March 2, 2007
A Matched Pair: Two Reports From Hell
The story of the Expulsion of the Eastern European Germans has not been dealt with well in English literature, indeed, it has been largely ignored. A few first person stories have come out, Wolfgang Samuel’s “German Boy” (Mecklenburg/Pommern) and Elizabeth Walter’s “Barefoot on the Rubble” (Yugoslavia) come to mind, but in general, English speaking readers, like most of our children and grandchildren are, are cut off from literature concerning an event that ended close to 1,000 years of German presence in areas that are now considered to be parts or Poland, Czech Republic, Russia, and other Eastern European states. An event so epochal that it changed the ethnic face of Europe.
We are lucky that 2006 changed this situation. Two memoirs; “Weeds Like Us,” (Authorhouse, Bloomington, Ind.) by Gunter Nitsch and “Abandoned and Forgotten” (Wheatmark, Tucson, Arz.) by Evelyne Rapp Tannehill have opened up the events of the Expulsion for English-speaking readers. Both books are well worth reading and really should be read together as they complement one another: one telling the story of Nitsch, a little boy in Northern East Prussia (now ruled by the Russians) and the other of Tannehill, a little girl in Southern East Prussia (now ruled by Poland). Both are interestingly written, and we can be sure that if they dealt with children survivors of any other act of genocide, the authors would already have been on “Oprah” and have had long book reviews in the New York or London Times.
The books answer once and for all the currently debatted question of whether the Germans were victims during and after WWII. They answer the question with a horrifically clear YES. They tell of the unrelenting horror that two families, neither of which had ever done harm to anyone in Russia or Poland, were exposed to. The years of rape, murder, suffering, discrimination, brutalization, slave labor. All this from the standpoint of a little girl and boy who were forced to experience the Expulsion on their own bodies.
What the families went through fills two books, and so cannot be recounted sufficiently here. The text needs to be read, thought about and analyzed over the time it required to read them. Suffice it to say that Nitsch, watched several relatives die during the Expulsion and went two years without tasting meat. His mother and aunt worked as forced laborers for the Russians for 1/3 kilo of bread per day each. With this 2/3 kilo of bread they had to feed their entire extended family. Tannehill watched as her dying mother was raped on her deathbed, as her father (an American citizen!) and brother were marched off to be “registered” and never returned, her father probably dying in Siberia, her brother was only seen again in the US. Tannehill herself was kept by the Polish family that had seized her family farm as a kind of child slave, forced to eat in the kitchen, forced to watch as the family’s daughters were given her mother’s and sister’s clothing to wear, but she wore rags. Sexually molested, unprotected to the point that she cried that she wanted to become Polish, and was told, “someone has to want you for you to become Polish.”
Once caught by the drama and tragedy of the texts, you will not want to put them down, and neither will your children or grandchildren. My 17 year-old daughter, a girl who never showed the least interest in family history of the Expulsion from the Sudetenland, started reading “Weeds Like Us” after I finished it and could not put it down. It opened her eyes for the first time to the monumental, unrecognized injustice committed against innocent Germans in the East due to their ethnicity, and nothing else. It made her want to learn more about the Expulsion and she has already staked her claim on the Tannehill book.
Both “Weeds Like Us” and “Abandoned and Forgotten” are available through internet book sellers and would make excellent birthday or yule presents for adult or teenaged readers. For those with children or grandchildren studying various genocides in school, they offer a unique look into the 20th century's largest act of ethnic cleansing (14-17 million victims with 2.5 million deaths), which was also undoubtedly an act of genocide. They are highly recommended.
Dr. Kearn Schemm
Pres. German World Alliance