Chapter IV: 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.

Tracing Service of Red Cross still tries to locate the more than
100,000 women taken for forced labor and never returned.
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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.
]

A one-room home for an Expellee family is bare, but bright and shiny.
]

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.

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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.