Willi Gerlach

“We would take the train from Reppen to get to our place and at the Reppen train station, we saw cattle cars returning from the eastern front, crammed with wounded soldiers. That was for the first time we saw battered German soldiers. There was bloody gauze all over their smashed bodies. Before then, trains with the wounded soldiers (so-called ‘Lazarettzüge’) were well camouflaged in order to keep this demoralizing show away from the public eye. But now, the wounded soldiers could be seen by everybody. This, of course, raised question nobody would publicly answer. Then it happened. It was in January 1945. I was out with a couple of friends. We were going downhill a slope on a sled when suddenly we heard a mighty thundering sound. We remained silent for a while until somebody said: ‘that was a cannon’. Somebody else said that it was plainly impossible. Nobody would believe it at that moment. We then simply continued sledding, paying no more attention to the thundering in the background. A few days later, the first fugitives with their carts and wagons started to appear in the village. I remember that one of the runaway families came to our house. It was wintertime and a woman let me hold her little child. She instructed me to be silent, to not wake up the child. The child was awkwardly silent and I soon realized that it was dead. The woman hadn’t realized it, yet, she only found it out later. After she realized that her child had died, she broke out in tears and weeping. The people coming in told us about what they had witnessed, about the onslaught and the atrocities committed by the Red Army, about civilians being run over by tanks, being shot by Russian soldiers, women being raped. Even some of the wagons that appeared in our village showed signs of damage. The next days were calm and peaceful again.”

“The next day, we heard a mighty rumbling and it didn’t take too long before the first Russian tanks stood at our doorstep. The first Russian soldiers that came inside our house behaved… well, more or less humanely. There were hardly any problems with them. The real trouble started with the troops that came later. It was all a bit different with these soldiers. They jumped down from their trucks and came inside the houses. We heard shots being fired and we could also hear women screaming and crying. At night, I heard a loud bang and when I looked out of the window, I saw that our neighbor’s house was up in flames. It was the first house that had been set on fire. The next day, I mean the next night, our other neighbor’s house was burned. It was the Kiebels. My grandmother called me and my brother and told us to get the hand carts out of our barn. We hurried to the barn and tried to move the carts out of the barn but as we were pulling them out the gate, a group of passing Russian soldiers on trucks opened fire at us. I can’t really tell you if they aimed at us or not, but we were scared to death. Anyway, we somehow managed to come back to our house with the carts and I remember that on this night, it got really bad. The Russian soldiers came to our house on that night and demanded that the women – my mother, my mother’s mother and my father’s mother – come with them, supposedly to make them diner. But even before they had left – we were standing in our kitchen – one of the Russian soldiers wanted to touch my mother. When my brother saw this, he jumped in between them and the Russian soldier, who probably felt threatened, took his machine gun and wanted to take my brother outside of the house. Now my mother jumped between them and screamed ‘take me, take me’. Then the women were separated from us (me, my brother and my grandfather) and they only came back in the middle of the night. We didn’t sleep on that night, of course. I have to point out that these Russian soldiers were demanding something specific. We didn’t understand what they were saying. Then they searched the rooms and found sauerkraut. Pickled sauerkraut. They were very angry as they supposed that we were hiding it away from them. This was the point where the whole affair escalated and then our women were separated from us on that night.”