Reflecting on my childhood I felt the need to pass on to my children the events that shaped my future life and led me to leave my country and make my home in Great Britain. This move was driven by heartache and sorrow over the loss of not only my home where generations of my family had lived, I had also lost my dearly loved homeland. All this was eclipsed by the loss of almost all of my close relatives, so intensely loved and missed and so longed for, added to this grief was the loss of all my friends and their relatives and the knowledge of the brutality which was employed to end all their lives so prematurely. And like millions of other, children and adults alike, I could not get these relatively recent events out of my mind.
The almost paralysing terror inflicted upon millions of ordinary people regardless who they were or where they came from was unimaginable. What took root in people’s minds was not a hazy confused vision of what had happened but the memory of the cruel violent reality which could not be wiped out. I am not unique in trying to run away from the most painful memories and like all the others find that the memories keep pace with me. There is no escape. It may sound inconceivable but East of the Oder is about the cruel events that actually took place in the middle of Europe in the middle of the 20th century. The phrase 'hell on earth' does not compare with the violence that was unleashed on millions and millions of totally innocent human beings who had no say over their lives. Control over themselves was totally taken out of their hands. People were trapped by a minority (28%) of fanatics who misused their ill acquired power to mercilessly suppress and murder their fellow countrymen. You did not have to be exclusively Jewish to be persecuted and snuffed out by the Nazis.
If you displeased the Nazis they would let their hatred out on the families of the person who had the courage to speak up against their evil policies which very quickly silenced the vast majority of their critics. By making a critical remark about 'Hitler and co.' you condemned not just yourself but also your immediate family to death. Fear soon silenced all opposition.
Everyone was hoping that something would happen to bring this dictatorship to an end. And something did happen. The apocalypse. Not that biblical one but the real one. And I survived it. The Allied Forces, with hindsight, did not win – I am glad they did – as a result of wise decisions, but because they were overwhelming by sheer numbers.
At the Conference in Tehran in 1943, initially attended by Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill, it was agreed that the area east of the Oder should be cleared of all Germans. The area involved was about 600km from the Oder to the eastern border of East Prussia, German territory for more than 1000 years with a population of 15 million. By the time this proposal was approved at the conference in Yalta and Potsdam in 1945, the deed had been done and more than 50% of the civilians lost their lives during the first 5 months of 1945.
If you want to be cynical you could say that Hitler was a poor second with 'just' 6 million Jewish civilians murdered. He took several years over it. I am a survivor of this planned mass murder – a mere child of 11 in 1945. I cannot claim that I know much about the war, nothing about the background except that one’s daddy had to go away for a long time, all uncles, most of our aunties and even one’s older school friends with whom one played cops and robbers in the woodland.
I was there when our area was overrun by the Red Army and the 'resettlement of all the Germans east of the Oder' was put in practice. If one was lucky, you were ordered out of one’s home at gunpoint with 2 to 3 minutes to get out. It was the worst of winters, temperatures lower than -3°C. There was no time to get properly dressed, no food, mothers who were weakened by prolonged hardships gathered up their frail, often dying, children and relatives and then there you were out in the winter’s night.
Large numbers of people did not survive the first 24 hours. We were driven east, we were in the way of the Red Army at the mercy of soldiers who happily shot, stabbed or clubbed to death any living creature. Mountains of bodies soon lined the many roads in the east. The dead were not buried; they froze and became obstacles to be climbed over by the living. The living no longer cried, they were exhausted by the terror and almost paralysed by fear. We were not in the way of the Red Army’s tanks, the mighty JSIIs and never ending columns of T34s. Because tanks can make a space for themselves they drive over people, dead or alive, it makes no difference to a tank – they leave a clearance of red squelch behind.
The numbers of dead swelled: death by suicide, often hanging, became frequent. People were no longer able to live with what was done to them and others. When spring came the bodies thawed. Children like me, supervised by Red Army soldiers were forced to bury them. I buried them by the hundred at a time. The Red Cross could not locate millions of Germans from east of the Oder after the war. I can tell everyone what happened to the missing. Little people like me dug them in to the soil of their homeland.
My mother was with her four children on a road near Soldin on the 14 February 1945 when Mongolian soldiers jumped off their tanks and started to club to a pulp women and children indiscriminately, stopping just short of us. I heard my mother’s voice, so disciplined and yet so anguished 'Oh please, let them have the mercy to kill the children before me.'
To some war is no more than an ego trip. A time and a place where, in their sick and deluded minds, heroic deeds are done. They are glorified in paintings and statues. Imagine Napoleon depicted high up on a magnificent horse – a hero to some, a villain to others.
What was done to us in the early months of 1945 I have recorded in my family history East of the Oder. After the book was printed I read it only once. I don’t know from where I took the courage to write down what I experienced. It is hard to read, but if you get scared reading it, be brave, continue reading. I could not run away.
Luise Urban is the author of East of the Oder. She was born in 1933 into a world about to be turned upside down. Her family lived east of the river Oder. Crucially, her family were not Nazi Party members and suffered as a result. As the Third Reich crumbled and the Red Army advanced, she was one of 15 million Germans trapped in a war zone during the terrible winter of 1945. Weakened by starvation and forced to flee their home, it was only the bravery of Luise’s mother that saved the family from total destruction. The Oder–Neisse line (Oder-Neiße-Grenze) is the German-Polish border drawn in the aftermath of the war. The line primarily follows the Oder and Neisse rivers to the Baltic Sea west of the city of Stettin. All pre-war German territory east of the line and within the 1937 German boundaries was discussed at the Potsdam Conference (July-August 1945). Germany was to lose 25% of her territory under the agreement. Crucially, some might say (including most certainly Luise Urban) callously, Stalin, Churchill and Truman also agreed to the expulsion of the German population beyond the new eastern borders. This meant that almost all of the native German population was killed, fled or was driven out by force. In East of the Oder, Luise relives that harrowing time, written in memory of her mother, to whom she owes her life. It is the story of a child, but it is not a story for children.