Read Forgotten Land Online

Authors: Max Egremont

Forgotten Land (33 page)

BOOK: Forgotten Land
4.75Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
 
 
Rominten
, however, was a work of nostalgia, describing a world very different to what Hans von Lehndorff saw in April 1945 when the Red Army stormed through Königsberg. Lehndorff had expected a savage horde seeking justifiable revenge before a quick adjustment to a new world – but the ordeal was much, much worse. What remained of the German population crept about like the walking dead, already searching for food. His companion, the Doktora, was assaulted; Lehndorff thought that she had met the Devil.
Hans von Lehndorff’s profession as a doctor saved him at first, for he treated some of the Russians. He and other Germans were marched in a long column out of the city. Near Palmnicken, he managed to run away from the column but was recaptured, ending up with several thousand others back in Königsberg, in the Rothenstein barracks. Here there was little water, no latrines and rampant dysentery and venereal disease. Lehndorff joined a small medical team, wondering what use he was, as the Russians seemed to want all the Germans to die. Some Germans tried to ingratiate themselves with the Russians as informers, picking out Nazi Party members. For Lehndorff, his God was the great comfort, even though it might seem that he had been abandoned – this and the invaders’ strange unhappiness, as if such destruction was morally doomed.
Lehndorff let his contempt go; the Russians were like children. They were insensitive to noise, yearning for the brightest possible light or, at their worst, inhuman so that, for him, everything was permitted to ensure survival: an exciting but, he
thought, a dangerous state for a Christian. With the Doktora, he read the daily watchwords from the Bible. They saw many deaths from starvation – no revolt, just sudden collapse after what seemed like a sense of calm – and other terrible injuries: blocked bowels through eating unripe fruit, extreme gangrene where part of the face falls away, swollen legs from under-nourishment and thirst, huge neck carbuncles infested with maggots, mad patients screaming. Water at first came from the castle pond, now crammed with floating corpses, until a local pump began to work. Abandoned gardens supplemented rations kept to a very low level to starve the Germans to death. Old Königsberg still appeared through the rubble; books were scattered among the rooms of the ruined houses and, in the hospital, a professor read a volume of Bismarck’s recollections.
The Doktora had terrible lice. The itching made her desperate, unable to sleep, so she took sleeping pills and died: not, Lehndorff was sure, from suicide. He found a notebook in her Bible and read the words ‘Russia – and there was a time when I wanted to go there. Now it has overthrown me.’ Through them, he thought of another text, ‘These are they which came out of great tribulation and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’ By the end of July Lehndorff too was weakening; amid the suffering he recalled the German brutality towards Russian prisoners – ‘we imagined that only Asiatics were capable of such a thing.’ By October he had recovered enough to leave Königsberg, fearful of rumours of his imminent arrest. He and a sick woman got a lift on a horse-drawn lorry, heading out on the Lowenhagen road, the route to Friedrichstein.
Lehndorff wanted to reach the country districts in what was now the Polish part of East Prussia, where he thought conditions might be better and where some of his own family lived. They continued on foot; the woman collapsed and urged him to go on his own across a deserted land, past unharvested corn, mutilated trees, burned-out tanks and vehicles – partly walking, partly getting lifts on more lorries. Eventually he reached what he thought
was the new border and ran for it, striking out across muddy forest paths, sheltering in abandoned houses and given food by people who had more than there was in Königsberg. Lehndorff found the railway – he’d been here just after Christmas 1944 – then the line to Mohrungen, and felt suddenly brave on a brilliant October day.
An inner voice urged him to go on to find his sister and brother-in-law’s house, which was still standing. An old man told him that the owners had ridden off when the Russians were almost at the village. Further on, Lehndorff found his aunt in a gardener’s cottage on another family property. The aunt told him that earlier she had gone to Januschau in search of Hans von Lehndorff’s mother. In Januschau, she had found Russians who had tried to keep her there – but she escaped, took a train back, was attacked in it by a Russian and again escaped to reach the cottage with a sprained foot. The villagers hadn’t welcomed her because they’d worked out a way of living with the Russians and the Poles. She said she couldn’t complain of the way the Poles had treated her. They had beaten her once, yet this was better than what she had experienced with the Gestapo while under interrogation at Allenstein as a suspected enemy of the Reich.
Lehndorff stayed in the house, recovering slowly. He started to practise again as a doctor under the Poles, also organizing services in an empty church. Did he ever have a Polish name? a Polish woman doctor asked. He said that in the Thirty Years War the name Mgowski had been linked to the Lehndorffs – and she got him a certificate that said he was called Jan Mgowski. Over the next sixteen months, he worked in Masuria, travelling on foot or on one of the few trains or by lorry, threatened by Russians and Poles or German informers and locked up briefly before escaping. Being a doctor protected Lehndorff – but increasingly his spiritual survival seemed to depend upon the familiar, strong and immutable landscape and what remained of the historic towns – Allenstein or Osterode, with the Tannenberg monument now a mere temporary phenomenon, crumbling ‘like a bad dream’.
In Palmnicken, under Russian rule, Johannes Jänicke went about his business as freely as he had under the Nazis. He was hit only once by Red Army soldiers – when he tried to stop them from taking his wedding ring. People of all faiths came to his services in the old brickworks, including communists. Jänicke walked for miles to other villages, including the seaside resort of Cranz, where he preached in a devastated hotel from the text ‘If God is for us, who can be against us?’ from the Book of Romans. The service was interrupted by a drunken Russian with a knife. The small congregation responded by singing as loudly as it could until the intruder left.
The hunger became worse, the deaths multiplied, burials took place most days – yet the two sides, German and Russian, grew closer. At the 1946 May Day celebrations, Russians danced with German girls and got drunk, now with less violence. Eva Jänicke recalled how fantasies slightly soothed the suffering – that the Americans had reached Königsberg, that the English paratroopers would come. In the autumn of 1946, the congregation moved back into the church, but it was too cold in the winter, so the services were transferred to a bakery.
Johannes Jänicke, the only evangelical pastor for miles, enjoyed his long solitary walks to other churches, accompanied at first by a sheepdog which he saw as his protector until he sold it to a Russian to pay for a sack of flour. In the winter, by candlelight, he could at least read, once at Easter 1946 declaiming from Goethe’s
Faust
in the company of some doctors who had also stayed behind. Jänicke’s poverty was complete – with no ration
card and daily survival dependent upon scavenging or the help of others; the challenge was to obey the commandment ‘Thou shalt not steal’. At times a hopeless lethargy crept over him. Christmas in 1946 felt even more desperate than usual – still with the threat of drunken Russians and those dreaded words, ‘Frau komm!’ Eventually some verses found on a page torn from a book raised him up: Harlequin singing to the unhappy Ariadne, from the libretto written by Hugo von Hofmannsthal for Richard Strauss’s opera
Ariadne auf Naxos
:
Love and hate and every pleasure,
Hope deferred and every pain,
Human heart can bear in measure,
Once and many a time again.
 
But bereft of sense to languish,
Painless, joyless, numb and cold,
Who can bear such cruel anguish,
Worse than death a hundredfold.
 
Rest you from such gloom and sorrow,
Wake, if but to fiercer pain;
Live, for joy may come tomorrow,
Live, and wake to love again.
Eva Jänicke’s diary for April 1947 recorded that twenty people had been buried in one week, fifteen the week before – constant deaths from hunger and typhus: quite quick deaths, often soon after the person had come back from work. Whole families had gone. What food there was came from a world before trade or transport – fish from the sea, turnips from the fields, what a garden could produce, trapped animals and birds. But to find and prepare all this needed energy and will; and Eva Jänicke saw how hunger changed people into sullen, base shadows. Reports came of cannibalism in Cranz and Königsberg: men killing a young girl, grandmothers and mothers eating dead children – for starvation destroyed even the mother instinct. Letters
came and went, not always reliably, but news did arrive. That was one lifeline.
Towards the end of June, goods wagons came to take the Germans out of what was now Soviet territory – the two hundred and seventy people in Palmnicken who were still alive out of the fifteen hundred who had been overrun on 15 April 1945. The train was to leave very early in the morning. That night, unable to sleep, the Jänickes went to the beach, so taken up with thoughts of what the place had meant to them that – Eva later regretted – they didn’t think of the Jews who had been murdered there two and a half years before. Clouds shaded part of the moon and stars glinted over the Baltic for this last glimpse of what she had come to think of as their land, apparently inseparable through the darkness from the gentle waves.
On the slow train, their possessions were turned over by Russian and Polish officials – but this didn’t matter. Johannes Jänicke thought of a passage from the Book of Psalms: ‘They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in. Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them. Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them out of their distresses …’ As they crossed the Oder at Frankfurt, he sang ‘Now thank we all our God’, the words taken up by others, echoing through the wagon and out over the river as the East Prussians reached their new home.
Because of their socialist principles, Johannes and Eva Jänicke went to live in their country’s Russian zone. He became Provost of Halle and, in 1955, Bishop of Saxony: a central figure in the sometimes fraught relationship between the communist authorities and the Church. Retiring in 1968, three years after Eva’s death, he died eleven years later, aged seventy-eight, in an old people’s home in Halle. His memoirs, published posthumously, challenge the account of the last days of German East Prussia written by Hans von Lehndorff. To Jänicke, Lehndorff’s
East Prussian Diary
, a bestseller, was too anti-Russian, not grasping the extent of the hatred built up by a war of unsurpassed brutality and racist
contempt. Surely it
was
Dostoevsky who had understood the souls of those who had invaded East Prussia. Johannes Jänicke saw them as not only Russian but terrifyingly human in their mixture of demon and angel.
 
 
Where were you when the Russians came? I ask.
Klaus Lunau, then a young boy, had left in time. He and his mother were on the last train out of Cranz in January 1945, reaching Gotenhafen in a large fishing boat, where they boarded the liner
Deutschland
with ten thousand other people, (including four thousand wounded soldiers) bound for Rügen, further down the Baltic coast, and then by train to Denmark. No German town would take them. Klaus’s older brother, a soldier, was shot on the Frisches Haff.
So Klaus missed what happened when German troops withdrew from Cranz at the start of February – but he knows the details. For three days the stillness was like that last Christmas before the January offensive – people walking in the cold streets, looking out across the frozen sea (as if in hope of a last-minute rescue ship), trying to find food, knowing that they were no longer protected. Some three thousand had stayed. The fourth of February was colder – 30 degrees below, one of the coldest days – when the ‘Ivans’ arrived, some on foot, others in tanks or jeeps. Many of the men of Cranz were shot in the streets; the other inhabitants were ordered out of their houses before being marched off to the south-east, five or six miles a day, during which many died. They were left near the old German border. Most tried to make their way back to Cranz, where the women were raped, some many times.
Gerda Preuss was in Königsberg. She came out of a cellar to hear that the Red Army was in the city – and as she walked near the ruined castle, passing some horse-drawn carts, she saw Soviet soldiers coming up the hill towards her, in the silence after the surrender. That evening troops came to the clinic where Gerda
worked and ordered the staff out into the street before forcing them, as in Cranz, to march to the edge of the city where they were left without food or drink, forced to take water from puddles or ponds. A week later they were allowed back into Königsberg. For Gerda, Germany faded quickly. She fell in love with Maria, a Russian woman, and stayed in the new Kaliningrad, with her partner. After 1946, Gerda Preuss, who’d learned Russian before the war, scarcely spoke German again. Before her death in 2008, she probably deserved most to be called the last German in Kaliningrad.
 
 
The graves remained – and at least those who came afterwards could honour the silence of the dead. To reach the Polish village of Drw
ck (until 1945, the German Dröbnitz) you take a back road south-west from Olstynek (Hohenstein) through scrubby land, past a large pond, once a good breeding ground for trout. Probably there are no more than a hundred people in Drw
ck – no post office or church, just a small shop and a school. After the war, the population changed; Poles moved in from the east, from what had been Wilno in post-1918 Poland (since 1945, Lithuanian Vilnius) or from the newly Sovietized Ukraine. By the end of the 1990s, the last old Masurian – a survivor from the pre-1945 period – had gone; this seventy-five-year-old woman had moved to Olsztynek. The other East Prussians had left soon after the war.
The German red-brick houses remain, as does what is left of two cemeteries: an evangelical one for the civilian dead, the other some soldiers’ graves from the First World War. Of the civilian cemetery, only a tree near the centre of the village has survived; but, because of the work of Borussia – a cultural organization that seeks reconciliation through an understanding of the past – the war cemetery is now recognizable as a tribute to the dead of what Poles might see as the former enemy. Volunteer groups – often Germans and Poles working together – have done much of this work since the end of the Soviet empire. It’s a contrast to the
1980s, when a schoolteacher was called to Olsztynek by the local Communist Party committee for ‘instructive conversations’ after he had expressed regret for the dereliction of the old German graves.
In post – Second World War Poland, with its newly changed borders, those coming to the former parts of East Prussia had, theoretically, simply to move into the empty houses of the Germans who had left. The new settlers seem to have formed two groups – those who had followed the Red Army from central Poland in search of a better life and others from the eastern parts that had been taken over by Stalin. Poland had shifted westwards – losing land to the Soviets in the east but, in the west, gaining cities like Breslau (now Wrocław) and Posen (Pozna
), previously centres of German history and culture. Little help was given to the new settlers. Many were stranded on slow-moving trains or left at the mercy of a few bureaucrats in what became often little better than a land grab.
In a light-filled modern block at the Warmian-Masurian University in Olsztyn (Allenstein), a professor in the German department takes me into his room, where I notice, on the desk, a small bust of Lenin, now no longer an object of threat. We speak of north-east Poland (what had been the old East Prussia) and I say what I’ve heard – that it’s still a poor region. There had been the wrenching change after 1945 – a new identity yet still linked to the past, not like the Soviets’ fresh planned utopia in Kaliningrad. After all, Poles had lived here for centuries, as part of Prussia or Germany or the Polish-Lithuanian Empire. The trinkets and plastic armour and imitation battle axes on sale by the Grunwald battlefield told of many more years of engagement than the Russian statues in Kaliningrad of Peter the Great and the Empress Elizabeth or the memorials to the Red Army dead. In Polish East Prussia, the sense of shared history meant that even the old enemy could be assimilated, as in the restored castles of the Teutonic Knights. Since 1989, after communism, a new idea has come – of a Baltic Atlantis, a once submerged and now rediscovered
city of an all-embracing past: ancient Prussia, Prussia, Polish Prussia, Germany, the Soviet empire, the new Poland of the European Union.
BOOK: Forgotten Land
4.75Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Marriage by Mistake by Alyssa Kress
The Long Green Shore by John Hepworth
The Good Girl by Emma Nichols
Enchanted Dreams by Nancy Madore