Kinder Der Krieg-Children of War

By William Guy Towe

The small village looked as if time had stopped for 30 years; even though the houses were painted differently, or in such bad need of paint that they did not at all resemble the memories I had of them.  The poverty of the Polish people who now lived there had prevented any improvements or renovations.  I looked around through my memories at Steinau, the home of my youth, with its new Polish name that I couldn’t pronounce; the past and the present superimposed in my mind and indistinguishable from each other.  My emotions were numb as I realized one surprising thing; the streets were deserted, there were no people.

As a 5 year old boy I remembered the day the German soldiers had come through, retreating from the east and warning us to flee because the Russians were coming, because the Russians would kill us all.  One of my aunts had chosen to leave, had packed all her valuables into a horse-cart, and tried to escape to the west before the Russians arrived.  But the Soviet troops had found her on the road; the horse spooked at their orders to halt and would not stop, so they shot her from the back.

My mother refused to leave.  In the last months of the war Hitler had conscripted young boys and old men into the Wehrmacht for the defense of Berlin, and my father who was only in his fifties had been taken.  Mother adamantly clung to our ancestral property and to the hope that dear Julius would survive the war and return home.  This was their land and nobody was going to take it from them.  Also my grandmother was too old to travel so someone had to look after her.

The Russians came, and so did the Polish, who had been pushed out of eastern Poland by the treaty between Hitler and Stalin that had erased their state from the map.  After the war, Russia never gave back the part of Poland it had taken, while large areas of eastern Germany became Polish to accommodate the refugees.  The area known as Silesia which included my Steinau was one of those regions.

The Russians liked children, and so my older Brother Karl and I were treated well.  Mother, however, would disappear for long periods of time; time undoubtedly spent in the presence of lustful soldiers who had been long without women, and who hated Germans.  Until the day she died she never spoke of what happened to her then.