_The Women_
If there is not complete moral chaos and nihilism among the Expellees
of Western Europe, I would give most credit to the tremendous spiritual
strength and homemaking capacity of the women and mothers in the
Expellee group.
After they—with their children, with the old people of the family,
and with or without their husbands—were thrust out of their homes
and farms in such sections as the Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia,
Silesia, and East Prussia, these women found themselves unloaded into
almost uninhabitable barns, half-destroyed hotels, or barracks, often
temporary structures put up for unfortunate prisoners of war or slave
laborers in Germany. The world knows that for these slave laborers,
there was little comfort or sanitary convenience from their Nazi
overlords; and it was because of this that so many of them died or came
out broken in health at the end of hostilities.
It is hard to imagine that in time of peace, innocent families,
including millions of women and children and old people, were crowded
obscenely into these same slave labor and PW barracks which were
the shame of the Nazi regime. Having been thrust into the left-over
shelters in Western Germany, forty per cent of whose housing had
already been destroyed or damaged by bombing, these families were made
the care of already overburdened local welfare agencies.
I saw these swarms of people in the camps right after they came out of
the cattle cars that brought them from their ancestral homes. I saw
the agony of the mothers as they tried to keep alive the spark of life
in dying babies, or as they sat over the straw bed of a feverish boy
or girl. In those days the homes of the Expellees were called “Lagers”
(camps).
Again in 1949, five years later, I visited the Lagers and found the
same people living in these same buildings that should never have
housed human beings. I referred to their quarters as Lagers, and I
was told, “These are now barracks-homes” (Wohnungs-Baracken). In my
visits I found out why that name had been changed. There was far less
mass living than before, because of the almost superhuman efforts of
men and women who had often no income and no supplies, but merely the
unquenchable desire to preserve family life. Partitions consisting of
all types of brown paper, of waste wood, of blankets were put up in
the large barrack halls so that each little family could live in its
own orbit. When the camps were located in rural areas men and women
got permission to chop down trees, and out of these they made regular
walls that divided the long barracks into completely separate rooms.
This meant that ten or more door openings had to be made so that the
family could come and go through its own private entrance. The skilled
carpenters among the expellee men made these door openings and doors
so that in some camps there is no more mass living, and each family has
its own separate home though that home be only one room that serves as
bedroom, kitchen, living room, and wash room.
Over and over again I was amazed at what the women were able to do with
these rooms. Paint brightened the rough, unfinished walls, and pictures
were placed strategically to cover cracks or unsightly defects. Wooden
lamp stands were brightened by homemade lamp shades of painted paper.
Frankly, I wouldn’t know how a woman keeps a room tidy when its
furniture consists of seven beds (two-and three-decker), a table, a
primitive stove, a couple of chairs, and clothing boxes for each member
of the family. I suppose it merely meant that the woman worked all
day and every day to tidy up after the children washed, ate and did
their studies. The drabness of these rooms, whose beds are almost all
covered with the same grey or olive-drab blankets, is lightened only by
the bright table cloth or the few pictures on the wall. However, the
very transformation from camp living to home-barracks is a proof of
the unquenchable spirit of the women of the expellees to preserve the
integrity and the unity of their homeless, abandoned and often broken
families in the face of a world which has meted out to them a terrible,
though unofficial, punishment.
[Illustration:
Tracing Service of Red Cross still tries to locate the more than
100,000 women taken for forced labor and never returned.
]
[Illustration:
For so many the end of their wandering is not in sight. These
dishevelled women by the roadside try to find a place of safety for
their children after fleeing with them westward through the forests.
]
[Illustration:
A one-room home for an Expellee family is bare, but bright and shiny.
]
[Illustration:
A valiant woman of today—she saved her eight children in a flight
that took her across a continent.
]
There are some expellee centers where the conversion to separate
dwellings is not at all possible. These are the hotels and old castles
with forty-foot ceilings. For four years hundreds and hundreds of
people have tried to make homes out of such centers as the
sixteenth century castle in Eutin, Schleswig-Holstein. It is a common
thing in such centers as these to see four women share the same cooking
arrangements. The stove, over which someone is hovering all the day
long, becomes not a center of peace and warmth, but rather a source
of strife and bickering. Tired and harassed mothers find that this
sharing of cooking facilities, year in and year out, is a sore strain
on already overtaxed nerves.
Though a camp is the easiest place to see at a quick glance the many
problems of the women among the expellees, one can only know the whole
picture when one realizes that millions of them are also dispersed
among the populations in the towns. Our delegates have gone out to
visit these families and have found women making homes for their loved
ones in the cellars of partly destroyed homes. Others are able to rent
one room of an apartment, with the privilege of sharing a kitchen. All
over such towns as Kiel, the expellee women have set up housekeeping
for their homeless families in these one-room arrangements. As
rebuilding proceeds slowly, this one-room living goes on for years and
brings on, in some cases, grave social and moral problems.
The material tragedy of living for four, going on to five, years in
such conditions is quickly seen and easily understood by anyone who
visits the expellee centers. It is only by talking with individual
expellees in and out of camp that one sees into the almost unbelievable
tragedies that these women have faced in their personal lives since
that great mass expulsion began in 1945, after the Potsdam declaration
of the heads of the three greater allies. Let us take as an example a
young girl from East Prussia.
A YOUNG GIRL
Her name is Margarita Kopsky and she lived with her parents in the
lower section of East Prussia. After this area changed hands, the new
regime put her aged mother and father along with hundreds and hundreds
of other helpless people into a former munitions factory near Bromberg.
Hunger raged over all of Europe in 1945, but it raged particularly in
camps such as this one near Bromberg where former enemies, guiltless
or guilty, who were marked for expulsion, were temporarily kept. When
Margarita came to claim her parents so that they could all cross the
border together into Western Germany, she found that they had both died
of hunger along with an untold number of other people whose deaths were
never announced. Margarita now works as a catechist to help an expelled
priest bring Christ’s message to the children among his uprooted flock.
A MOTHER OF EIGHT CHILDREN
One group of unfortunates whose expulsion was so complete that little
trace is left of it was the Volga Germans who lived in a whole section
of the Ukraine. These descendants of Germanic stock were only in Russia
because their ancestors had been invited to settle and work the soil of
that area. These industrious people lived in scores of villages where
they preserved their dialect and their special traditions. Almost all
of these people, whether men, women or children, were deported to
Asiatic Russia and Siberia in one of the first mass deportations that
marked the last days of the war. I visited a woman who escaped these
mass deportations by leaving her native village with her eight children
and walking by stages to Poland in the confusion that accompanied the
retreat of the German army. She did this because she knew her husband
had already been deported to Siberia, and she wanted to save her boys
and girls from a similar fate. Let us call her, for the sake of her
family’s safety, Mrs. Barbara Walt. She, with her eight youngsters, now
lives in a one room home-barracks in an expellee camp in the diocese
of Paderborn. When she reached Poland, Mrs. Walt was expelled into
Germany and found herself, with her children, in the Russian sector
of Berlin. She was spotted immediately as a Russian citizen and found
that she was marked for another deportation, this time back to some
unknown destination in Russia. Fleeing with her eight children into the
British sector, she persuaded the military authorities to accept her as
a political refugee. And wonder of wonders, she and her eight children
were loaded on to an army plane and taken into the British zone of
Germany.
I think that in all my life I have never seen a more industrious
family. The diocese of Paderborn had immediately given to Mrs. Walt
some of the clothing donated to War Relief Services by the National
Council of Catholic Women. Right away, Mrs. Walt and her daughter set
about and remade the clothing until it was exactly the right size.
Though only five weeks in the British zone, the Walt family were
neatly dressed and everything in their one room home was in order. The
two oldest boys have work with a local carpenter; the younger boys cut
wood and fix up the family dwelling place. Mrs. Walt introduced me
to her children one by one: Candita, Josef, Mathilde, Agnes, Bruno,
Matthias, Emilia, and Anton. They were handsome, normal children. The
terrible experience of fleeing and of being homeless had been softened
for them by the tremendous protective power of a mother’s love. These
children were secure and well balanced. I asked them if they wanted to
emigrate to some other country and they all agreed that until they knew
the fate of their father they would make the best of life in Germany
and not plan any emigration. I have pictures of this family busy about
their sewing, their mending, their wood-chopping and all their other
activities. I have a picture, too, of a real heroine and a Catholic
mother who might qualify as a valiant woman of today.
MOURNING FOR CHILDREN LOST
Perhaps the most inconsolable women are those who lost children during
the expulsion, either by death or disappearance, or whose children were
deported into unknown regions for forced labor. This is not uncommon
at all, and is particularly true of the women who have come from such
areas as East Prussia. In a casual conversation with a woman in an
expellee camp near Neumuenster, one of our delegates was told that two
of her daughters had been deported into Russia at the time that she
and her husband and four other children were expelled. Her daughters
at the time were 19 and 21. She has never heard from them and does not
know if they are still alive.
The mortality of children during the expulsions is something that no
one can ever write about statistically, but there is no doubt that
it must have been very high. A woman named Mrs. Drescher, who is now
in a camp in the bleak isle of Fehman of Schleswig-Holstein in the
Baltic Sea, spoke for many more when she said to a War Relief Services
delegate, “I started from Danzig with four children and I arrived here
with two. A little boy and a little girl died on the way, and yet we
could not stop because they were always driving us on. We had to save
the other two.”
MOURNING FOR CHILDREN ABOUT TO BE BORN
Caritas directors and social workers told me that one of the greatest
tragedies in an Expellee family is the knowledge that a new life is
expected—that a child will be born into the world. The mother often has
not even a scrap of material for covering the newly born, and she is
considered lucky if she is given a packing case to serve as a cradle.
With daily living confined to one small room, or a part of a room,
and sanitation difficult to maintain for lack of soap, it is easy to
understand the anxiety of a mother who must care for a new born child
in the midst of the shortages and the confusion. It is particularly
difficult for Catholic mothers in the Diaspora areas, where Catholic
teaching on birth control seems to the ordinary citizen as utter folly.
Yet Catholic mothers accept the children that God sends to them, even
in their desolation. They tell the Caritas directors that they know
that Providence will be with them if they bring the new souls into the
world.
Often, Providence acts through the gifts of infants garments, sent
in such number by the Catholic Women of the United States. So many
layettes, sent directly or through the hands of the Holy Father, have
reached these mothers just in time for them to cover the body of a
child born into homelessness.
When an American visitor entered a barracks-room housing four complete
families (two with teen-age children) and asked, “Do you have any
small children here?”, he was struck by the vehemence of the answer,
“No babies or little children here, thank God.” These were Catholic
expelled families, from Yugoslavia and Rumania, who in normal
circumstances would want to raise happy families in their flourishing
villages. In the horror of exile, each child is a tragedy.
A Catholic leader, working among younger Expellee families, said quite
frankly that if we urge Catholics to live up to their faith in matters
of birth prevention we must stand ready to help the mothers to accept
their burdens. “It is layettes or Birth Control,” she told us quite
frankly.
Much has been done by Catholic women in this regard, but much must
still be done if each new life is not to be looked on as a tragedy.
There are so many separated families, so many widows, among the
Expellees, that it is almost a form of genocide when the parents who
might be producing children are dissuaded therefrom by the terrifying
material conditions of their lives.
MOURNING FOR HUSBANDS
The number of young women of the expellees whose husbands are still in
slave labor in Russia is enormous. Again in Schleswig-Holstein, one
of our delegates went into the country to see how the expellees were
living when they worked on the large estates of the area. A simple
little woman from East Prussia, named Mrs. Kupsch, lived as did five
other families in rooms back of the barn, one family to a room. It took
her fourteen days to get to Schleswig-Holstein with her four children
after she was expelled from her farm. Her husband wrote to her every
few months from his slave labor camp in Russia. She did not even know
where he was located. Her sole income is 93 Marks monthly from the
local welfare agency, and whatever gifts come to her through charitable
agencies. The well of misery among the women whose husbands are
laboring in the night of slavery in unknown Asiatic areas is something
that no one can attempt to describe.
OLD WOMEN WAITING FOR DEATH
The plight of the aged women among the expellees could be the subject
of a book. It is enough to say that these old women and old men were
herded into cattle cars and dumped out as callously as were all the
other expellees. Caritas operates 168 homes for the aged among the
expellees, but even with the greatest efforts on the part of local
Catholics, the lot of the dispossessed aged is still a cruel one. Here
and there, by almost a miracle, Caritas has managed to set up Old
People’s Homes that are cheerful and happy places—such is the Old
People’s Home at Wewelsburg in the Diocese of Paderborn. But hundreds
and hundreds of damp cellars, bunkers, or air-raid shelters also house
the old people dislodged by mass expulsions in the twilight of their
lives. Sometimes, one barrack in a camp is set aside for the aged
and there one sees the old women busy with their beads, if they are
Catholic, or possibly doing some sewing or knitting. Often, they have
no knowledge of the whereabouts of the rest of their families; often
they know that they are already dead. So many of them are gentle and
without bitterness. So many of them await death as a blessed and happy
deliverance.
* * * * *
Thus, the plight of the women among the expellees is a particularly
bitter thing; from the young women who have lost parents, to the wives
who have lost husbands, the mothers who have lost or are separated from
their children, even to the aged women who sit quietly awaiting death
in a world which has shown to them its most cruel face. The examples of
tireless work and a boundless heroism among these women give one faith
in the better qualities of humankind.