_The Children_
“These Little Children are looking for Their Parents,” was a printed
announcement that met me all over Germany. Underneath this announcement
were the haunting faces of fifty little children—little ones separated
from their parents and relatives during the mass expulsions. The little
faces on the poster stared at me in railroad stations, in welfare
offices, on church doors, and in public buildings.
The children who do not know their own names and whose parents are
being sought; the children who know their names and who still search
for their parents; the thousands upon thousands of children who have
vanished without trace and may all be dead—these are the problems
which present themselves in any discussion of the Expellee children
of present-day Germany. There are special Search Services designed
to reunite these tragic little victims with their parents and many
thousands of happy reunions have been brought about.
No one was able to count the number of children, especially infants,
who died in the course of the expulsions, although many have stories to
tell of children who died on the roads. Often the cold, lifeless bodies
of infants and small children were the first to be handed out of the
windows of the deportation trains.
There are no adequate reports on the health and welfare of the millions
of children who survived, and who as innocent, unknowing Pilgrims of
the Night were led to the dismal barracks and shelters that were to
serve as their homes from then on.
THE LITTLE LOST CHILDREN
But to return to the faces on the poster, the children were too young
at the time of flight to remember their last names or the address of
their parents. The descriptions underneath each picture highlight the
unimaginable suffering that is meted out to the innocent in any mass
expulsion.
One little child was found on the road by a soldier; another two
children knew that their mother was taken to Russia from East Prussia.
Another child knew that his first name was Gerhard and that he had a
telephone in his house in Pomerania. Under every photo is written in
a few words an individual tragedy which was implicit in the Allied
decision to uproot millions of human beings in the days of chaos that
followed a world war.
This poster of little lost children searching for parents more than
four years after the end of the war, symbolized for me all the
guiltless who have suffered in the mass expulsions of close to 12
million people from areas of Eastern Europe.
I asked also about other children who were expelled and found that
between 160,000 and 180,000 children were lost in the course of the
uprooting of Germanic minorities and German citizens from such areas
as the Sudetenland, Silesia, East Prussia, Yugoslavia, and Hungary.
In most cases these children, still unaccounted for, were the
casualties of the peacetime war action. Many died on the road; hundreds
upon hundreds of nursing babies died for lack of nourishment and warmth
in the chaotic days after arrival during the terrible winters of
1945/46 and 1946/47. Parents are still searching for the children from
whom they were separated and whom they believe to be alive.
Public searches conducted by posters, by advertisements and by
thousands upon thousands of radio-broadcasts, have given a tone of
tragedy to everyday life in Germany. There are special radio programs
for those children who know their names and the former addresses of
their parents. There are also special radio programs for parents
who still believe that their children who were separated from them
during the deportation can be located somewhere in Germany or in the
neighboring lands.
DAY AFTER DAY, HEART-BREAKING ANNOUNCEMENTS
Day after day, one can hear these heart-breaking announcements of
parents who still hope to find their children three or four years after
the separation. One might reasonably ask why parents allowed themselves
to be separated from their little ones. It is easier to understand,
when one hears such announcements as that regarding a young boy who
had walked to a nearby town to go to the store, and before he returned
his whole family was forcibly loaded on to a truck and taken to a
detention camp for expulsion. Other children were placed on different
deportation trains from the parents.
SEARCH SERVICES FOR MISSING CHILDREN
The lost children are a very special problem of all welfare agencies
which are cooperating to locate as many of them as possible and to
reunite them with their families. The children who are searching for
their parents and whose little faces stare at you all over Germany from
the posters I described, are, in general, well taken care of by public
and religious welfare agencies. It is interesting to note that many
calls have come to German welfare agencies for the adoption of these
children by families living in other lands, but in general expellee
children are not available for adoption because they have been taken by
German families. The remainder of the unaccompanied expellee children
are being kept until extensive investigations are made regarding their
parents and relations.
UPROOTED ORPHANAGES
Two representatives from War Relief Services-N.C.W.C. for Germany
sought out the institutions having expelled children and found some
homes filled with uprooted orphans.
In the Bavarian countryside is one such institution for children
conducted by the Sisters of St. Charles Borromeo. The children and the
Sisters were included in the fiction of mass guilt and were expelled
from a bordertown in Silesia. Given little time to gather their charges
together, the Sisters managed to keep the little family intact on the
deportation train. A home was provided for them all by the American
Military.
The children sheltered in this home have been spared nothing of
bitterness, or terror, or death.
Three of the orphans were a brother and two sisters, Klaus, Gertrude
and Hilda. Klaus, as the eldest, had brought his two sisters to the
safe-keeping of the Nuns before the evacuation from Silesia. His
father was already dead, and when his mother died as a result of a
bombing raid, he, at eleven years of age, presented himself at the
door of the orphanage, holding a five-year-old sister by one hand and
a seven-year-old by the other. The Nuns were keeping the pathetic
remainder of the family intact because of the security it gave each
child to be near the other.
Two little boys, Horst and Dieber Twerdon, were turned out of the
family home at the height of the expulsions, and began walking toward
the center of Germany with their mother. So great was the cold of the
march, that the mother lay down by the side of the road and died.
The two little boys walked on alone until they were picked up by
authorities and added to the uprooted brood congregated in the Bavarian
home.
So many tales of pitiful little children could be told; tales of the
fatherless, of the motherless, from whom everything was taken except
the love of those dedicated women who, of the little helpless beings
entrusted to them, lost not any one.
CHILD LIFE IN BARRACKS
The expellee children who are living in barracks and almost
uninhabitable buildings of all types are subjected to constant
sufferings and agonies. One room to a family is a luxury. Sometimes,
this room may formerly have been a stall for a horse. One extremely
large expellee camp, the Rositen Kaserne near Salzburg, was formerly
a Veterinary Center for horses. Each sick horse had his own stall in
which the animal was tied to a heavy post. Now, in this former horse
hospital, each expellee family lives in one of these stalls and the
heavy post is a reminder to each member of the family that their home
is really a stable. There is little privacy for family living in such
conditions. There is less privacy when 20 families must occupy sections
of large halls in the former castles that have been pressed into
service for expellees. What can we expect of children who live in such
constant overcrowding, surrounded by daily reminders of their degraded
lot as expellees?
YOUTH WITHOUT HOPE
A Red Cross leader explaining that one of the most explosive situations
in Western Germany was that of unemployed, homeless, footloose youth,
stated that there are more than 300,000 young men, between the ages of
fourteen and twenty-five, among the Expellee groups who are without
jobs, or job-training. These young people, old enough to understand
the indignity of their lot in the barracks and hovels of strange towns
and villages, but too young to appreciate the cataclysm that has come
to all Europe, can only look forward to nothingness. There are no
places in the schools for them to learn a trade; no jobs are opening
up for them in an economy that has not even jobs enough for adult
breadwinners. There are at present no real chances of emigration.
These young people look backward to the day by day destruction and
systematic cruelty of the war years, and to the inhumanity and chaos of
the years of peace. It would not be surprising if out of this immense
mass of youth without hope, there should emerge a cold dangerous
nihilism. Since they have seen the depths, they might come to fear
nothing, to reverence nothing, not even life itself.
The appeal of hungry and homeless children is one that goes right to
the heart. No one needs to ponder, or study whether such an appeal
should be answered by help even at a sacrifice. The appeal of these
young people is one that must go to the mind as well as to the heart.
The future of the West will have to count with these young people,
whether for good or for ill. Up to now, the world has shown them by
all methods possible that it does not want them, nor does it want
their intelligence, or their skills. They have been driven from their
homes, and driven out of participation in the business of living.
Those who have parents are still under some restraints and are linked
to religion, to family, to some small, eventual hope of making a
contribution to society by work. But even then, the parents themselves
are full of discouragement, because most of them had hoped to provide
training or higher education for their teenagers, and now find
themselves utterly unable to do so.
There are others who have lost all ties with family—either through
death or through deportation to the East. Some young men were urged
by families living in the Eastern Zone to flee to the West because of
imminent danger of forced labor. Still others have come to the West
after escaping from forced labor in the uranium mines. Many of these
youngsters are sixteen and seventeen years of age. Were it not for the
activities of Lutheran Aid and Catholic Charities in setting up homes
for these boys, it is hard to say what would have become of them.
I visited such a home for homeless boys at Wewelsburg, in the diocese
of Paderborn, Westphalia, and saw what stable and disciplined young
citizens they become when gathered into the warm and intimate
atmosphere of a home. A selfless young leader of Catholic Action
directed the home, and gave each boy a sense of responsibility, a
sense of belonging. A course of training, as near as possible to the
capacities and desires of the boy, was provided in the neighbourhood.
Forty boys lived in this Youth Home, recently rebuilt after being
completely burnt out. The boys themselves worked on the building and
renovation. All of the boys were Expellees, though some of them had
been expelled first into the Russian Zone of occupation before deciding
to cross into the so-called Golden Zone of the West. Many of them had
escaped from forced labor.
[Illustration:
“These little children are looking for their parents.”
]
[Illustration: “Parents seek these lost children.”]
[Illustration:
Home for this child is behind the barbed wire of former slave labor
barracks.
]
[Illustration:
An Expellee child in a camp in Schleswig-Holstein.
]
The one diocese of Paderborn has had to set up eight such Youth Homes,
for homeless, driven youth—seven for boys and one for girls. Forty
Youth Homes have already been set up by Caritas in Western Germany.
Many more such homes are needed in the Western Federal Republic if
these young people are to be rescued for a normal, useful and stable
existence.
CHILDREN OF THE DISPERSION
From a religious point of view, the Catholic children who have been
expelled into the Northern areas of Germany, where there are neither
sufficient churches nor schools, are at present a very pressing and
special problem. These children are served by priests who come to
them on foot, on bikes or on motorcycles. They are prepared for First
Communion and Confirmation in crowded barracks rooms and Lutheran
churches kindly lent for the occasion. The richness of Catholic life
which their parents knew before the expulsion is entirely absent.
The faith is kept alive only by the heroic efforts of weary and
overburdened priests and dedicated lay people from among the expellees.
Much self-help has been organized among the German Catholics to
save this generation of children who are living in the Diaspora, or
Dispersion areas of Germany. Every year, the dioceses of South-Germany,
particularly Bavaria, bring down thousands of the expellee children
from the areas of Schleswig-Holstein and North-Germany to spend the
summer months with Catholic families.
TALE TOLD AT NIGHT BY HOMELESS CHILDREN
Bavaria in the summer is rich in color and richer still in
its expressions of Catholic life. Some of the children from
Schleswig-Holstein used to sit in the evenings and tell the Bavarian
youngsters what they thought of the lovely domed churches of the
Bavarian countryside. The little expellee children marvelled at the
colorful interiors of the churches, at the vestments of the priests,
at the beautiful marriage ceremonies, at the fact that one could go to
Confession and Communion at almost any time because the priest was near
the church and near the people.
For the expellee children from Schleswig-Holstein, there were very few
priests and their life was dark and sad. They told how they waited on
the road, often without shoes and in the rain, for the priest who came
to them on his cycle. They explained how their Mass was said in bare
schoolrooms without any color or loveliness.
A PICTURE OF DESOLATION
A Bavarian girl listened to these stories told in the evenings by
homeless and yearning little ones. These tales impressed her so much
that she painted them into a picture—a picture which in its accuracy
and power is a real masterpiece. The young Bavarian girl was Veronika
Reich of the diocese of Augsburg in Bavaria. Veronika painted in
the lower part of the picture several crowded scenes of color and
joy, a church wedding, a child being baptised, a Bishop dispensing
Confirmation, children being taught Catechism by the priests, children
going to Confession, children receiving Communion. Behind these scenes
rise the spires and the cupolas, or “onion” towers, of the typical
Bavarian churches. Towards the top of the picture, the colors grow
dark, and we see two little groups of shoeless children, standing by
the side of the road waving in welcome to a priest on a bicycle. The
buildings are plain as schoolbuildings are. The top of the picture is
absolutely black in color. In this way Veronika, hardly more than a
child herself, interpreted the longings and sufferings of other little
children from whom so much has been taken, even the joys of their
religion. I wish that every Catholic in America had seen this most
unbelievable picture that came from the hearts of some children and the
hand and heart of another child. Among the Pilgrims of the Night, the
expellees of Western Europe, the children are the most desolate of all.