Forgotten Land (28 page)
Authors: Max Egremont
The conquerors’ hatred became clear. They weren’t interested in the Jewish Star as a sign of opposition to Hitler – and they searched relentlessly for women. Michael Wieck thinks that if Lasch had surrendered before the last great assault had begun, many civilian deaths and much destruction could have been prevented – because they were still at war, the Russians felt no restraint. The wild drinking, the looting and the rapes began, the legends of the Tatar invasion and the Thirty Years War becoming a horrific reality. The city filled up with the mangled, swollen bodies of the dead – troops and civilians – which came to seem enviable, at peace, beside the desperate living.
The Wiecks and most of the surviving Germans were marched out towards the Samland. There were signs of humanity among some of the Russian guards, and a Red Army lieutenant who spoke German with a Yiddish accent raised their hopes – but, when told that the Wiecks were Jews, he said that they must have worked for the Nazis because Hitler had killed all the Jews. One evening the Russians sang folk songs – a beautiful contrast to their apparent heartlessness – and Michael’s mother played on a violin some salon pieces by Kreisler and Wieniawski. The guards’ expressions relaxed before the captives were marched back through devastation to the city, where already some of the signs were in Cyrillic script. The transformation into Kaliningrad had started.
There followed months of shifting corpses and scavenging for food; naked women defiled and raped; old men and children shot, stabbed or strangled; suicides either hanged or poisoned; people burned in the huge fires. Communication began with the Russians – just a few basic words – and the horrors of what had happened on the eastern front emerged, comprehensible enough. Dysentery and typhus took hold in the icy late winter. Separated from his parents, Michael Wieck found himself in the former Rothenstein barracks among prisoners bloody and bruised from interrogation.
At night he dreamed of the Curonian Spit, of the glorious air; how good it would be to live there as a fisherman. A Russian soldier beat him with a rifle. Just a teaspoon of sugar brought ecstasy – also the forsythia blooming again, as if God had spoken to him, as he had once spoken to Moses. Back in Königsberg, where he was marched from the barracks, the Russians seemed to soften. One brought him more food – and Michael Wieck wondered if they saw their prisoners as humans at last, although the rapes went on.
At night he dreamed of the Curonian Spit, of the glorious air; how good it would be to live there as a fisherman. A Russian soldier beat him with a rifle. Just a teaspoon of sugar brought ecstasy – also the forsythia blooming again, as if God had spoken to him, as he had once spoken to Moses. Back in Königsberg, where he was marched from the barracks, the Russians seemed to soften. One brought him more food – and Michael Wieck wondered if they saw their prisoners as humans at last, although the rapes went on.
His mother, with phenomenal energy, went out every day to beg or barter for food and to haul water from a mile and a half away. He saw the Russian signs of joy when the German surrender came – the firing of guns in the air, and the Red Army triumphant in the rubble. More and more, the task of the breadwinner fell on Michael as his mother became exhausted and his father, helpless with age and despair, took refuge in studying Chinese. You worked for the Russians or you starved.
Michael found a job repairing a wharf – a twelve-hour day with an hour off at midday. He received food and also stole from houses that were still standing – goods that his mother bartered for more food. He worked as a carpenter in a bakery, yet it was harder to steal food from there and a new threat emerged – gangs of orphaned Russian and Polish children who had followed the Red Army and were now feral, sometimes carrying knives, even pistols.
The new Kaliningrad had music issuing from loudspeakers at street corners – often deep, nostalgic military choruses. As if to reflect this, the Red Army soldiers could be sentimental, kind to children, but mostly the Germans still experienced hatred from those they had been taught to despise. Michael and his parents were evicted six times to make way for Russians who had been settled in the city. He was taken on as a carpenter in a new plant for smoked fish, scavenging the occasional fish head or tail or leftovers before being transferred to a construction site. His mother became adept at the black market. At last his father worked, as a
security guard, and Michael’s new job as a bricklayer’s assistant brought in more money.
security guard, and Michael’s new job as a bricklayer’s assistant brought in more money.
Danger was always lurking; his mother was robbed and knocked down by a Russian, he himself was attacked by another Russian with an axe – and lice, typhus, reputed cannibalism and malaria from the lakes and the ponds, which were polluted by decaying corpses and rubbish, threatened the survivors. In December 1945 Michael ran a high fever and was near to death, treated by German doctors while his mother brought food. Rations became even more meagre; the Soviets seemed to want to rid East Prussia of Germans through starvation – just as the Nazis had wanted to rid it of Jews.
The Wiecks both aged terribly and suffered from lice; urine was the only disinfectant easily available. Michael found work as an electrician, even though he knew little about it. He stole lamps or sockets and sold them again on the black market, before being caught and released by an unexpectedly kind police officer. Relying on the theft of wood and the use of the electrics at work and at home to keep warm during the icy winter of 1946 – 7, he heard Soviet propaganda booming out from the loudspeakers set up on the streets, interspersed with beautiful music – Bach played by David Oistrakh. The family’s salvation was a brick oven, built by Michael, in which they baked a sweet biscuit beloved by the Russians. The boy exchanged bread and roubles for a violin owned by a German prisoner of war. He started to play at dances in the newly founded German Club.
He even began to like the Russians as the hatred faded a little. One with connections in the Riga Conservatory offered him a scholarship to study there if he became a Soviet citizen, but he refused to leave his increasingly helpless parents or to choose absorption into the life of a totalitarian state. In the New Year, he went with a small band to play at the coastal resort of Rauschen in temperatures of 30 degrees below to drunken Soviet soldiers. At last, near the end of the winter of 1948, the trains started to leave for Germany.
Michael Wieck was partly why I went to Yantarny, a little seaside place about twenty miles from Kaliningrad. There was also Johannes Jänicke, the Protestant clergyman who was at Palmnicken (Yantarny’s German name) from 1935; and Martin Bergau, once in the Hitler Youth, who’s written about what he saw in the village in January 1945.
Johannes Jänicke thought later that the scene at Palmnicken rectory in the winter of 1945 might have come from Dostoevsky – the hammering at the door, a foreign soldier glimpsed through the window, the dark anticipation, the shout of ‘Frau komm … Woman come!’ Dostoevsky – his idea that demons lurk within us all – is easily linked with darkness, and Stalin reached for him when excusing the brutality of his troops to the Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas.
In Palmnicken rectory, that winter day took another Dostoevskian turn, from darkness to redemption. Unlike many from Palmnicken, the Jänickes had stayed on in 1945 rather than escape west, and Johannes shouted that the woman would not come. The Red Army soldier broke the glass, cutting himself and bleeding ‘like a pig’. The clergyman, who had a first-aid kit, opened the door and bound up the man’s wound. The soldier, suddenly pathetic and very young, said, ‘Du gut! Frau nicht gut! Russe schlecht!’ to which the clergyman answered, no, all were good – and the Russian left, watched by the two Jänickes.
Martin Bergau’s father was the Palmnicken sexton. As a boy,
Martin went to church, ignoring Johannes Jänicke’s pronouncements from the pulpit against National Socialism because he’d found adventure in the Hitler Youth, and it’s Martin – an old sharp-eyed man, rather small – that Michael Wieck takes me to hear in Stuttgart. The meeting is in the Haus der Heimat, where the lost German east is kept alive through exhibitions, meetings and concerts. Some of those who cherish that mythical place won’t like what Martin has to say. There’s redemption, however, not only in his honesty but in the questions afterwards, and the evening ends with Michael Wieck playing two melancholy violin pieces by Bloch. Johannes Jänicke might be surprised to see how far his land has come since that battering on his door in 1945.
Martin went to church, ignoring Johannes Jänicke’s pronouncements from the pulpit against National Socialism because he’d found adventure in the Hitler Youth, and it’s Martin – an old sharp-eyed man, rather small – that Michael Wieck takes me to hear in Stuttgart. The meeting is in the Haus der Heimat, where the lost German east is kept alive through exhibitions, meetings and concerts. Some of those who cherish that mythical place won’t like what Martin has to say. There’s redemption, however, not only in his honesty but in the questions afterwards, and the evening ends with Michael Wieck playing two melancholy violin pieces by Bloch. Johannes Jänicke might be surprised to see how far his land has come since that battering on his door in 1945.
The two men from Palmnicken – Martin Bergau and Johannes Jänicke – parted after the war. Jänicke chose communist East Germany, becoming Bishop of Saxony before his death in 1979; Bergau came to Ulm, in the west, to find work as an engineer. But what happened in the village in 1945 took them both into a Dostoevskian night.
Born in 1900, Johannes Jänicke grew up in Berlin, where his father was a missionary in the city’s poorest parts, among the unemployed, many of whom had come there from East Prussia. One of three brothers – who knew hunger during the First World War – he found comfort and inspiration, like Peter Kollwitz, wandering through the country outside the capital – a protest, Jänicke thought later, against bourgeois life. On these trips, he felt an intense romanticism deepened by his love of music – a feeling that, combined with nostalgia, was, he felt, brilliantly manipulated by the Nazis. Johannes became a minister in the evangelical church. He married a girl from a family of prosperous lawyers – conservative and Prussian – who were not enthusiastic about their daughter’s love for a poor, radical priest. His first duties were in an industrial parish south-west of the city; from 1929 until 1935 he was in Halle, another industrial town, where the poverty turned him further towards socialism.
The Nazis horrified the Jänickes. Listening to the Day of Potsdam, Hitler’s display of patriotic and military nostalgia, on the radio in March 1933, Johannes’s wife wept as the choir sang a beautiful chorale that seemed suddenly a hideous insult perpetrated by this new, godless regime. He became the representative of the new anti-Nazi Confessional Church in Halle and was held for three days in the cells with other clergymen – over seven hundred were pulled in on 16 March 1935. He wasn’t treated badly, his congregation stood by him and he refused to sign a concocted statement.
The Jänickes left Halle for Palmnicken in East Prussia at Whitsun of that year, into what must have looked like exile. Bible study had become a fundamental of the Confessional Church – a way, it was thought, of fighting Hitler’s assault on religion – and Johannes’s small Bible-study group came to the station to see him off, singing as the train pulled out ‘Bless and protect us through your grace.’ Jänicke later denied that he’d been forced to go. But it seemed odd that a young Berliner should leave voluntarily for East Prussia, which was, as he himself said, somewhere on the way to Russia, practically ‘in China’, out of ‘the storm of life’. He claimed, however, that he had wanted to leave Halle because his wife needed a sea climate for her asthma. The years in Palmnicken were, he concluded later, the best and the most demanding, if the most terrifying, of his life.
In 1935 there were about 2,400 inhabitants of this small coastal village, clustered round a main street near the Baltic. The total number of people in Jänicke’s parish, which included several other small settlements, was 4,000. Fishing was still a local occupation, but the main employer was the large amber works where they mined ‘the gold of Samland’. Until recently this had had a Jewish owner, Moritz Becker, who had also built the evangelical church with the aim of improving the morals of his workforce. When the Jänickes arrived the company was part of the conglomerate Preussag, Becker having been forced out.
Attendance was good at the small, ugly church, built in
1893, the numbers swelled in summer by holidaymakers staying in rented rooms or hotels – sometimes visitors who, the East Prussians said, had come from ‘the Reich’, thereby stressing their own isolation since the Polish Corridor had been established. Johannes Jänicke considered his parishioners generally conservative and quite dour, although they sang hymns loudly. Many of the locals didn’t come to church, although they weren’t against it. His only serious opponents were some Nazi functionaries – not many in this remote place, although their tentacles reached out from Königsberg.
1893, the numbers swelled in summer by holidaymakers staying in rented rooms or hotels – sometimes visitors who, the East Prussians said, had come from ‘the Reich’, thereby stressing their own isolation since the Polish Corridor had been established. Johannes Jänicke considered his parishioners generally conservative and quite dour, although they sang hymns loudly. Many of the locals didn’t come to church, although they weren’t against it. His only serious opponents were some Nazi functionaries – not many in this remote place, although their tentacles reached out from Königsberg.
In old age, moved by memories of the place’s wild beauty and his terrible last ordeal, Johannes Jänicke tried not to romanticize Palmnicken. The new order, the religion of Hitlerism,
had
been strong there. Guests at the rectory had included Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others from the new Confessional Church – and the Church authorities hadn’t liked this. In Königsberg, Jänicke was interviewed by a disapproving National Socialist colleague who later, overwhelmed by shame, killed himself.
had
been strong there. Guests at the rectory had included Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others from the new Confessional Church – and the Church authorities hadn’t liked this. In Königsberg, Jänicke was interviewed by a disapproving National Socialist colleague who later, overwhelmed by shame, killed himself.
The church is still there in what was Palmnicken and is now Yantarny (the name means amber in Russian) – a small stone building with a pale-purple corrugated-iron roof and a short steeple that has a cross on top. Now the priest is Russian Orthodox instead of German Protestant, but beside the main door are two tablets that record the laying of its foundation stone under Emperor William I in 1887 and its completion in 1892, during the reign of the last Emperor, William II. Another notice says that in 1991 the place was consecrated an Orthodox church by the Bishop of Kaliningrad and Smolensk – which makes the interior, with its bright colours and icons, very different to the austere Lutheranism of Johannes Jänicke’s day. Nearby are Prussian red-brick buildings, one of which might have been the rectory – now used in summer as a children’s camp.
Not far along the street is a museum, partly a display of carved amber, partly also ‘heritage’ items from the German time, some in bad condition. The place is supervised by a custodian
who, while saying she knows absolutely nothing at all about the collection, radiates anger and contempt. After looking round, it’s easy to excuse her irritation; there’s really nothing extraordinary about an accordion splayed open on a cracked wooden chair, some scattered old bricks and stones, a sewing machine with foot controls (emblem of lost East Prussian domesticity), many plates, often chipped or painted (some with romantic views of German cities), a rusty iron bed frame and a case of china drinking steins, one bearing the initials of the Hofbräuhaus in Munich. The apparent regional obsession with empty bottles is evident – lots and lots of them, some thicker than others, slightly green in colour or cloudy with age, arranged in rows, sharply glinting in the sporadic sunlight as if about to explode. Here, at least, are remnants of some good times.
who, while saying she knows absolutely nothing at all about the collection, radiates anger and contempt. After looking round, it’s easy to excuse her irritation; there’s really nothing extraordinary about an accordion splayed open on a cracked wooden chair, some scattered old bricks and stones, a sewing machine with foot controls (emblem of lost East Prussian domesticity), many plates, often chipped or painted (some with romantic views of German cities), a rusty iron bed frame and a case of china drinking steins, one bearing the initials of the Hofbräuhaus in Munich. The apparent regional obsession with empty bottles is evident – lots and lots of them, some thicker than others, slightly green in colour or cloudy with age, arranged in rows, sharply glinting in the sporadic sunlight as if about to explode. Here, at least, are remnants of some good times.
Outside, scaffolding and boards are up on several of the buildings, one of which is a café advertising German beer. Some have the toy-town air of much of the new Kaliningrad construction – close to pastiche, like the new development of offices, shops and apartments by the river in the city: neither Soviet nor Russian nor German, yet slightly reminiscent of a Königsberg revival – but as if in caricature. Stalls sell amber or trinkets and further along, at what could be a symbolic crossroads, you meet Yantarny’s two pasts: the Soviet war memorial – its most obvious feature a statue of a bare-headed young soldier, a cloak cascading off his shoulders, one outsize arm raised as if to halt an entire invasion – and, to its left, lined by a double avenue of lime trees, a street of white German villas that leads to the sea.
They are improving the infrastructure of the beach, putting in a complex of thatched beach umbrellas and what will be a café or a bar. Back from the sand and the rough Baltic, a heavy concrete sea wall looks as if it keeps all Samland in check. Below the wall, in a partly cleared space, is a small pile of stones, held together with thick patches of mortar, against which rests a wreath of plastic flowers and manufactured foliage beside an engraved black marble stone. On the stone, engraved in Hebrew and in Russian,
is an inscription declaring that seven thousand Jews were driven into the sea and killed here in January 1945.
is an inscription declaring that seven thousand Jews were driven into the sea and killed here in January 1945.
During his talk in the Stuttgart Haus der Heimat, Martin Bergau recalls the old Palmnicken, a seaside paradise engulfed by the new spirit. At the time of Kristallnacht, the shop run by the Jewish Friedlander sisters was attacked and the young Bergau was taught in school that the Jews were parasites. He saw the removal of Jewish names from the town’s war memorial and the swastika flag hung outside his house even though his parents scoffed at the Nazis. There was in Palmnicken a renewed pride in being on the edge, in the north-east bastion of the Reich, combined with a deep sense of the consequent danger.
Bergau couldn’t wait to join the Hitler Youth. He revelled in the summer camps and the mock battles, in travelling with other schoolchildren by horse-drawn wagon to join the joyful crowds at Polennen that greeted Hitler. Martin’s father had fought in the last war, at Tannenberg, at Verdun and in the Carpathians. The sexton thought that defeat had come because of the arrival of the American hordes and the betrayal of the troops by politicians – but people in Palmnicken were worried in 1939 when soldiers and artillery came to the town. By 1940, however, after the great battles in the west, East Prussia was calm, enveloped by a trust in the victorious Führer. When Poland was overrun and France fell, the Palmnicken mine band played ‘Do you see in the east the brightening dawn?’ – and Polish prisoners came to help on the farms. This time no enemy seemed to threaten from across the eastern frontier.
In that summer of German triumph, Martin Bergau went to a Hitler Youth Camp on the Kurische Nehrung. After days of orienteering and hiking, they marched through the woods on the mainland, on the historic route from Berlin to Petersburg – three hundred young men in the light rain singing ‘Today Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the whole world’, watched by two apparently oblivious elk. Christmas 1940 was even colder than usual but full of hope as the little swastika flags on a map in the
village school advanced across western Europe. In February 1941, more soldiers, weapons and armour started to arrive at Palmnicken station, the locals fascinated to see these legendary victors. At Easter, Martin Bergau went with friends from the Hitler Youth on a bicycle trip to Memel, the town that Hitler had retaken in 1939, and they slept on straw in farmsteads, finding it all a glorious adventure.
village school advanced across western Europe. In February 1941, more soldiers, weapons and armour started to arrive at Palmnicken station, the locals fascinated to see these legendary victors. At Easter, Martin Bergau went with friends from the Hitler Youth on a bicycle trip to Memel, the town that Hitler had retaken in 1939, and they slept on straw in farmsteads, finding it all a glorious adventure.
Later Johannes Jänicke felt overwhelmed by guilt that he hadn’t done more to fight the Nazis. In August 1939, he left Palmnicken to be chaplain to an artillery unit in Poland, where he saw lines of terrified Jews who had been brutally expelled. This inhumanity, he told a comrade, will engulf us all, and in East Prussia we won’t fight it enough because of traditional Prussian obedience. It seemed a dreadful intimation of man’s helplessness before hypnotic ideology and technological power. In 1940 Jänicke returned to Palmnicken, not leaving it again until 1943, when the village was still quiet, to work on a hospital train near Tapiau. Another clergyman was sent to the village by the diocese, ostensibly to bring order to the parish – but the parish didn’t accept him, so he left. There were no further attempts at change.
The invasion of Russia was, Martin Bergau remembers, a surprise, even in Palmnicken, where the build-up of forces had started months before. The early successes reminded older people of Tannenberg; ‘It is all going to plan,’ some of them said. That winter of 1941, however, the flags on the map stayed still, after the astonishing advances of the summer and autumn, and the wounded who ended up in hospitals in Königsberg told bleak stories which reached the outlying villages. The sense of crisis was added to by appeals to civilians for warm clothes for the front. Soldiers stationed nearby said that their comrades in the east reported worsening conditions.
For the thirteen-year-old Martin there was a new thrill – that of gliding, again fostered by the Hitler Youth, and that summer, in May, he’d gone for instruction in Masuria. Back in Palmnicken, he played football on the restored town pitch, ran along the small
paths to the beach to bathe naked and back through the woods and took a late-summer job helping with the harvest. Finally the horror of war came when one of the Polish prisoners refused to work; the overseer called the police, the Pole panicked and ran and a policeman shot him dead. What shocked Bergau was that it was all so close; the policeman was a neighbour. He wondered if there might be a protest from the church – but none came.
paths to the beach to bathe naked and back through the woods and took a late-summer job helping with the harvest. Finally the horror of war came when one of the Polish prisoners refused to work; the overseer called the police, the Pole panicked and ran and a policeman shot him dead. What shocked Bergau was that it was all so close; the policeman was a neighbour. He wondered if there might be a protest from the church – but none came.
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