt der Namenlose und Bescheid,
Da erhebt er sich,
Gross und feierlich:
"Welchen Sinn hat all dies Herzeleid ?"
Und wir sitzen bis zum Morgengrauen
Und der Tote goennt sich keine Ruh,
Und er laesst uns in die Zukunft schauen,
Und es ist ein grosses, dunkles Du,
Das uns hier vereint,
Und die Sonne scheint,
Und wir hoeren ihm noch immer zu ...
* * *