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Title: Pilgrims of the night
A study of expelled peoples
Author: Edward E. Swanstrom
Contributor: Francis Spellman
Release date: April 20, 2026 [eBook #78506]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Sheed and Ward, 1950
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78506
Credits: Bob Taylor, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PILGRIMS OF THE NIGHT ***
Transcriber’s Note
Italic text displayed as: _italic_
_Pilgrims of the Night_
_PILGRIMS OF THE NIGHT_
_A Study of Expelled Peoples_
_by_
RT. REV. EDWARD E. SWANSTROM
with a foreword by
HIS EMINENCE
FRANCIS CARDINAL SPELLMAN
SHEED and WARD
New York ··· 1950
_Copyright, 1950, by Sheed & Ward, Inc._
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_Foreword_
The Holy Year of Our Lord, 1950, comes at mid-century of an era of
anguish for the children of men. The precious blood of millions of men,
women and little children of nearly every country has been spilled in a
world still torn by suffering and strife, and other millions of maimed,
sick and destitute still roam homeless throughout lands disfigured by
wounds of war.
Monsignor Swanstrom has personally visited many of these lands and been
witness to the grief and sufferings of many of these misery-ridden
peoples. Of them and their desolation and agony he writes with
understanding and compassion, and I pray that those who may be
fortunate pilgrims to the Shrines of the Apostles during the Holy
Year, and all who live in our blessed land of liberty and bounty, will
remember with prayers and active charity God’s pitiful pilgrims who,
with heart-rending truth, have been called, “Pilgrims of the Night.”
[Illustration]
Archbishop of New York
CARDINAL’S RESIDENCE
452 Madison Avenue
New York 22
_Contents_
CHAP. I. THE DISPOSSESSED 1
II. MEN AND WORK 11
III. MEN AND SLAVE LABOR 24
IV. THE WOMEN 36
V. THE CHILDREN 47
VI. THE PRIESTS 58
VII. TWO BISHOPS AND THEIR BURDENS 74
VIII. THE LONG PROCESSION 90
_Pilgrims of the Night_
CHAPTER I
_The Dispossessed_
It was shortly before the halfway point in this our twentieth century
that I drove through thousands upon thousands of tons of rubble, the
undifferentiated remains of an ancient city. What were once the homes
of man, his houses of worship, all the gathering-places of a city that
had sheltered the spirits and bodies of men down through the ages, were
now anonymous and monstrous heaps of ruin.
As I drove to the home of His Eminence, Cardinal Frings, the Archbishop
of Cologne, I realized more vividly than ever the effects of total war
on the inarticulate people of the many nations; on the men who were
obliged to take part in this organized killing, on the women, mothers
of families, and on their children, whose bodies moulder under the
broken stones of so many towns and villages of an old continent. I felt
about the violent half-century already drawing to a close (five decades
of the most intensive destruction yet seen on the planet), as the poet
had felt about an earlier era: “May it rest in peace, as it has lived
in war.”
When Cardinal Frings received me, I thought he might make a point of
the necessity of rebuilding a destroyed country, or of finishing the
repairs on the ancient, partly bombed Cologne Cathedral. But his
concern was for a more urgent problem, that of the living temples of
the Holy Ghost, who have been herded into the ruins of Germany since
May 1945, when the shooting war ended. War Relief Services-National
Catholic Welfare Conference, as the official agency of the Bishops of
America for relief to devastated countries, has done all in its power
to ease the lot of these late refugees, but despite the earmarking of
the majority of relief shipments for these dispossessed peoples, the
problem is still staggering in its immensity. The Holy Father appointed
Cardinal Frings as Special Protector of all these refugees within the
borders of Germany.
As a result of a special agreement reached at Potsdam, the Germanic
groups living in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, were to be sent
back within the borders of Germany in “an orderly and humane manner.”
The Allies only took responsibility for the expulsion. German welfare
organizations, both public and private, were to take care of all
housing, food and other needs of the expellees. German authorities were
told to expect an influx of 6,000,000 people.
However, the idea of mass expulsion, so much used by the Nazis during
the course of the war, now took hold of the Councils of the Allies, and
before long, the Yugoslav citizens of German origin who had settled
in certain sections by special invitation more than three hundred
years before were gathered into camps or driven across the border into
Austria. Groups of people were likewise expropriated in Rumania and
driven into Austria and Germany. Native Germans living in East Prussia,
in Pomerania in Silesia, were also driven from their homes, while
those who had fled before the Russian armies in what they thought was
a temporary exodus were forbidden to return to their businesses, their
homes and their well-kept farms.
With its welfare set-up weakened and without adequate resources,
with its housing already damaged or destroyed by 40 per cent, with
all social life in chaos, ‘rump Germany’ accepted a flood of nearly
12,000,000 men, women and children. They were destitute, carrying
with them hardly more than the clothes on their backs. Leaving
behind as barren deserts the areas that became productive because of
their agricultural and productive skills, these unfortunates brought
increased chaos and greater want into the areas that had to accept them.
These new Refugees are known as the Expellee Group. Their problems
are not as well-known as those of that other homeless, exiled group,
the Displaced Persons, because the DPs rightly became the concern of
the Allied Nations and are being resettled under the direction of IRO
(International Refugee Organization).
Since 1943, War Relief Services-N.C.W.C. has followed and cared for the
exiles thrown off by a world at war. The Catholics of the United States
have, through their delegates, been at the side of the Polish exiles
who escaped after their unspeakable sufferings in Siberia and Asiatic
Russia. Priests and lay Catholics from the United States went to such
areas as Iran, India, North and East Africa, Mexico and British Isles
to set up more than 250 welfare centers for those deported and exiled
peoples.
As soon as it was possible to serve the Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians
and other groups liberated from the Nazi yoke, a wholehearted program
of aid was initiated. Now nineteen offices staffed by American
directors serve the DPs throughout Germany, Austria and Italy.
Thousands upon thousands of Catholic DPs are being resettled in new
homes in the United States and other countries through the emigration
programs of the N.C.W.C.
At this moment, about 300,000 DPs remain, out of the enormous total of
1,500,000 which UNRRA took over after the war. The donations of the
Catholics of America in the Bishops’ Laetare Sunday collection have
made it possible to give these important services and also to approach
a final solution of the DP problem.
The IRO has been an expression of international concern for DPs and
has been the means of coordinating emigration plans and providing
transportation to lands of resettlement. This specialized agency of the
United Nations is now planning with private charitable agencies for the
welfare of those DPs who cannot emigrate, the so-called “Hard Core.”
But no international agency has protected the millions of expellees. No
group of governments has banded together to solve this problem which
was, after all, internationally created.
The Expellees have been solely the concern of local German agencies,
including the public welfare agencies, private welfare agencies,
notably Caritas, the Catholic Charities of Germany, and the Evangelical
or Lutheran Aid Society.
It was for these, the Expellees, that Cardinal Frings pleaded, like
a father pleading for helpless stricken children. He told me that the
relief supplies of War Relief Services-N.C.W.C. had saved countless
lives among this almost forgotten group, and he expressed his most
earnest wish that we would not consider the problem solved and withdraw
our help. He told me how heavily the problem of the Diaspora Catholics
(those expelled Catholics who live in the northern areas of Germany
without churches or schools) lay on the heart of each and every
Catholic Bishop. For this reason a special Catholic Study Committee has
been set up to find ways to meet the problem.
I told the Cardinal that I planned to see with my own eyes, as a means
of giving a firsthand report to the Bishops of the United States,
how these Diaspora Catholics lived in dioceses where one out of two
Catholics is a homeless, destitute expellee.
The problem of expellees was not new to me, since I had been in Germany
in 1945, right after the end of hostilities. I had come to set up a
program for the Displaced Persons, innocent men and women and even
children who had been impressed into slave labor for the Nazi war
machine, or who had fled from such areas as the Baltic States before
the second arrival of the armies from the East.
I had seen the cattle cars come into various towns of Germany. I had
been present when these first transports were opened up, and the weary
people, from aged grandmothers to little babies in their mothers’ arms,
emerged into the daylight, into the ruins of railroad stations. I had
stood with other witnesses as the dead and the dying were carried from
the cars, and I had seen nameless expellees die right before my eyes
on the cold stone of the station floor. These mass expulsions were the
result of a theory of mass guilt, a theory which makes every single
human being, in a given group, responsible for the actions of the
leaders of the group. Thus even babies and little children are punished
as guilty entities, in the same way as Hitler killed even little Jewish
children as members of a race that he, in the obscenity of his racial
hatred, considered guilty as a whole.
The Bishops of the United States spoke up against these mass expulsions
in no uncertain terms. In 1946, when the deportations were at their
height, and few voices were heard in defense of a recent enemy, the
Administrative Board of N.C.W.C., in the name of the Bishops of the
entire United States, made the following statement:
“Something has been happening in Europe which is new in the annals of
recorded history. By agreement among the victors, millions of Germans
who for centuries have lived in Eastern Europe are being forced
from their homes, without resources, into the heart of Germany. The
sufferings of these people in their weary travels, the homelessness
of them, and the hopelessness, make a sad story of the inhumanity of
their transplantation. Had there prevailed in the councils of the
victor nations a right appreciation of the dignity of man, at least
arrangements would have been made for transplanting these people in
a humane way. We boast of our democracy, but in this transplantation
of peoples we have perhaps unwittingly allowed ourselves to be
influenced by the herd theory of heartless totalitarian political
philosophy.
[Illustration:
In the first days of peace they were locked in the cattle cars.
Here the steps are placed against the locked cars so that the
people can emerge into exile.
]
[Illustration:
Owning only the clothes on their backs, the Expellees walk into the
night of homelessness and destitution.
]
[Illustration:
Child Expellees, thrust across frontiers, descend from a transport.
]
[Illustration:
Some, mostly the helpless aged and the helpless young, died on the
way; others arrived like this and died later.
]
The reports of the deportation of thousands in areas of Soviet
aggression to remote and inhospitable regions just because they
cannot subscribe to Communism tell of a cruel violation of
human rights. These men are men and have the rights of men. Our
sympathy also goes out to the technicians and skilled workers in
enemy countries who have been seized and forced to work for the
strengthening of the economy of victorious nations. It is not in
this way that peace is made and the nations are united in mutual
cooperation. No lasting good can ever come from the violation of the
dignity of the human person.”
In the same year, the World Protestant leaders made a moving protest in
these words:
“The Provisional Committee of the World Council of Churches is
persuaded that this policy, aggravated as it is by the compulsory
transfer of large numbers of people from other countries into a
smaller Germany, ought to be re-examined, lest, by condemning
millions of Germans either to be fed by charity for an indefinite
period or to die from starvation until the population fits the new
frontier, it bring ruin, not only upon Germany, but on Europe.”
The Catholic Bishops of America, as Fathers of the Poor, spoke out for
all the poor—and who could be more poor than those driven like herds
of cattle across frontiers without homes, or bread? They denounced the
deportations of Eastern Europeans to Siberia, and of conquered peoples
to slave labor in Nazi Germany, and of masses of Germanic Europeans
to post-war Germany, in exactly the same terms—as a violation of the
rights of man. These same Bishops had supported the war effort of
the United States precisely because our country, in company with its
Allies, was fighting a war to vindicate the common humanity of all men
of all races.
They had called for the utmost sacrifice in the country’s service so
that the bestiality of aggressive warfare, of extermination camps, of
mass expulsions, could be erased from our generation. Their whole
denunciation of persecution, and call to retribution, was based on the
principle that men have rights that are inviolable, and they included
in the category of men, all our enemies.
A man’s moral principles are put to the test, not so much in his
treatment of his friends, of those he loves, as in his treatment of
his enemies. All the qualities of forbearance, of respect for human
personality, of obedience to strict justice, are strained when he has
in his charge those who have been or are his enemies. This is equally
true of nations. If there is any general acceptance of the thinking
that the innocent men and women and children among the Expellees
deserved their fate because of their racial stock, then it would seem
that a moral catastrophe has come upon those who fought in the name of
moral principles.
There are those who, unconsciously sharing the un-Christian concept of
mass guilt, do not press for help to the expellees, or for a solution
of the immense problems. Because of lack of full information, many
people do not yet realize the crucial importance to the recovery of
Europe of an organized approach to the whole matter of integration
and resettlement of the millions of expellees now living in camps and
barracks, airless bunkers and barns. It is not yet understood that this
group hangs like a dead weight to impede the recovery of all of Western
Europe. Many Catholics do not appreciate the moral and religious
implications of the problems.
Sometimes it is easier to make a vivid and realistic picture of a
problem if we describe it in terms of our own environment. The impact
of the Expellee problem on a Germany reduced to three quarters of its
former size, bombarded almost to a standstill, deprived of millions of
its manpower by death and detention in Eastern Europe, would work out
like this if it were applied to the United States. Suppose, God forbid,
that one quarter of the wheat-producing and industrial territory of
our country were ceded away, and that the greater part of our larger
cities, including Detroit, Chicago, and all the port cities, were
battered by bombs. Suppose that millions of men of active arms-bearing
age were detained for years as Prisoners of War in other areas of the
world. And then, suppose that all the populations of Canada and Mexico
were driven into the United States as destitute refugees, having been
forced to surrender their homes, their businesses, their farmlands,
without compensation. It is easy to imagine the sufferings of so great
an army of the dispossessed if they came wandering the roads of our
nation, and it is easy to see how many of them might perish of cold, of
hunger in the desolation of their enforced exile.
It is just such a situation that I shall write about in Europe. It is a
situation from which our leaders and people alike have tended to turn
away their heads. But no solution can ever be found unless we force
ourselves to face problems in their reality—whether that reality be
pleasant or not. By this time, the Expellees who could not survive the
terrors of the road or cattle car, or the rigors of the first years
of being homeless, have already perished. Estimates generally agree
on the figure of a mortality of fifteen percent during the first year
of expulsion. Now, the situation has settled down to a struggle for
existence on the part of the Expellees—a struggle that would have
resulted in death for many more were it not for the fact that charity
still exists as a moving force in the world.
In the darkness of their bitter exile, their homelessness, their
abandonment, in the hopelessness of their outlook toward the future,
these Expellees, driven so heartlessly across frontiers, are, in the
words of the old hymn, “Pilgrims of the Night.”
I shall try in a few short chapters to penetrate the terror and
sorrow of their night of exile and to delineate for you a few of the
experiences of these silent, joyless pilgrims. I shall record my visits
to the various areas where the expellees live, and shall attempt to
picture from these visits and from the special reports of various
workers of our relief agency, the plight of little children, of women,
of men, of priests, and even of Bishops, who make up this vast army of
pilgrims of the night.
CHAPTER II
_Men and Work_
“Extraordinarily frightening,” says the _New York Times_ in examining
the German refugee problem in an editorial that appeared early in 1950:
“About one-fourth of the population of the Federal German Republic
is composed of refugees from the provinces now occupied by Poles,
from the Eastern Soviet Zone, the Czech Sudetenland and a few other
scattered places....
“There are now more than 8,500,000 registered refugees in the Western
Zones, and at least another 1,000,000 who are drifters and live
by begging, scavenging and thieving like so many gypsies, without
permits to work or settle down. Something like 40,000 refugees are
coming in monthly from the Soviet Zone. What can be done with them?...
“It is an example of how extraordinarily frightening German problems
can be when one stops to think about them.”[1]
This sensation of alarm was with me when I came close to the lives of
these refugees, or Expellees, in an industrial center in and around
Salzgitter.
Here during the war years, the Nazi conquerors brought hundreds of
thousands of workers, mostly slave laborers, who occupied the rows upon
rows of desolate barracks that stretched out over the flat countryside
as far as the eye could see. Not long after the barracks had been
vacated through the liberation of the slave laborers, they were filled
again—this time with destitute families and parts of families who had
been expelled from their homes by the Allies. In a gigantic movement
of population known as “Operation Swallow” millions of men, women and
children were dumped into this and other areas of a destroyed nation
after Silesia and part of East Prussia (formerly part of Germany
itself) were given to the Provisional Administration of a regime
imposed on an unfree Poland.
Sixty thousand of these Expellees were clustered in the infamous slave
labor camps of Salzgitter when I visited them recently. I visited one
barrack which served as a provisional hospital for the aged and infirm
among the Expellees. I was told that more than 400 old people, weakened
by the deportation and the consequent hunger and lack of care, had died
in this barrack-hospital in the days of the “Operation Swallow.”
In the meantime, the men among the Expellee group had found work in
some sections of the Reich Steel Works, a great war-born industry.
I knew that many of the industrial plants in the area had already
been dismantled as producers of materials that could be turned to war
purposes. No protest had accompanied these dismantlings, since no
working people anywhere wanted a repetition of the holocaust of blood
and broken steel and stones that they knew in World War II.
However, part of the steel works, which use the large deposits of
ore found in the area of Salzgitter, are still operating, and more
particularly the railroad repair shops. The Allies decided, after
dismantling a great rolling mill and crating it for shipment to
Yugoslavia as reparations, that three out of four smelting furnaces
could continue working, in order to make use of the special smelting
process necessary for the particular type of ore mined in the vicinity.
Coal was needed from the Ruhr, and as not enough was shipped, only one
smelting furnace was actually in operation.
Work was the precious thing that these dispossessed heads of families
had found here as a result of the fact that the furnace had not closed
down. Workers all their lives, they still had their self-respect
because they could buy the bread and potatoes that kept their families
alive. Other men, released as prisoners of war from Russia and Poland,
found that their families had already been resettled in the slave labor
barracks in the “Operation Swallow.” They also came here, and many of
them were able to use their industrial skills in the steel works.
What amazed me when I visited these desolate barracks on a damp and
overcast day was the lack of complaint at the obvious want of decent
comfort and privacy in their lives. In one medium-sized room, I found
four families living. Their quarters were separated by blankets hung
on ropes. One primitive stove served the four families. Some of the
men and one of the women (together with her daughter) had known from
months to years of slave labor in Eastern Europe since the end of the
war. They felt that this freedom in the west, though it was a freedom
bounded by blanket partitions and barracks built for Hitler’s slave
labor, was a beautiful thing. “We are grateful to God to be here,”
this woman told me. “I am glad that my daughter and husband are alive.
I’ll make no complaint.”
But with the men, I could feel a corroding fear. They discussed the
fear with Dr. Adalbert Sendker, who accompanied me on my visit. As
Director of Charities, and member of a local Commission for Expellees,
Father Sendker struggles daily to meet the needs of these dispossessed
people. They pointed to the tremendous lettered message, painted in
white on a great gas tank that dominates this woebegone community
of rows upon rows of rough wooden barracks, WE WANT TO LIVE. STOP
THE DISMANTLING. One of the men explained: “We want to support our
families—even if we can hardly buy the few things that are listed on
the ration card. Now most of us who work only have jobs because we
are dismantling. Every day, we destroy our own livelihood. What will
become of us all when there is nothing more to dismantle? Before long
everything will be as still as the grave.”
I looked for confirmation to Dr. Sendker. “That is true,” he said. “We
fear that before long all will be still here. Only about 800 men will
have work in the ore mines, which will then send the ore to the Ruhr.”
The sign “WE WANT TO LIVE. STOP THE DISMANTLING” stared at me wherever
I went in this community of desperate people. I am not competent to
judge the question of dismantling in its larger aspects. Any steps to
prevent another war should be taken at the earliest possible moment.
There is here, however, the problem of nearly 60,000 Expellees from
Upper and Lower Silesia in a much larger native population. These
heads of families have found a livelihood for themselves and their
families in works that have been turned to peacetime uses. Now, at one
stroke, they will all be rendered paupers, exiled paupers who will
depend on the pittance of the local public welfare set-up and the
local religious welfare agencies. Already, Caritas of the diocese of
Hildesheim, the local Catholic Charities, is spending 85 percent of its
budget and of its donations from the outside to meet the needs of the
hundreds of thousands of Expellees in its area.
This, then, is undoubtedly a social and human problem that goes far
beyond the realm of politics. Those who agreed to the creation of this
double problem must have an answer adequate to meet it.
So far, there has been no hint of an adequate answer, nor have
sufficient serious studies been made which give much hope for the
future. Whether the Salzgitter Steel Works were dismantled or not
would have little importance if plans were afoot to resettle, either
in Europe or beyond Europe’s frontiers, the more than 60,000 uprooted
human beings who have found a refuge and bread there. The latest report
of the High Commissioner’s Office for Germany says, on the subject of
Expellees:
“The influx of refugees is primarily a German problem and the care
and maintenance of these groups until they can be assimilated by the
West Zone economy is primarily a German Government responsibility.”
When, several years ago, I studied the waterfront labor problem in a
great Eastern port, I found many intricate and involved problems, but
to each one there was the possibility of a solution—whether or not
any steps were taken toward that solution. Here in Salzgitter, turn
which way I would, I could see no solution, because in making overall
decisions of an economic and political character, the human material
has been completely ignored. That human material faced me as I walked
among the rows of slave labor barracks—the men, with their grey, worn
faces, the women, with their pathetic attempts at homemaking, the
children playing in the mud inside the barbed wire enclosures.
Up to now only local German agencies, and the Protestants and Catholics
of the United States, have been active in trying to salvage the human
material of the mass expulsions, of the mass misery and unemployment.
War Relief Services-N.C.W.C. has been sending large quantities of food
and clothing to answer the desperate appeals of the German Catholic
Charities for continued help. Some help has come from England,
particularly for expelled priests and forsaken parishes.
Eight expelled priests, who lost their parishes when they and their
flocks had to take to the road, serve the Catholics among the Expellees
around Salzgitter. These men, dressed like workmen, bicycle around from
barracks to barracks, instructing, comforting, consoling.
They have set up a church in a great old cow barn and celebrate Mass
there regularly, often while the rain drips in through the ancient and
unrepaired roof. Animals are still kept in annexes to the barn.
At night these men return home to rented rooms; one to a sleeping room
in a kitchen, a group of several to a small rented apartment with
borrowed furniture. They are much heartened by any little help they
receive in their difficult ministry.
In a special program to relieve their most urgent needs, English
Catholics have collected help from their own slender resources to send
to the priests of the area. Active in the work are the members of the
St. Vincent de Paul Society of the Diocese of Nottingham, England. One
sees in the putting aside of old enmities, the real beginning of peace.
Salzgitter, with its thousands of desperate men, first rendered
destitute and homeless, and now rendered unable to earn the bread for
their families, is a meeting place of the burning social problems
of Europe as a whole. America and the Allies can only ignore this
problem at their peril, because these forgotten men with their expelled
destitute families are becoming a dead weight on the spiritual and
material revival of western Europe.
Since I visited the area of Salzgitter, there have been mass meetings,
demonstrations, and even riotings by the local population against the
progress of the dismantling project. It was finally decided to retain
a large portion of the Reich works in activity. The men who so feared
complete idleness will now continue working. Present plans call for
the utilization of the plant for the manufacture of mining machinery,
castings for railway rolling stock, ceramic products and pig iron
castings.
The impossibility of providing a livelihood for uprooted people who
form a quarter of the population of the Federal Republic of western
Germany is better understood when one adds to such problems as that
described above, the inescapable fact that two industrial and mining
areas have been effectively detached from Germany proper, Silesia in
the East, and the Saar, bordering France. The economy of The Ruhr, the
third and largest industrial and mining concentration, is operating at
a reduced level because of the effectiveness of Allied air raids on war
plants, and because of subsequent dismantlings.
And yet, the already swollen population of these western areas grows at
a monthly rate of about 40,000, as the _Times_ editorial pointed out,
owing to the continuous flight of people from the People’s Republic of
Germany behind the Iron Curtain.
Nothing could give a clearer view of the tragedy of uprooted people
than a visit to the transit camps where are lodged the unfortunates who
flee from the Eastern zone of Germany. During a twelve-month period,
1,300,000 persons crossed illegally. Many of these are Expellees who
were dumped into the Soviet Zone and who have fled to the West, hoping
for freedom if not security.
One of the largest transit camps is at Uelzen, located inside the
British Zone of Germany, not far from the Iron Curtain. This same camp
crowded with ugly barrack structures was the scene of the Operation
Swallow mentioned above, by means of which hundreds of thousands of the
former inhabitants of Silesia were concentrated briefly into Uelzen
and then distributed all over the British Zone of Germany, including
Salzgitter and vicinity. Operation Swallow, as callous a bit of human
engineering as the post-war west can boast, was notable for the
skeleton-like appearance of so many starved men, women and children.
A great number of those who now come to Uelzen through the forests
are men, fleeing from service in the People’s Police. Large groups of
young men present themselves at Uelzen stating that they are fugitives
from enforced labor in the uranium mines near the Czech border. For
the teenagers among these groups, and they number untold thousands,
Caritas has founded several homes and training centers, such as will be
described in a later chapter.
A board of German experts representing the various government
departments, or Lander, sits at the Uelzen camp, and examines the
pitiful stories of the newcomers and also their potentialities for
work. If the new refugees cannot prove political persecution in their
last residence, or have crossed only for economic betterment, they are
immediately turned out of the Uelzen camp and given railroad tickets
for the return journey to the Soviet Zone. If political persecution
can be proved, the man is provided by one of the representatives of
the Land governments with the promise of a job, a ration card and
transportation. If he has a family with him, he can take them with him,
or can leave them in the Uelzen camp for a stated period.
The Uelzen transit camp receives between 300 and 1,000 fugitives every
day, of whom only a small percentage can be provided with jobs. The
others are turned out into the roads, because no other provisions can
be made for them. Lutheran Aid Service has a skilled staff of social
workers to take care of emergency cases such as pregnant women, the
sick, the aged and those who are looking for relatives. Caritas also
has social work aid, while the Labor Welfare Committee maintains a
fulltime nursery for the tired and worn children of the men and women
who trek westward.
The camp is a seething overcrowded mass of desperate human beings
fighting for a ration card, a bunk on which to sleep, for the right
to life itself. But outside on the roads around Uelzen, the scene is
worse. Here are the refugees for whose problems no solution could be
found.
As we drove up and down the road in the neighborhood of the camp, we
saw the men standing, dazed and tired, their packs on their backs,
trying to beg rides from passing cars and trucks. Others sat by the
roadside as though too weary to go any further, and many were lying
stretched out fast asleep, their knapsacks serving as pillows.
One of our delegates approached a group of such fugitives. There were
two men, a child with a bandaged eye, a woman with a distraught and
agonized expression. On being approached by an American, they were
willing to talk. They had just been turned out of the Uelzen camp,
turned out into the road of a destroyed country. They could not prove
political persecution, so there were no jobs, no ration cards, no
chance of shelter. In their pockets were a few East marks, each one
worth only about 20 per cent of a West German mark. One man was alone,
but he was consulting with the other man, who had a wife and child, as
to what they could do next. The lone man told his story. Before the
war, he had been a policeman, but he had been drafted into the German
Army for duty on the Russian front. Captured by the Russians, he had
served more than four years as a slave laborer. When he was released
in early 1949, he had gone back to his old town, and was returned to
the police force. It was required of him that he join the People’s
Police, and that he carry out political rather than judicial arrests.
“If you do what you are told, you can have a good life in the People’s
Police,” he explained. “I know well what slave labor is. How could I
do the things they wanted me to do, arrest innocent people, when I am
a Christian? So I am here. I could not prove that I am a political
refugee—but I will never go back there,” and he pointed east.
“Well, what will you do now?” he was asked.
“We thought we would try to get to Hamburg. This man thinks that
someone might give his wife and boy temporary shelter there—and there
might be some kind of work.”
The other man told his story. He had always been a minor civil servant
in a town, and only decided to flee with his wife when he could no
longer carry out the orders given him. He had thought that perhaps they
would recognize his claims to help in the Western Zone, and seemed
dazed when he and his wife and son were turned out of the transit camp
without any help or advice, except the railroad ticket to return to
his place of origin. “They were going to arrest me before, because I
did not carry out all the orders I was given; they would surely arrest
me if I went back now. Even if we starve in Hamburg, we will keep on
going.”
Enough money was found for this desperate group to get them to
Hamburg, and to take care of them for a reasonable time. After that
they would join the ranks of the drifters, who manage to keep alive
from day-to-day by the Providence of God and the local and Church
agencies of welfare. But all along the roads were the others, the
tired, the disheartened, the desperate men, the disheveled women, the
uprooted children, for whom no emergency help was forthcoming. And
as they leave the roads, and disappear into the teeming life of some
half-destroyed city of the West, their places are taken by the next
wave of those who have fled, and who will not return. Never in history
have there been so many wanderers on the roads as in our decade just
past, and perhaps the trek has been accentuated in the past four years
of the peace. We can well echo the query of the thoughtful editorial of
the _New York Times_. “What can be done with them?”
Thus the problems of men and work cannot yet be resolved, owing to
the stream of people who are constantly being added to the potential
labor force, the millions of Expellees whose precarious livelihood is
threatened by dismantling, and the lowered production schedules which
result from Ruhr inactivity and the detachment of other centers of
industry from the body of Germany.
[Illustration:
“We want to live! Stop the dismantling!”—Reich Works
Salzgitter-Wattenstedt.
]
[Illustration:
“Now most of us who work, only have jobs because we are dismantling.
Every day we destroy our own livelihood. What will become of us all
when there is nothing more to dismantle? Before long everything will
be as still as the grave.”
]
[Illustration: “We thought we would try to get to Hamburg ... there
might be some kind of work.”]
[Illustration:
After fleeing through the forests they arrive at the transit camp at
Uelzen. This bleak haven is all their hope, but they are so often
turned out to scrounge in a shattered economy.
]
Another aspect of the condition of Expellee men and their work is the
fact that it often happened that transports of people from farming
areas landed in industrial centers, and thousands of human beings from
towns were herded into the agricultural areas. Men are separated for
years from the work in which their skill could be productive of much
good. They have no security in this temporary adjustment, nor
can they give any sense of security to a family living in a half or a
quarter of a barracks room. It is evident that no social peace can come
out of such conditions. It is in the hope that some solution moving
toward social stabilization of the Expellees can be found that this
study is being written.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _The New York Times_, January 6, 1950.
CHAPTER III
_Men and Slave Labor_
There is a large camp near the center of Germany, close to the
demarcation line between the Western and Eastern Republics of that
divided nation, where the men held in slave labor by the Soviet
Government are turned over once again to their families, to freedom.
This collection of barracks is known as Camp Friedland, or Land
of Peace. For some time, the Russian authorities have liberated
between twenty and thirty thousand men every month through Friedland.
In general, the men returned recently are adequately dressed and
have received more or less the same food as Russian workers. Their
appearance is vastly different from that of the skeleton-like creatures
with bloated heads and feet that used to be returned in trainloads to
their home country.
The day that I visited Friedland, there was no homecoming, so I had
time to look at the installations of the camp—notably the Search
Service. This is a Red Cross Service to help these men, often separated
from their families for anywhere from four to seven years, to locate
them again. The Search Service is located in a large Red Cross
barracks, whose walls are decked with pictures of the missing. One
picture showed a gang of slave laborers rebuilding a city of Eastern
Europe. One man was facing the camera, and his features could be
clearly distinguished. A notation underneath read:
“This is my husband. I have had no word from him for four years. Does
anyone know where he is now or whether he is still among the living?”
Evidently no one had word of the fate of this man, and in the country
where he is held for forced labor, communication with families is
forbidden. I saw many other such appeals, mostly printed by the family
of the lost man, and carrying a copy of his picture. These appeals are
attached to walls and gathering places wherever former Prisoners of War
congregate, and are a pathetic testimony to the power of human beings
to hope against all hope.
One picture would show an ordinary middle-aged man, and underneath
would be such a notice:
“This is our father. He wrote to us from the Eastern front and his
comrades say he was captured near Orel. Our mother has died. Write to
us if you have seen our Father. Greta and Johann Moschle.”
Then follows the address of the children.
Another such flimsy poster carried a picture of a young man and an
appeal from a mother:
“My son Gerhard Foerster was never reported dead, but some of his
comrades say he was taken prisoner at Rostov. Has anyone seen him in
any mine or camp in Russia? He is my only child. He was born in 1926.”
The returned Prisoners of War scan these pictures, and if they have
knowledge of the persons’ whereabouts, or of their death in captivity,
they use the Red Cross Services to notify the families. Even a death
notice is far better than the day-to-day anguish of waiting and not
knowing. The Red Cross Search Services, as well as the Search Services
of the Catholic and Lutheran Churches, all of which are integrated
by exchange of cards, operate on a scientific basis. Every returned
prisoner, after giving the number of the regiment in which he served,
must go to the file where all men missing from that regiment are
listed. He will then give information to a trained Red Cross worker
about every one of the missing men he has seen at any time during his
captivity. This information is annotated, and the family is informed
without delay.
The room that is of the most urgent concern to the returned prisoner is
that busy room with the teletype machine. Many of the men just returned
do not know the precise addresses of their families, since so many were
bombed-out during the war or expelled since the end of hostilities. As
the men searching for their loved ones enter the teletype room, the
information they have listed on a form is relayed to the Red Cross
Headquarters in Hamburg. Here at Headquarters is the master file of
all expelled families, unified with the files handed in by Caritas
(Catholic) Search Service, and by the Lutheran Service. In as little as
three hours, a man whose family has been expelled from Silesia, or the
Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, Danzig, East Prussia, Hungary, Rumania,
or Yugoslavia, may hear the joyful news of their new address—even
though this new address is clearly that of a barracks settlement.
But for many men, there is no news at all. They know that their
families have been expelled. They sometimes learn that a daughter or
a son has died in some place or another. But some wives or sons or
daughters have died en route, or shortly after arriving, and have left
no trace. In the terrible chaos of the great waves of expulsions, no
listings of the dead and missing were possible. The men then wait
around in the camps while additional searches are made, and finally if
no news comes through, they wander back into an empty world and try to
take up life again. Many, moreover, are sick. These are gathered into
special homes for sick POW’s. Caritas in the diocese of Hildesheim has
such a convalescent home, as has the diocese of Paderborn—as have most
of the areas of Germany. This is the last bitter end of the double
tragedy of expulsion and slave labor—two of the things for whose
obliteration we entered the war in the first place.
There are many such men in hospitals, and it is hard to meet the
misery of their eyes. They tell how they wrote to their old address
in Silesia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia or Poland proper, and how the
letter was returned, or how no answer came back at all. Among this
group there is a well of misery whose depths no one can plumb—a misery
only equalled by that monstrous suffering inflicted by the Nazi regime
on innocent people during the years of the war.
In Friedland that day there were some of these men—men who had
been lost four or five years in the depths of Russia, and now upon
liberation were doubly lost, because life had taken away all trace of
those who were dear to them, even their children. The Caritas Director
translated their stories for me, stories that in any other age would
have been so extraordinary that the teller would have been doubted
by his fellows, but today have become the everyday tales of drafted,
deported, dispossessed and brutalized humanity.
One, I remember, was a young man in his twenties. He was drafted from
his home in Silesia. After being captured on the Eastern front, he
was put to work in a Soviet mine even while the war was going on. The
food, he said, was indescribably bad those first years, but it was
similar to the food of the Russian miners themselves. In 1946 and
1947, as conditions in Russia improved, so did the food served to the
slave laborers in the mines. The working hours were shortened, and
life became more bearable physically. All the weaker among the forced
laborers died during the first three years of captivity, he explained.
Men dropped on all sides of him, and no one was informed of their
deaths. Those who survived the first two years were the hardiest and
the toughest. The hope of being reunited with their families, of seeing
again their native villages, helped these men to cling to life in the
most desolate hours.
For this young man there was no return to his native village, since it
had already changed hands. Ever since the day of his return, the Red
Cross had been trying to locate his mother and father and sister, but
not a trace of them had been found anywhere. The whole village had been
evacuated, and other Expelled families from the same area were listed
with the Search Services.
As his parents were rather old, they might have perished anonymously
as did so many older people, during the hard days of the flight of the
millions from the East to the West. As for his sister, she also had
vanished without trace. There had been at that time, many transports of
women towards the East, and perhaps this man’s sister was one of the
thousands of women of the vanquished who had been carried off almost
like the booty that pagan barbarian armies carried off after battle so
long ago.
It was hard to say anything to this young man, because words of comfort
would sound unreal. He is one of many who, after each transport of
returnees, wait behind for word that does not come, for reunions that
will never happen.
I asked a delegate of War Relief Services to meet one of the large
transports of Heimkehrer (returnees) at Friedland. I received a short
report of the human aspect of the event:
“We had been told to expect the release of the 1,700 POW’s at 11
o’clock in the morning. I was at Camp Friedland in time to see Father
Krahe set up his supplies—cigarettes, cakes (given by citizens of the
localities nearby), cocoa, bread, and such prized amenities as soap and
shaving cream.
“Father Krahe always meets the men of the transports as they come
past the barrier into the Western zones, and he told me that many
men were already informed in Moscow that a priest would be stationed
there to greet them. Actually, Father Krahe is not “stationed” there
in the strict sense of the term. He has volunteered for this job
because his own locality suffered little during the war years, and as
a young priest, he wanted to be of some service to the seething mass
of humanity displaced since the peace. He has set up a very practical
barracks chapel decorated by a striking painting of Our Lady protecting
by her mantle the dispossessed and the homeless. Father Krahe gives
real service to the “Hard Core” of returned prisoners—those whose
families are missing.
“A message came through from the Soviet barrier that the men would
not be released until three o’clock in the afternoon. We toured the
Camp and inspected the Red Cross Search Service and at three P.M. we
were ready at the barrier for the men to start streaming through. Camp
Friedland is several miles from the barrier where the men are set free.
“Between the Soviet and Western Zones of Germany there is a No-Man’s
Land, the width of about two city blocks. The road is blocked off by
sentry boxes and by wooden barriers at each end of the No-Man’s Land.
[Illustration:
They came back from slave labor in Russia broken in body, embittered
in spirit.
]
[Illustration:
Camp Friedland. The men began to stream through. They were dressed in
remnants of Wehrmacht uniforms four years after.
]
[Illustration:
Camp Friedland. The boy at the right is 21 and has known five years
of slave labor. He kneels with a comrade to thank God for deliverance.
]
[Illustration:
The doctor, so tired from the return journey that he could hardly
walk, was the one who had to give the news of the death of a
25-year-old prisoner during the trip.
]
“At three o’clock we saw the men lined up beyond the Soviet Zone
barrier. They made no sound, and stood quite still. It was not until
nearly six o’clock that evening that the barrier was raised on the
Soviet side. I stationed myself inside the No-Man’s Land and the men
began to stream through. They were dressed in remnants of old torn
Wehrmacht uniforms, four years after. Many of them had a sort of blue
outfit, with Russian type padded jackets. Under their arms or on their
back they carried shapeless bundles, or wooden valises. For more than
half an hour they trudged by, and as they came they cried out many
things. One young man yelled: “Now after five years, we can laugh
again!” Many, seeing a priest standing at the barrier in the Western
zone, called out the Catholic greeting “Gruss Gott,” and some
shouted, “God be thanked that we are here.” An old man and his daughter
who were waiting at the side of the road suddenly entered the line
and put their arms around a young prisoner. Until that moment, he had
marched like anyone else, but he was so overcome with the joy of seeing
them, that they had to help him walk the rest of the way. Sobs broke
out from him, and the sister and father wept with him as they walked
along.
“Lastly came the sick, who were transferred from Soviet trucks to
waiting ambulances, and last of all came an old bearded man. He was a
doctor who had been taken prisoner, and he was so tired that he could
hardly walk. His wife, who had been waiting for him, saw him just as he
left the Russian barrier, and she ran all the way to the Russian side
to greet and support him. He had been in captivity five years, and he
was worn and ill.
“As he came slowly up the highway in the No-Man’s Land leading to the
barrier, I could see how heavily he leaned on his wife.
“All this time, a tired thin man had been sitting on the grass on the
opposite side of the road from me. He had taken off his shoes, as
though he had walked a long way to get to Camp Friedland.
“When the doctor finally reached the barrier, this man got up, and with
his shoes still in his hand, approached him to find out if there were
any more men on the transport. The doctor explained that he was the
oldest, and the last. All the sick had preceded him.
“The inquirer explained that he had come to Camp Friedland because
his son, a young man of 25, had been able to notify him that he would
be released on this special transport. The doctor asked for the young
man’s name. Then the tired old doctor performed his last sad duty of
the return journey, a journey that had taken 14 days in all, including
the trip in rough, wooden coaches from Moscow. The young man, he
explained, had died on the train, before loving arms could welcome him
home.
“The father, who had waited so quietly and patiently all the day long,
and for the years preceding this day, walked quietly back to where he
had been sitting and sank down on the grass, his face grey.
“Back in Camp Friedland the men who were well enough were lining up
for their first meal as we drove in. The sick were being served in
the barracks hospital. Even the men who look well often have serious
internal disorders, especially heart and kidney diseases.
“They did not mind our photographing them outside the sickrooms, or on
the food line. They made many jokes, and told us how grateful to God
they were for being liberated from Paradise.
“Meanwhile, a few men gathered quietly in the Catholic Chapel. The
greater part of the transport, however, was composed of Protestant men
from the northwestern sections of Germany.
“One young man with a child’s face knelt quietly in the chapel. He was
just twenty-one and had endured five years of slave labor in the Soviet
mines. He had been impressed into the Wehrmacht at the age of sixteen.
He was serene and composed, partly because he had been in touch with
his parents during his captivity by means of the special Postcard
service permitted in some forced labor areas. He was to go to his home
the very next day, right after his registration and his checking of the
file of men still missing from his unit.”
There are uncounted men still held in slave labor. Some maintain that
1,500,000 men have died in Soviet camps and mines and that their deaths
have been unreported, thus leaving a labor pool of 400,000 men still
in Russian hands. Some of these, who are classified as war criminals,
will not be freed, but it was expected that all ordinary drafted
soldiers, whose actions of attack and defense were substantially the
same as those of any drafted soldier, would be released in the regular
transports.
The figures, however, are hard to reconcile, as this excerpt from a
_New York Times_ release will show:
“One year ago the Western allies recapitulated the situation
according to communiques issued on the Russian side during the war.
The total of 3,730,995 prisoners mentioned differed sharply from
Deputy Premier Vyacheslav Molotov’s figure of 890,532 still in the
Soviet Union in March, 1947.
Prisoners repatriated from Russia to March 1, 1948, totaled 252,395
by Mr. Molotov’s reckoning. That would have left 3,478,600 still
detained there by Western reckoning. Even after deducting 500,000
for possible Austrians and ‘Volksdeutsche,’ almost 2,000,000 Germans
would still have been awaiting discharge.” (_New York Times_, Jan.
11, 1950.)
These figures do not include the approximately 80,000 Italian soldiers
still listed as being held in Russia, nor the Hungarians, Rumanians, or
other men captured in war and never released.
A sizeable percentage of the men released from forced labor are
dispossessed and homeless, and find their expelled families in one-room
homes in wooden barracks, or even in mass quarters in old castles and
hotels. But the return of these men is the signal for the family to
take heart again and to begin a new life with the increased strength of
the family unit. Each father who returns home decreases the bitterness
of some among the millions of German children who knew their fathers
were slaves, and whose resistance to teachings of democracy stemmed
from a knowledge that the democratic nations of the West had given
their name to slave labor at Yalta. Reparations in blood was not one of
the ways to erase the crimes of the warring German nation.
Mass homecomings such as the one described above are now no more. The
Soviet authorities have made an announcement that has caused a pall to
descend over hundreds of thousands of homes throughout the length and
breadth of Germany—the simple announcement that repatriation of German
prisoners of war from the Soviet Union has been concluded. The mothers,
the wives, the children who hoped against hope for an eventual reunion
have gone into mourning. The fate of a vast host of men is unknown.
There are so many who are still held in the far reaches of Siberia and
Soviet Asia in forced labor, not only Germans captured in war, but
Austrian and Hungarian soldiers and unnumbered innocent civilians from
Poland and the Baltic States, that we who can help in no other way must
at least join in the great prayer of the Vicar of Christ for the Holy
Year:
“May the Holy Year be for all men ... the year of the great return
and of the great pardon.... Grant, O Lord, to the Refugees and
Prisoners a homeland, and to all men, Thy grace.”
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.
[Illustration:
Tracing Service of Red Cross still tries to locate the more than
100,000 women taken for forced labor and never returned.
]
[Illustration:
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.
]
[Illustration:
A one-room home for an Expellee family is bare, but bright and shiny.
]
[Illustration:
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.
* * * * *
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.
CHAPTER V
_The Children_
“These Little Children are looking for Their Parents,” was a printed
announcement that met me all over Germany. Underneath this announcement
were the haunting faces of fifty little children—little ones separated
from their parents and relatives during the mass expulsions. The little
faces on the poster stared at me in railroad stations, in welfare
offices, on church doors, and in public buildings.
The children who do not know their own names and whose parents are
being sought; the children who know their names and who still search
for their parents; the thousands upon thousands of children who have
vanished without trace and may all be dead—these are the problems
which present themselves in any discussion of the Expellee children
of present-day Germany. There are special Search Services designed
to reunite these tragic little victims with their parents and many
thousands of happy reunions have been brought about.
No one was able to count the number of children, especially infants,
who died in the course of the expulsions, although many have stories to
tell of children who died on the roads. Often the cold, lifeless bodies
of infants and small children were the first to be handed out of the
windows of the deportation trains.
There are no adequate reports on the health and welfare of the millions
of children who survived, and who as innocent, unknowing Pilgrims of
the Night were led to the dismal barracks and shelters that were to
serve as their homes from then on.
THE LITTLE LOST CHILDREN
But to return to the faces on the poster, the children were too young
at the time of flight to remember their last names or the address of
their parents. The descriptions underneath each picture highlight the
unimaginable suffering that is meted out to the innocent in any mass
expulsion.
One little child was found on the road by a soldier; another two
children knew that their mother was taken to Russia from East Prussia.
Another child knew that his first name was Gerhard and that he had a
telephone in his house in Pomerania. Under every photo is written in
a few words an individual tragedy which was implicit in the Allied
decision to uproot millions of human beings in the days of chaos that
followed a world war.
This poster of little lost children searching for parents more than
four years after the end of the war, symbolized for me all the
guiltless who have suffered in the mass expulsions of close to 12
million people from areas of Eastern Europe.
I asked also about other children who were expelled and found that
between 160,000 and 180,000 children were lost in the course of the
uprooting of Germanic minorities and German citizens from such areas
as the Sudetenland, Silesia, East Prussia, Yugoslavia, and Hungary.
In most cases these children, still unaccounted for, were the
casualties of the peacetime war action. Many died on the road; hundreds
upon hundreds of nursing babies died for lack of nourishment and warmth
in the chaotic days after arrival during the terrible winters of
1945/46 and 1946/47. Parents are still searching for the children from
whom they were separated and whom they believe to be alive.
Public searches conducted by posters, by advertisements and by
thousands upon thousands of radio-broadcasts, have given a tone of
tragedy to everyday life in Germany. There are special radio programs
for those children who know their names and the former addresses of
their parents. There are also special radio programs for parents
who still believe that their children who were separated from them
during the deportation can be located somewhere in Germany or in the
neighboring lands.
DAY AFTER DAY, HEART-BREAKING ANNOUNCEMENTS
Day after day, one can hear these heart-breaking announcements of
parents who still hope to find their children three or four years after
the separation. One might reasonably ask why parents allowed themselves
to be separated from their little ones. It is easier to understand,
when one hears such announcements as that regarding a young boy who
had walked to a nearby town to go to the store, and before he returned
his whole family was forcibly loaded on to a truck and taken to a
detention camp for expulsion. Other children were placed on different
deportation trains from the parents.
SEARCH SERVICES FOR MISSING CHILDREN
The lost children are a very special problem of all welfare agencies
which are cooperating to locate as many of them as possible and to
reunite them with their families. The children who are searching for
their parents and whose little faces stare at you all over Germany from
the posters I described, are, in general, well taken care of by public
and religious welfare agencies. It is interesting to note that many
calls have come to German welfare agencies for the adoption of these
children by families living in other lands, but in general expellee
children are not available for adoption because they have been taken by
German families. The remainder of the unaccompanied expellee children
are being kept until extensive investigations are made regarding their
parents and relations.
UPROOTED ORPHANAGES
Two representatives from War Relief Services-N.C.W.C. for Germany
sought out the institutions having expelled children and found some
homes filled with uprooted orphans.
In the Bavarian countryside is one such institution for children
conducted by the Sisters of St. Charles Borromeo. The children and the
Sisters were included in the fiction of mass guilt and were expelled
from a bordertown in Silesia. Given little time to gather their charges
together, the Sisters managed to keep the little family intact on the
deportation train. A home was provided for them all by the American
Military.
The children sheltered in this home have been spared nothing of
bitterness, or terror, or death.
Three of the orphans were a brother and two sisters, Klaus, Gertrude
and Hilda. Klaus, as the eldest, had brought his two sisters to the
safe-keeping of the Nuns before the evacuation from Silesia. His
father was already dead, and when his mother died as a result of a
bombing raid, he, at eleven years of age, presented himself at the
door of the orphanage, holding a five-year-old sister by one hand and
a seven-year-old by the other. The Nuns were keeping the pathetic
remainder of the family intact because of the security it gave each
child to be near the other.
Two little boys, Horst and Dieber Twerdon, were turned out of the
family home at the height of the expulsions, and began walking toward
the center of Germany with their mother. So great was the cold of the
march, that the mother lay down by the side of the road and died.
The two little boys walked on alone until they were picked up by
authorities and added to the uprooted brood congregated in the Bavarian
home.
So many tales of pitiful little children could be told; tales of the
fatherless, of the motherless, from whom everything was taken except
the love of those dedicated women who, of the little helpless beings
entrusted to them, lost not any one.
CHILD LIFE IN BARRACKS
The expellee children who are living in barracks and almost
uninhabitable buildings of all types are subjected to constant
sufferings and agonies. One room to a family is a luxury. Sometimes,
this room may formerly have been a stall for a horse. One extremely
large expellee camp, the Rositen Kaserne near Salzburg, was formerly
a Veterinary Center for horses. Each sick horse had his own stall in
which the animal was tied to a heavy post. Now, in this former horse
hospital, each expellee family lives in one of these stalls and the
heavy post is a reminder to each member of the family that their home
is really a stable. There is little privacy for family living in such
conditions. There is less privacy when 20 families must occupy sections
of large halls in the former castles that have been pressed into
service for expellees. What can we expect of children who live in such
constant overcrowding, surrounded by daily reminders of their degraded
lot as expellees?
YOUTH WITHOUT HOPE
A Red Cross leader explaining that one of the most explosive situations
in Western Germany was that of unemployed, homeless, footloose youth,
stated that there are more than 300,000 young men, between the ages of
fourteen and twenty-five, among the Expellee groups who are without
jobs, or job-training. These young people, old enough to understand
the indignity of their lot in the barracks and hovels of strange towns
and villages, but too young to appreciate the cataclysm that has come
to all Europe, can only look forward to nothingness. There are no
places in the schools for them to learn a trade; no jobs are opening
up for them in an economy that has not even jobs enough for adult
breadwinners. There are at present no real chances of emigration.
These young people look backward to the day by day destruction and
systematic cruelty of the war years, and to the inhumanity and chaos of
the years of peace. It would not be surprising if out of this immense
mass of youth without hope, there should emerge a cold dangerous
nihilism. Since they have seen the depths, they might come to fear
nothing, to reverence nothing, not even life itself.
The appeal of hungry and homeless children is one that goes right to
the heart. No one needs to ponder, or study whether such an appeal
should be answered by help even at a sacrifice. The appeal of these
young people is one that must go to the mind as well as to the heart.
The future of the West will have to count with these young people,
whether for good or for ill. Up to now, the world has shown them by
all methods possible that it does not want them, nor does it want
their intelligence, or their skills. They have been driven from their
homes, and driven out of participation in the business of living.
Those who have parents are still under some restraints and are linked
to religion, to family, to some small, eventual hope of making a
contribution to society by work. But even then, the parents themselves
are full of discouragement, because most of them had hoped to provide
training or higher education for their teenagers, and now find
themselves utterly unable to do so.
There are others who have lost all ties with family—either through
death or through deportation to the East. Some young men were urged
by families living in the Eastern Zone to flee to the West because of
imminent danger of forced labor. Still others have come to the West
after escaping from forced labor in the uranium mines. Many of these
youngsters are sixteen and seventeen years of age. Were it not for the
activities of Lutheran Aid and Catholic Charities in setting up homes
for these boys, it is hard to say what would have become of them.
I visited such a home for homeless boys at Wewelsburg, in the diocese
of Paderborn, Westphalia, and saw what stable and disciplined young
citizens they become when gathered into the warm and intimate
atmosphere of a home. A selfless young leader of Catholic Action
directed the home, and gave each boy a sense of responsibility, a
sense of belonging. A course of training, as near as possible to the
capacities and desires of the boy, was provided in the neighbourhood.
Forty boys lived in this Youth Home, recently rebuilt after being
completely burnt out. The boys themselves worked on the building and
renovation. All of the boys were Expellees, though some of them had
been expelled first into the Russian Zone of occupation before deciding
to cross into the so-called Golden Zone of the West. Many of them had
escaped from forced labor.
[Illustration:
“These little children are looking for their parents.”
]
[Illustration: “Parents seek these lost children.”]
[Illustration:
Home for this child is behind the barbed wire of former slave labor
barracks.
]
[Illustration:
An Expellee child in a camp in Schleswig-Holstein.
]
The one diocese of Paderborn has had to set up eight such Youth Homes,
for homeless, driven youth—seven for boys and one for girls. Forty
Youth Homes have already been set up by Caritas in Western Germany.
Many more such homes are needed in the Western Federal Republic if
these young people are to be rescued for a normal, useful and stable
existence.
CHILDREN OF THE DISPERSION
From a religious point of view, the Catholic children who have been
expelled into the Northern areas of Germany, where there are neither
sufficient churches nor schools, are at present a very pressing and
special problem. These children are served by priests who come to
them on foot, on bikes or on motorcycles. They are prepared for First
Communion and Confirmation in crowded barracks rooms and Lutheran
churches kindly lent for the occasion. The richness of Catholic life
which their parents knew before the expulsion is entirely absent.
The faith is kept alive only by the heroic efforts of weary and
overburdened priests and dedicated lay people from among the expellees.
Much self-help has been organized among the German Catholics to
save this generation of children who are living in the Diaspora, or
Dispersion areas of Germany. Every year, the dioceses of South-Germany,
particularly Bavaria, bring down thousands of the expellee children
from the areas of Schleswig-Holstein and North-Germany to spend the
summer months with Catholic families.
TALE TOLD AT NIGHT BY HOMELESS CHILDREN
Bavaria in the summer is rich in color and richer still in
its expressions of Catholic life. Some of the children from
Schleswig-Holstein used to sit in the evenings and tell the Bavarian
youngsters what they thought of the lovely domed churches of the
Bavarian countryside. The little expellee children marvelled at the
colorful interiors of the churches, at the vestments of the priests,
at the beautiful marriage ceremonies, at the fact that one could go to
Confession and Communion at almost any time because the priest was near
the church and near the people.
For the expellee children from Schleswig-Holstein, there were very few
priests and their life was dark and sad. They told how they waited on
the road, often without shoes and in the rain, for the priest who came
to them on his cycle. They explained how their Mass was said in bare
schoolrooms without any color or loveliness.
A PICTURE OF DESOLATION
A Bavarian girl listened to these stories told in the evenings by
homeless and yearning little ones. These tales impressed her so much
that she painted them into a picture—a picture which in its accuracy
and power is a real masterpiece. The young Bavarian girl was Veronika
Reich of the diocese of Augsburg in Bavaria. Veronika painted in
the lower part of the picture several crowded scenes of color and
joy, a church wedding, a child being baptised, a Bishop dispensing
Confirmation, children being taught Catechism by the priests, children
going to Confession, children receiving Communion. Behind these scenes
rise the spires and the cupolas, or “onion” towers, of the typical
Bavarian churches. Towards the top of the picture, the colors grow
dark, and we see two little groups of shoeless children, standing by
the side of the road waving in welcome to a priest on a bicycle. The
buildings are plain as schoolbuildings are. The top of the picture is
absolutely black in color. In this way Veronika, hardly more than a
child herself, interpreted the longings and sufferings of other little
children from whom so much has been taken, even the joys of their
religion. I wish that every Catholic in America had seen this most
unbelievable picture that came from the hearts of some children and the
hand and heart of another child. Among the Pilgrims of the Night, the
expellees of Western Europe, the children are the most desolate of all.
CHAPTER VI
_The Priests_
One of the most significant books that was given to me during my recent
tour of Europe was a bound volume containing the names and addresses
of 2,700 expelled priests who were uprooted from their parishes in
1945, 1946 and 1947. None of these Catholic priests had been accused
of crimes of any sort. Most of them were simple pastors of country
and city parishes whose aim was the spiritual welfare and eventual
salvation of their flocks. Many of them had suffered at the hands of
the Gestapo.
And yet, when the theory of mass expulsion on a racial basis was
applied to such areas as Pomerania, East Prussia, Danzig, and Silesia
and the Sudetenland, these men of God were thrust from their parish
churches, from their rectories, and joined the nearly 12 million
expellees who trekked through the heart of Europe as uprooted pilgrims
of the night. And they still are joined to the lot of the disinherited,
for they live among them in daily service, in daily sacrifice.
The book to which I refer has been printed by the Seminary for expelled
seminarians located in Koenigstein, near Frankfurt. It lists the former
dioceses of the priests, their date of ordination, and their present
whereabouts in Western Europe. We see in this book listings of priests
ranging from young men who were just ordained to priests ninety years
of age.
Some of the priests as members of such religious orders as the
Franciscans and Augustinians were generally accepted by the houses of
their orders in Western Germany. The vast majority of these expelled
priests were simple pastors and they have gone out among their people
who were expelled with them. Their life differs little from that of any
other homeless expellee.
I have known a priest to live in a single room of an old house, so as
to be near the former slave labor barracks where the expellees from
Silesia manage to exist. I have seen pictures taken by Caritas of
the dwellings of other expelled priests; one priest from the Ermland
diocese was able to get a little room in the attic of a resort hotel,
a room which serves not only as his study, his sleeping quarters, and
garage for his only means of transport, a bicycle, but also as his
parish office where he receives his parishioners.
HOMELESS PRIESTS—THEIR FLOCKS DISPERSED
One of the burdens that lie most heavily on these expelled priests is
the knowledge that their former parishioners are scattered throughout
all the zones of Germany. These driven people had no choice as to
their destination; or to be exact, they had no destination. To cite
an example, Father Johannes Preuss, now located in Neumuenster,
Schleswig-Holstein, reported that he had a parish of 700 souls in
Nossberg, East Prussia. When the expulsion came, trains took his
parishioners in different directions and he has received word from
them from all four zones of Germany. The largest number of his
parishioners landed in the Russian zone. He does not know how many of
his parishioners were deported eastward to slave labor in Siberia, nor
how many died on the roads and in the cattle cars during the expulsion.
He does know that exhaustive efforts to find out how many of his
parishioners are still alive resulted in a total of 450 out of 700.
Father Preuss also gave us another significant figure: out of the ten
priests fulfilling their ministry in the area of Gutstadt, (where his
parish was located), seven were killed or deported and only three live
to labor among their expelled flocks in Western Germany. The particular
diocese of Ermland from which Father Preuss comes suffered possibly
more than any other diocese in the loss of its priests and the loss of
its faithful. About 40 per cent of its priests are dead or missing.
For all the inhabitants of East Prussia, Catholic and Protestant, the
total of dead or missing comes to 1 out of every 5 people. This is
the cost that is paid by human beings in general, the guilty and the
innocent, the aged and the children, for mass expulsion.
A PRIEST IN SIBERIA
One of the priests of this Ermland diocese is now in the United
States on a mission on behalf of the St. Boniface Society, the Church
Extension organization of Germany. This young Ermland priest has told
us in a calm, gentle way of his experience—experiences which are true,
unfortunately, for other priests, and men and women.
Because of his opposition to Nazism, Father Gerhard Fittkau was
forbidden to teach by the Gestapo, though he had earned his doctorate
in theology and was needed as a professor in a Catholic High School.
He was appointed as the young pastor of the parish of the Nativity of
Our Lady, in Suessenberg, East Prussia. He had in his pastoral care a
little flock of 91 families, numbering 460 people. They were in the
main, the owners of well-kept farms, hard-working and orderly, but not
rich—part of a Catholic enclave in a prosperous Protestant area.
He was there in January, 1945, when the Russian advancing army almost
completely encircled the area of Central Ermland in East Prussia.
Though tempted to flee, in the wake of many who had managed to get out
before the arrival of the Soviet troops, Father Fittkau found in the
sacrifice of the Mass, the strength to remain, though it might mean
death or deportation. Every day he celebrated High Mass, and all the
parishioners who remained, together with evacuees from other villages,
prayed with great faith and devotion. The confessional was busy as
never before. The instruction for Holy Communion was speeded up so that
the little ones could also receive the Holy Eucharist; the Sacrament
was carried to the old and the sick. For so many it was a viaticum,
explains Father Fittkau, not only for the aged and ill, but for the
young and the strong.
“When I consider,” says Father Fittkau, “all that God’s grace must have
accomplished in those days of extreme distress, the price we had to
pay was surely not too high. Could our parish ever have been led by
any other means to such trust in God, to such resignation, and to such
love?”
When the Soviet army entered Suessenberg, girls and women were
immediately rounded up and taken away for “peeling potatoes for
the soldiers.” They returned after being abused by the army men,
broken-spirited and infected by disease. Father Fittkau was able to
protect a group of several women and girls and a Grey Sister from such
violation, though he came close to being executed for his deed.
Twenty-five villagers were murdered, including a seventy-three-year-old
sacristan, the sixty-five-year-old church bell-ringer, the
twenty-three-year-old girl organist, and four other girls under
twenty-five. Six priests of the surrounding area were executed.
After burying the bodies of his dead parishioners in the hard-frozen
earth, Father Fittkau had to register at the newly set-up Red Army
headquarters. There, he met three elderly priests who had been herded
in from the neighborhood. The four of them were sent as a special
detail to go out into the fields and gather for a common grave the
bodies of about fifty murdered civilians—bodies already partly mauled
by animals. Before their task was fully done, the priests were arrested
and marched by the Soviet Secret Police to a cellar in a neighboring
town. Many civilians were locked up in other cellars of the same town
and were not allowed out of the improvised cells even for any of
nature’s needs. (This was a common Soviet prison procedure.)
Finally in March of 1945, two months after the arrival of the Red Army,
the prisoners knew their sentence—the deportation to Siberia for slave
labor. About 2,500 men and women from the area were sent off at the
same time. Forty-eight other men and boys, ranging in age from 14 to
73, were in the dark, ice-cold car with Father Fittkau for a 21 day
journey, which included stops at Moscow and Kotlas for delousing. The
journey continued until they reached a forced labor camp near Pechora
in the Tundra near the Arctic Ocean. When the freight car was opened at
the destination, seven of the forty-nine men had already died. Father
Fittkau staggered with the men into a large compound, filled only with
bare, snow-covered barracks. Around the compound was a ten-foot wooden
fence. Four large watch towers stood at each corner of the camp. It
seemed as though most of the inmates of this compound had died, but the
few who were left were led off shortly after Father Fittkau arrived.
They were Poles and Ukrainians who had been deported to Siberia in 1940
and 1941, when between one and one-half and two million innocent men,
women and children of Polish nationality were brutally uprooted from
their homes for forced labor.
“They were ragged, prematurely old, pitiful human creatures,” says
Father Fittkau, “the remnants of those poor people who had been removed
to this forced labor district when Stalin shared Poland with Hitler.”
Father Fittkau worked with other men, and many deported women with
shaved heads and men’s garments, on the earth works and timber-works
for a canal. One of his only sources of comfort was the companionship
of a Protestant minister. Together, they tried to force their worn
out minds to hold on to spiritual realities while men, reduced to a
vegetative existence, fell and died in the snow around them.
At the end of the first month, a quarter of all the inhabitants of the
compound had already died. The unfortunates who could not work, but
also could not die, were sent farther north to a so-called barracks
hospital, where little could be done for them in the way of medical
aid. They were observed by a specialist, however, for the signs of
degeneration due to lack of vitamins and general malnutrition.
With his legs and feet swollen from weakness and hunger, and his entire
body marked with abscesses and eczema, Father Fittkau waited for death,
but unexpectedly, on the Feast of Our Lady of Ransom, he was freed, and
added to the first batch of freed laborers that would be returned to
Germany.
Recovering in a half-destroyed hospital in Berlin, he learned of
the expulsions from the East. The flock of his little parish of Our
Lady’s Nativity were now homeless wanderers, mostly in the Soviet Zone
of Germany. The poor little village had been scattered, says Father
Fittkau, “from the Urals and uttermost reaches of Siberia, to the
Rhine.” From letters and reports, he estimates that scarcely half of
his former parishioners are still alive.
Father Fittkau stresses that this story of the dispersal of a parish is
nothing exceptional—but rather the typical story of the atomization of
thousands of parishes since the end of the war.
As soon as he had recovered, Father Fittkau was placed in charge of the
Chancery of the late Bishop Maximilian Kaller. In this work, he was
thrust into the heart of all Expellee problems since Bishop Kaller was
named by the Holy Father as Bishop of all Expelled Catholics in Germany.
Father Fittkau wants to make known the sufferings of the priests of the
disinherited, so that special help can be sent to them to aid them in
their holy and heroic tasks. He wants to make known, too, his strong
feeling for the reconciliation of all Christians, especially former
enemies, who have suffered so much that they should have no hatred
left—only love and compassion.
UPROOTED CATHOLICS WITHOUT CHURCHES
One of the least understood problems concerning the expellees is
that of the Catholics who were expelled into the Protestant areas of
Germany, where there are neither churches, parish centers, nor schools.
Here the task of the homeless priest is made a thousand times more
difficult, because he must find places to say Mass and he must find
ways of getting to his poverty-stricken flock. They cannot come to him
over great distances because they lack means of transportation and
money. They lack strength often to walk the miles necessary to reach
the town center where Mass is being said. There are three Catholic
dioceses in Germany which have received in the last few years, hundreds
of thousands of destitute Catholics whose spiritual and material needs
are overwhelmingly great. The two dioceses of Osnabrueck and Hildesheim
in the north of Germany found their Catholic populations increased
almost overnight by more than a million Catholics. These dioceses,
which are located in the predominantly Protestant areas of Germany and
which have received so tremendous an influx of Catholics, are known as
the Diaspora dioceses. The diocese of Paderborn was also affected in
this way as well, as we will make clear later.
The diocese of Osnabrueck extends all the way up to the Danish border
and includes within its area the entire province of Schleswig-Holstein
which juts out into the Baltic and North Sea. Schleswig-Holstein has
been since the 16th century an almost wholly Protestant area. As a
result of the mass expulsion, the population of this province rose
from 1,500,000 to 2,700,000. The Lutheran expellees from East Prussia,
Pomerania and Silesia came into an area where their spiritual needs
could be met in some measure by the local Lutheran churches and
Lutheran Pastors. The thousands upon thousands of Catholic expellees
found themselves living not only in material misery in wooden barracks
and in rooms in back of barns, but in the deepest spiritual misery
because of the lack of the consolations of religion. Bishop Kaller
immediately stationed more than sixty-five expelled priests in the area
of Schleswig-Holstein. These devoted men were helped by the Lutheran
Pastors who gave them the use of their Lutheran Churches to say Mass,
and by local public authorities who allowed them to say Mass and to
give instructions in public schools on Sundays and in the evenings. The
Bishop of Osnabrueck has also transferred some of his best equipped
priests to this area to help in the organization of new parishes.
Several wooden churches and parish centers have already been erected.
The efforts of the priests to cover great tracts of territory are
supported by the work of selfless women, who trudge on foot, or go by
bicycle, to teach Catechism in the most remote settlements. A group
of young women have even grouped themselves into a new society to
meet the needs of the times. In a barracks on a lonely section of
Schleswig-Holstein, they pray and study to prepare themselves for their
apostolate as pastors’ helpers.
I sent one of the delegates of War Relief Services up to
Schleswig-Holstein to make a special survey of the struggles and needs
of these priests, and among other reports, I received one on the
typical Sunday of an expellee priest in Schleswig-Holstein.
It might be well to mention in this connection that the Diaspora area
of the Lutheran expellees is in Bavaria and Southern, predominantly
Catholic, Germany. Here the Lutheran homeless find themselves without
churches. Their pastors often use Catholic halls and establishments to
give the ministrations of their belief to Lutheran expellees. One sees
them on their bicycles moving over the roads of Munich and the southern
German countryside on their visitations. I am sure that studies have
also been made of the struggles of these Pastors, but I would like to
present to you this living picture of a priest and a pastor, who in the
dark night of exile, tries to keep alive the light of faith.
ALMOST NEVER OFF HIS MOTORCYCLE
Father Francis Motzki, the report states, was an expellee from the
diocese of Ermland in East Prussia, who was sent in 1946 by Bishop
Kaller to care for the souls of the expellees in northwestern
Schleswig-Holstein.
He found a room in the town of Bredstedt. It is a little room which
contains besides his bed, his desk, his clothing, his work table, his
book case, and his parish supplies, a locked tabernacle on the wall
which contains the body and blood of the Lord of all the world. Father
Motzki works and eats and receives his local parishioners in this one
room. As there is no Catholic Church in the town of Bredstedt, he must
keep the Most Blessed Sacrament in this tabernacle so that he will be
ready to go to the sick and dying when called.
Catholic expellees are located in camps and villages all around
Bredstedt, and Father Motzki says Mass in eight different places and
gives religious instructions to children and young people in thirteen
places. Though he is well under forty, he looks like an older man. He
is almost never off the motorbike on which he commutes between the
various places where he gives instructions and visits his parishioners.
He has recently developed a serious kidney ailment but cannot curtail
his work for souls.
He has known great personal tragedy, since one of his sisters was
deported for slave labor in Siberia, in 1945, and was never heard from
again. A second sister was also deported, but was returned to Germany
in 1948. She rented a room in the same house, and prepares Father’s
meals and acts as housekeeper for his furnished room.
I came early one Sunday morning to the town of Bredstedt where Father
Motzki said his first Mass in the Lutheran Church at 7:45 in the
morning. He had a full congregation consisting solely of expellees.
Because there was a three-hour interval before his next Mass, Father
Motzki was allowed to take liquid refreshment—some hot coffee. After
his cup of coffee, Father Motzki set out for his second Mass station at
Lutjenholm. This was in a public school. When he arrived the women from
the nearby expellee barracks were already there and the teacher’s desk
was covered with clean linen and with fresh flowers for the celebration
of the sacrifice of love. Most of the congregation at this Mass were
grown-ups. Confessions, heard in the open hallway of the school,
preceded the Mass, which began at 11:30 o’clock.
Immediately after the second Mass, Father Motzki proceeded to Bargum
and arrived there in time to say his third Mass in a school at 1 P.M.
There were many camps in the vicinity, and the school room was crowded
with a congregation that consisted of more than half young people. The
clean linen and the flowers just picked from the fields were already
there, and one could see the joy with which these forsaken people
welcomed the priest of God. At this Mass Father Motzki delivered a
special sermon for the children and young people, because a large
number of them were to be confirmed on the following Thursday by the
Bishop of Osnabrueck. The confirmation of these and all the other
children of the entire area would take place in the Lutheran Church of
Bredstedt.
Father Motzki reminded the children what confirmation meant as the
strengthening of the faith of the Christian to meet the trials of the
world and to resist sin. He explained to them the entire ceremony,
including the making of the sign of the Cross with the chrism, and the
slap on the cheek by the Bishop as a reminder to each child that it is
his duty to accept trials for Christ.
CHILDREN WHO KNEW CHRIST’S CROSS
“It may be,” said Father Motzki, “that I have not been able because of
the difficulties of our life here to instruct you adequately in all
the aspects of the faith for your Confirmation. It may be that there
are many points about Catholic doctrine that I could have taught you
more thoroughly, my beloved children. When the Bishop makes the sign
of the Cross first with the holy oil on your forehead and then over
you, I know that you will understand what he means by it. You know so
well, though you are only children, what the Cross means in our life of
every day. You are homeless, you are exiled from your farms and your
home towns. You must go out without shoes, and you have known terrible
hunger. You understand all these things. You know the way of the Cross!
“And so, when the Bishop, who represents to you Christ himself, makes
the Cross over you, you will know from your own sufferings, not from my
teaching, what Christ meant by the Cross.
[Illustration:
Confession in the school hall.
]
[Illustration:
“Oh Mary, help us all, out of the depth of our need.”
]
[Illustration:
Though he may be hungry and tired, the Expellee priest is a tower of
strength to the people whom he visits in their barracks homes.
]
[Illustration:
Father’s fourth Sunday Mass in a Lutheran Church.
]
“When the Bishop slaps each one of you on the face to remind you to
be willing to suffer for Christ’s sake, you must remember to offer up
willingly all the suffering of your own bodies and of your family for
Christ. He took His Cross and offered His life for each one of us.”
After the Mass the children and young people joined in singing the
beautiful and touching hymn of Maria Hilf. As they sang, “Oh Mary, help
us all, out of the depth of our need,” it was clear from their faces
and from their sad voices that they knew what the Cross really meant,
and also what it meant to accept the trials of the world.
There were tears in the eyes not only of the Expellees but also of the
War Relief Service delegate as this hymn was sung.
NO FOOD BEFORE EVENING
Father Motzki then visited some of the sick and aged in the nearby
barracks. I could not help but notice as we drove along throughout
the day, following Father’s route, how rich and lovely was the
countryside, with its flat, well-cared-for fields, fine barns, and neat
little cottages. Everywhere we saw the magnificent cattle for which
the area is famous. Every now and then, we would pass an impressive
establishment, owned by a larger landowner, and we would admire the
tremendous, solid brick barns. By contrast with all this comfort and
solidity, the clusters of unpainted, greyish-brown wooden barracks in
which so many of the expellees lived seemed even more desolate and
forlorn.
After his visits, Father took to the road again and headed for the
town of Langenhorn, where at 3 o’clock in the afternoon he said his
fourth and last Mass of the day in a Lutheran Church, kindly lent to
him by the minister. The main aisles of the church were filled and many
people went to communion, particularly younger people and children.
Again Father Motzki gave his sermon on confirmation and again the
voices of children who knew the misery of separation and homelessness
filled the building.
At 6 o’clock that evening Father Motzki was back in Bredstedt and
sitting down to his first solid food of the day.
TO SAVE A WHOLE GENERATION
You who read may think that this case is very unusual. It is not
at all. Other priests go through the same heart-breaking schedule,
covering regularly six thousand three hundred Mass stations in Lutheran
churches, movie houses and schools, only because they want to save a
whole generation for the Church. Priests know that men and women and
children who have been deprived of everything may become bitter and
cynical if they are not given the consolations of religion. It is
only to prevent the loss of a whole generation in the Diaspora areas,
that the expellee priests, like true apostles and true pilgrims, wear
out their strength in saying Masses and giving instructions over wide
areas. In the province of Schleswig-Holstein alone there are 341 Mass
stations for the expellees where 83 priests say Mass as often as is
humanly possible. Already young priests have died under the strain of
this schedule. This is an area where Catholic relief from America
can play a vital role in saving for the Church a whole generation, a
generation of the uprooted, of the disinherited.
Our Lord has put so often into our hands here in the United States the
bounty that we can share so that these children, so deeply wounded by
separation and suffering, may not also be disinherited from the Kingdom
of the Lord.
CHAPTER VII
_Two Bishops and Their Burdens_
While I was in Germany, a striking photograph on the cover of a German
pictorial magazine caught my eye. It was the picture of a tall Bishop
in his robes. There was hung about his neck, just above his pectoral
cross, a miniature wooden house into which the faithful were putting
their offerings of money. The picture was that of His Excellency, the
Most Reverend Lawrence Jaeger, Archbishop of Paderborn, who dramatized
the need for new houses in today’s Germany by striding with this odd
collection box among the 500,000 faithful assembled at a great Catholic
festival in Bochum, a Ruhr mining town. The Archbishop was begging in
person for the homeless, the bombed-out, the expellees, and just as
he actually carried around his neck the miniature wooden house, so
he carries, and is weighted down by, incredibly heavy burdens. His
immense diocese, stretching across the heart of a battered continent,
illustrates every conceivable post-war problem.
I had the privilege before I left Germany of spending several hours
with Archbishop Jaeger in his modest home in the midst of a ruined
city. Paderborn was eighty per cent destroyed in the bombings that
accompanied the end of the fighting on German soil. While not a
military objective, the city stood squarely in the path of the army. A
Nazi mayor fled for safety with his own family without transmitting to
the residents an offer for the cessation of hostilities in exchange for
the surrender of the city. The cathedral and the episcopal residence
were only part of the losses of the Church. Also destroyed were the
headquarters of the St. Boniface Society, the century-old organization
for helping mission area parishes; the great seminary of the diocese;
various hospitals; the motherhouse of the Sisters who serve the blind;
and the diocesan Caritas headquarters. Around the Archbishop are the
other destroyed cities of his diocese, including the famous industrial
targets of Dortmund, Bochum and Gelsenkirchen, as well as many smaller
towns. It was the thousands upon thousands of family dwellings which
had met complete destruction that brought anguish to the heart of this
“Father of the Poor.”
Before the war the flock of Archbishop Jaeger numbered 1,900,000. Since
the war 1,200,000 expellees have flooded the area of his diocese, of
whom 800,000 are Catholics. Archbishop Jaeger invited me to drive to
one of the new villages made up of these expellees. It was founded
on the site of an old prisoner of war camp and consisted largely of
barracks and quonset huts. Most of the barracks had seven rooms and
in each room is an expelled family, or what is left of the family
group. One of the quonset huts had been made into a chapel and a priest
comes to say Mass each day and to instruct the children. Another
serves as a hospital in which five nurses supplied by the Caritas of
the diocese do all they can to minister to the spirits and bodies of
these exiles. It is to camps such as these that the millions of pounds
of food, clothing and medicines of War Relief Services-N.C.W.C. are
channelled. This camp at Eselheide is just one of the many villages of
exiles whose care and welfare lie so heavily on the public and private
welfare agencies. Father Dietrich, the Director of Charities for the
archdiocese of Paderborn, accompanied us on this visit and outlined
some of the other burdens of his Archbishop.
Of the 800,000 Catholic refugees, a large number have been settled in
those parts of the diocese that are not equipped with Catholic churches
or schools. Hundreds of new service and welfare centers have had to be
opened so that priests may have a meeting-place to instruct children
and celebrate Mass. The greater number of the Catholic expellees were
dumped from the transports into the large section of the Paderborn
diocese that extends into the Russian Zone. Archbishop Jaeger makes
regular visits to the Russian Zone, and I was shown a map of the towns
and villages at which he stopped on his last visitation. More than
300 Catholic centers of various types have been set up in the Russian
section of the diocese for these unfortunate expellees. In the main,
they are administered by priests, themselves expelled. They are helped
in their day-to-day needs by a commissariat established at Magdeburg,
the largest town of the diocese in the Russian Zone. This tremendous
diocese extends into three occupation zones, British, American and
Russian, its furthest point being less than twenty miles from Berlin.
The proportion of expellees among the Catholics of this diocese is
higher than one in every three. What struck me with tremendous force
was the outlay of the diocesan Caritas on behalf of these destitute
newcomers to a scene of destruction. Seventeen homes have been opened
for aged expellees, including one for the aged blind. Two large
orphanages have been set up for the hundreds of homeless expellee
children, and eight youth homes for teenagers who are studying crafts
and professions.
A recuperation center for returned Prisoners of War, who are still
being returned daily, allows these men to search for their expelled
families while they are regaining their strength. All these are extra
burdens, accepted courageously by a Bishop who is an example to all of
Christian hope.
In talking with me of the past, Archbishop Jaeger told me of the losses
among his younger priests during the war. The Nazis took countless
priests and impressed them into the army as medical corps men and
stretcher-bearers. Others went as chaplains to the soldiers. In this
way, one hundred of the active younger priests of the Paderborn diocese
died during the war years. Another twelve are still prisoners of the
Russians. There is no word about their return. Father Dietrich, the
dedicated diocesan Caritas Director, was himself a prisoner of the
Gestapo for not supporting the war; while the rector of the Salvatorian
Fathers, Father Reinold Unterheld, perished in Dachau for the same
reason.
Archbishop Jaeger and his entire flock are now working with the release
of energy that comes to men who have regained freedom.
This diocese, which embraces the very heart of Germany, was coveted
by anti-Christian leaders. Himmler set up his SS headquarters and his
own dwelling in a picturesque and ancient village, Wewelsburg, that
commands a long view of the Westphalian landscape. For himself and his
SS, Himmler bought the entire village, including the ancient triangular
castle. The lovely Catholic Church was expropriated and the sacrifice
of the Mass was discontinued. The inhabitants were told to find homes
outside the village. Himmler considered this village, Wewelsburg,
the center of Germany and of the future. He boasted that from a high
conference room in Wewelsburg Castle, marked symbolically with a
radiating star as the “Middle-Point of the World,” the ideas of the
future would radiate, and that Rome as a center of spiritual leadership
would be replaced.
Wewelsburg is again a Catholic village, host to expellees from the
East, to young men in its Catholic Youth Home, to homeless old people
in a home for the aged, to orphan children, to productive artisans and
to families.
Such Christian hospitality to so many victims of the peace came
from the generous impulses of Archbishop Jaeger, Father Dietrich,
the Catholic Charities Director, and the sorely-tried flock of the
Archdiocese of Paderborn. Both the Archbishop and his Charities
Director stressed again and again the importance of the relief goods
from Catholic Americans in saving the lives of the helpless, the sick,
the aged and the fatherless, both among the local population and among
the expellees. Large amounts of War Relief Services-N.C.W.C. supplies
were channelled into the Paderborn area at regular intervals by the
central office of Caritas.
This story of this Archbishop presiding over the needs of an immense
diocese in the heart of Europe, is only one of many. I have given it in
some detail because it represents the problems and struggles of many
other Bishops of Christ’s Church, who, groaning under the burdens of
their suffering flocks, the homelessness of them, the terror and the
hopelessness of them, must nevertheless serve as towers of strength,
and sources of help in a cruel and destroyed world. Similar stories
could be gathered about the brave Bishops of Poland, of Hungary, of
Yugoslavia, of the war-shattered dioceses of Italy.
AN EXPELLED BISHOP
On the grounds of the Seminary of Koenigstein, in the peaceful valley
not far from Frankfurt, is the grave of an expelled Bishop—a Bishop who
carried one of the most stupendous burdens ever given to any shepherd
since the beginning of Christ’s Church. His flock were the more than
7,500,000 Catholics who were included among the Expellees from such
dioceses as those of Ermland and Breslan, which were denuded of their
Germanic flocks.
Bishop Maximilian Kaller, an exile also in death, is buried at
Koenigstein because it is here that the newer generation of priests
for the Expellees, drawn as they are from among the young men of the
Expellee group, are being trained.
Bishop Kaller was appointed by the Holy Father as Bishop of all the
Expellees. He was to coordinate all spiritual resources to ensure
the unbroken continuance of the Church’s ministry to this destitute,
nomadic flock, spread all over Germany. He was to plead the cause of
his disinherited millions at all doors.
When the Expellees were denuded of their possessions, Bishops were
turned out of their dioceses, not by any church authority, of course,
but by men who usurped all authority, both of God and of man.
Bishop Kaller was thrown out of his Ermland diocese, and came to
central Germany, as poverty-stricken, as homeless, as buffeted by men,
as were the first bishops of the Church in apostolic times.
Joined by Father Gerhard Fittkau, whose experiences were described in a
preceding chapter, he opened an office in Frankfurt. It was an office
that consisted of one room, where he and Father Fittkau stored all the
records they had, where they answered the tremendous volume of mail,
and where they slept when they called a halt to the work that was never
done.
In 1945, Germany was a place of chaos and misery, though we who saw it
feel we can never communicate anything of the reality of that chaos or
that misery. Bishop Kaller, without funds, without a car, travelled
the roads of Germany to visit those who had been given into his care.
He would stand up in the obscenely overcrowded trains, he would walk
great distances to meet with priests and lay people; he would fast and
go sleepless on his way so that the organization of spiritual care for
the homeless would not be hindered. And then he would return to the
crowded room in Frankfurt where hundreds of letters awaited him—letters
filled with anguish and terror and the blackest misery. Night after
night he would work answering these letters, not only offering words of
comfort, but planning works of relief.
So many of the letters told of urgent material needs—even for blankets
to cover the homeless at night, for food for sick and dying children.
So many letters begged the Bishop to help find a mother, lost in a
railroad station in the terror of a mass exodus; to find a child lost
on the road when the mother became ill; to find a father who had
disappeared into the void of captivity in the East.
But what tore at his Bishop’s heart especially were the repetitions of
anguished appeals like this: “If you can’t help us, won’t you send us
priests; won’t you send Christ to us, here in our wilderness.”
The priests he sent, those priests who labor as we tried to describe in
an earlier chapter. The Sacraments were brought to the homeless in the
camps and settlements all over Germany. The daily anguish of his task,
and the daily privation of his life, showed in the emaciated face and
frame of Bishop Kaller. He pressed his poor body on beyond its powers.
And finally, one day in 1947, before he could see any lightening of the
burden, before any real improvement in conditions had been noted in the
lives of his people, he died. His death came on the eve of his trip to
Rulle in the diocese of Osnabreuck, where homeless faithful and priests
of his former diocese were gathered together to hear the message of
their shepherd. The priests, the men and women and children, who had
come to Rulle to be strengthened by their spiritual father, were
stunned to hear that they were, in a sense, fatherless. Bishop Kaller’s
Vicar-Capitular announced the death of the saintly Bishop, saying “How
rich we were to have such a Bishop—to have a Bishop who was so poor.”
The Vicar-Capitular pointed out that Bishop Kaller imitated St. Francis
in his poverty.
To the tired exiles, so many of whom had come on foot great distances,
the Vicar-Capitular said:
“The road will not be easy for us. The road to every great pilgrimage
leads through Stations of the Cross. And we are all pilgrims, on
every day, not only today. We must daily walk many miles to quiet our
hunger, but there is one road we must seek and see every day, the
road to which the shepherd’s crook of our Bishop pointed over and
over again, the road which brings us near to God, the road on which
we must place ourselves every day with the Sign of the Cross.
“On that road our Bishop Maximilian preceded us.”
In his last pastoral letter entitled, “The Contribution of the Homeless
to Peace,” written in Lent of 1947 to all expelled Catholics, Bishop
Maximilian Kaller drew the real lessons from the mass homelessness
of the millions, and asked them to offer up their sufferings as a
contribution toward peace. After stating that “the criminal policy of
the German leaders had been judged by history,” he asks the Expellees
to join with the Saviour in carrying “the terrible accumulation of
guilt in this world.”
We have a translation of his words to his people:
“In humble, repentant prayer we will accept whatever God wills.
Through prayerful participation in the divine sacrifice of Our Lord,
we will always find again the strength to crucify our heart with its
wicked passions, with its greed and envy, its vengefulness and its
hatred.
“Our sacrifice must be joined to our prayer. For us, this consists
especially in the patient, voluntary endurance of the injustices
which have been done to us. In that manner, we follow the Saviour,
and we carry with Him the terrible accumulation of guilt in this
world. Only in this way do we break the power of evil in the
world....”
It is a marvelous testimony to the memory of Bishop Kaller that
these lessons have not been lost on the Expellees. So many of them,
particularly their priests, repeat those sentiments, using almost the
same words. They stress their role in the eventual achievement of peace
as one of willing acceptance of their daily want and long exile, and
some have openly expressed their belief that this sharing with Christ
of the terrible accumulation of the world’s guilt may be the Christian
alternative to war.
By the time that Bishop Kaller fell dead, broken in body by his heavy
burdens, he had laid the foundations for the spiritual care of the
Expellees. The supply of priests for the future was assured through
the foundation of Koenigstein Seminary where the students from the
seminaries in the East were accepted as well as the new vocations, many
from the ranks of the demobilized army.
One might ask how Bishop Kaller, on the call of the Holy Father, was
able with so clear an understanding, so sure and quick an analysis
of the problem, to assume so appalling a task of the Church on the
move. It has been brought to my attention that, in almost a prophetic
manner, Bishop Kaller had published at the beginning of World War II, a
brilliant study called “The Wandering Church.” In it, he told priests
of the special problems that were coming upon the church as a result of
the movement of populations.
Service among migratory Catholic workers had been, providentially, a
very important part of Bishop Kaller s experience. For eleven years, as
a country priest, he had served among the Polish sugar-beet workers who
came to Pomerania. His command of the Polish language was excellent,
and he loved his Polish flock as a father. That they loved him in
return was proved by the fact that out of their seasonal earnings, they
gave him enough money to build three churches so that their sacramental
life would not be interrupted during their work in Pomerania.
Considering the unforeseen displacements of population that came during
and after the years of the war, it would seem that Bishop Kaller’s
words had the ring of prophecy in them when he stated that “... it is
by no means impossible that the title ‘Wandering Church’ will come to
be regarded as the characteristic name of the Church in our time.”
I shall quote an entire paragraph from the early part of the late
Bishop’s magnificent analysis:
For, strictly speaking, this “Wandering Church” is only a part,
though a very important one, of a very significant general movement
which is going on in the whole Church. From an original migration of
a considerable number of young people, there has developed in Germany
a huge migration and resettlement of the entire people and, with it,
of the Church. Only by tackling the entire problem of this migration
from a pastoral point of view, can the thorny work of the “Wandering
Church” proper hope to reach its goal. The work done thus far in the
“Wandering Church” is therefore only the beginning of the solution of
much wider problems, and has become a rousing call of the greatest
concern for the entire pastorate. The center of gravity of the
problem of the “Wandering Church” has tended ever more to move from
the care of the “extraordinary,” transitory migration of groups of
young people, to that of the great interior migration, wandering and
resettlement of the German people, which has grown from year to year.
This phenomenon is of such far-reaching importance that it is by no
means impossible that the designation “Wandering Church” will come to
be regarded as the characteristic name of the Church in our time.
These words were meant for the whole church, and the whole church has
come to know their meaning. Bishop Kaller himself, came to have in his
pastoral care, the greatest and heaviest burdens of the “Wandering
Church.”
As if he foresaw this, he wrote; “It is taking too much for granted to
suppose that, in a few years, our entire Church in Germany will, on
account of this migration, have completely altered its appearance.”
He analysed the types of ordinary and extraordinary migration that
economic conditions and war might bring on the Church everywhere and
pointed out the grave dangers to the faith. He remarked the strange
fact that priests often withdraw into their sacristies and fail to see
the coming catastrophe. Even parishes that have already suffered from
the emigration of the faithful for this or that cause fail to take the
appropriate measures to reach out after the souls who have left. The
priests tend to “... meet the situation with speechless dignity or with
a sudden fervor of desperate activity.”
The Bishop suggested, instead, a calm analysis of the situation, and
appropriate measures on the part of the parish priests to explain the
changed status of the church by instructions, sermons, retreats, and
the revivifying of parochial societies. The priests and the entire
community must be educated to the care of migrating members, to welcome
them, to make them feel they have found a home, to lead them to church.
Specific organizational measures relating to a faultless system of
registration of new and old parishioners, of reports to other parishes
of parishioners who are expected to settle there, are outlined. These
measures have served well the Expellee priests who know the location of
their former flocks, and are thus able to give a sense of continuity in
Catholic life even to those who might seem to be swallowed up in the
anonymity of mass living. This long-distance pastoral care, even though
the Expellees are now settled in other parishes and new areas, is a
great source of moral strength to scattered Catholics.
But the sublime message of this overwhelming article is not its
organizational message, which is of the practical order, but rather its
prophetic vision, that out of the chaos of modern war a new era of the
Church should come forth.
[Illustration:
A tall Bishop in his robes—about his neck hangs a miniature wooden
house into which the faithful were putting their offerings of money.
]
[Illustration:
An expelled Bishop blesses his homeless flock. The miter with the
message of peace was made of cardboard.
]
[Illustration:
His Eminence Cardinal Frings, Papal Protector of Expellees,
examines with Monsignor Swanstrom, Executive Director of War Relief
Services-N.C.W.C., and Mr. James J. Norris, European Coordinator for
the Organization, a booklet on the Expellee problem prepared by the
Catholic Refugee Council of Germany.
]
[Illustration: The village of St. Stephen grows every day.]
“Is it not the will of God,” asks Bishop Kaller, “that the final result
of the terrible turmoil which has come over mankind should be to
point out with urgency to the Church her true vocation as pilgrim and
stranger on the journey towards the perpetual Sabbath rest of her only
home in Heaven?”
We who have seen the destruction visited upon the great edifices that
were left to us by the Church of the Middle Ages, and who hear now
of the future necessity for decentralization (and therefore immense
migrations from great centers of population) due to the threat of
Hydrogen and Atom bombs, can understand what Bishop Kaller must have
seen through grace when he wrote the foregoing words, and when he said:
“‘The Wandering Church’ is the Church of the future.”
There was faith in his heart when he stated “we must look on the
‘Wandering Church’ and its miseries with the eyes of faith. By it,
God visits and arouses us. Does not the innermost being of the church
reveal itself, though not perhaps at first sight, in the ‘Wandering
Church,’ namely as the ever-living Christ? ‘The foxes have their lairs;
and the birds of the air have their nests, but the Son of Man has not
whereon to lay his head.’”
And Christian hope speaks through him when he says near the end of his
unforgettable article:
We should lose no more time in the realization that the age of the
“Wandering Church” is an age of Salvation.
Sympathy with those who suffer was so deep in the heart of the saintly
Bishop that he fought the ministry of evil, the Gestapo, until during
the war years, he was taken out of his diocese by Gestapo officials as
a prisoner. He was not interned, as he had expected to be, but it was
thought that he would scarcely dare to return to his See, the town of
Frauenberg. Exiled to central Germany, he was free to move after the
arrival of the Allies, and he returned to Frauenberg as a pilgrim, on
foot.
But perhaps the most Christ-like aspect of Bishop Kaller’s life came
to light after his death when two letters were discovered in his
correspondence. One is a letter from the Bishop to the Apostolic Nuncio
and the other the answer from the Nuncio.
There had been a discussion regarding the possibility of having a
priest enter the Concentration Camp of Theresienstadt, where thousands
of Jewish men, women and children were interned. Some of these innocent
victims of racial hatred were Catholic Jews, or the half-Jewish
offspring of mixed marriages. The only way that they could be
ministered to was to have a priest enter Theresienstadt and live with
the inmates, partaking of their hunger, their daily terror, their bonds.
In a letter so beautiful, so selfless, that it reads like a letter
of one of the Saints, Bishop Kaller, on the 27th of February, 1942,
offered to be the priest to enter Theresienstadt, to give testimony of
his complete identification with the innocent victims of persecution,
and to bring Christ’s ministry to the Jewish Christians.
“I would want to be the priest who will minister to the Non-Aryan
Christians,” writes Bishop Kaller.
The Bishop explains how he has meditated upon this offer, and has come
to the decision that he himself, and not some delegated priest, must
accept the task. He even analyses a section from a book of meditations
entitled, “Concerning the Disposition to Martyrdom,” and expresses the
hope that no human considerations at all enter into his decision.
Not even his closest friends, no member of his Chancery or of his
diocese, was to know of this letter until after Bishop Kaller had died.
The letter goes on to say:
“I believe and hope that this will of mine corresponds to the Will of
God. But I will always comply with the opinion of superiors.
“The highest fidelity must embrace everything. I will keep nothing
for myself, will have no reservations. I want to fulfill my office
according to the order which I receive. St. Francis of Assisi shall
be my model; he who took the words of God completely literally and
fulfilled them. I will not actually be able to fulfill all to the
fullest extent.
“It will require a long practice, but I may say that the will is
there.
“Whether I judge rightly about myself, and about my wish, I do not
know, because selfishness and temptations are so tightly interwoven
with human nature that one often does not know and does not guess how
deeply these two enemies are hidden.”
These are the words of a man selling himself unto slavery for his poor
enslaved brothers. His offer was refused.
This letter is only now revealed to show the character of the first
real Bishop of a truly “Wandering Church,” a Bishop whose example still
inspires the millions whose wanderings are not yet over.
CHAPTER VIII
_The Long Procession_
“The blight of the detention-camps in time of peace, which is the
blight of innocent brothers’ and sisters’ frustrated lives, and the
plight of millions who now must answer to the hideous appellation
of ‘expellees,’ are no longer simply a subject for humiliation and
regret. There is more here even than a stark challenge to Christian
compassion. You have been able to see and judge for yourselves: more
insistently than ever at this hour that the agony of the so-called
‘displaced’ is a summons to prompt and responsible community
action.”—His Holiness Pope Pius XII to group of American Congressmen
studying problems of the displaced and expelled of Europe.
Opposite the railway station in the town of Salzburg, Austria, is a
tremendous hotel, now partly ruined by bombing. The large sign on the
front of this hotel reads: HOTEL EUROPE—REFUGEE CENTER.
This sign is symbolic of all Europe and more particularly of Western
Europe. The entire Western continent is crowded with people who have
fled from their homes, or who have been forced out of their homes and
homelands. There are the regular Displaced Persons who are cared for
in camps; the new displaced persons who are fleeing from tyranny and
persecution in Eastern Europe; there are the thousands of displaced
Jews, the pitiful remnants of a race which has undergone the most
terrible holocaust of blood of the ages; and finally, there are the
Expellees, close to 12 millions of them. I have tried in these chapters
to give a realistic picture of life among these Expellees because, from
the point of view of large-scale help, they are the most abandoned, the
most helpless, the most inconsolable of the refugees of our day.
EXPELLED WITHOUT RELATION TO INDIVIDUAL GUILT
The HOTEL EUROPE—REFUGEE CENTER contains close to 500 of these refugees
within its partly destroyed walls. These men, women and children were
evicted from their homes and farms in Yugoslavia without relation to
any individual guilt or crime. They were dumped into a partly destroyed
Austrian hotel in 1945, and they are still there. The men have all
found some kind of work because they are energetic people and are
willing to do anything to keep their families alive. The women try to
make homes out of the corners of draughty rooms. They look to the world
for a word of recognition of their plight. Up to now, they have found
little recognition or understanding. This symbolic HOTEL EUROPE is the
end of the road for these expellees whom we call the Pilgrims of the
Night.
It happens that the Expellee group in and around Salzburg represent
one aspect of the whole problem, that of the Volksdeutsche, or ethnic
Germans. These had been, for centuries, the citizens of such countries
as Yugoslavia, Rumania and Hungary. Their ancestors had been invited
to settle in uncultivated regions in an earlier age in European
history, when boundary lines were not so sacred as they are now, and
when racial and national distinctions had not attained the tremendous
importance now granted to them. Three hundred years ago the ancestors
of the Germanic minorities drained swamp-lands of the Voyvodina area of
present-day Yugoslavia, and laid the foundation for making this area
one of the most productive of the entire region. Though the descendants
of the settlers continued in most cases to speak a dialect of German
(owing to the compactness of their village colonies and the lack of
communication facilities) they were considered Yugoslav citizens on an
equal basis with the other heterogeneous nationalities that were joined
together after World War I to form the new country of the South Slavs.
Similarly, the German ethnic groups in the Banat region of Rumania and
Hungary were citizens of those countries, with the same duties and
rights as other citizens, including the duty of conscription into the
armed forces of the country in which they lived.
Expulsion was particularly bitter for the Volksdeutsche groups of
South-Eastern Europe because to them Austria and Germany were alien
lands. There was little or no feeling of kinship with the local
populations which were forced to receive them. Besides their different
mode of speech, it was found that even their manner of dress was
distinctly alien. It was as though the United States descendants of the
first settlers from England and Holland were driven back into English
and Dutch communities precisely because their ancestors in some rather
remote past had originated there. The kinship would certainly have been
lost over the centuries even though similarity of language remained.
These Volksdeutsche colonies are sometimes understood to have been
planted by Hitler for imperialistic purposes. Nothing could be further
from the truth, although some members of these German ethnic groups
did prove themselves amenable to Nazi arguments. Because of these
individual traitors, whole masses of people have now been deprived
of their rights and dispossessed of their farms, their homes, their
businesses and factories. Of the three hundred and ten thousand
Expellees in Austria, the greater number are Volksdeutsche.
Such tracts of rich farmland, such businesses and factories carefully
built up over years of patient effort, fell as rich plunder to the
new regimes of these Eastern countries. They were used as booty for
distribution to other settlers—innocent pawns who by reason of the
acceptance of these homes and lands are now bound in vassalage to the
regime that can take and give away without reference to any of man’s
needs or his rights.
All savings, pensions, accumulated possessions for old age, were lost
to the expelled people and they found themselves starting life as a new
kind of pioneer—unwilling pioneers in already overcrowded and partly
destroyed regions—pioneers not of hope, but of despair.
It is open to question how long the communities sheltering these
unwilling settlers can bear the cost of this heartless dumping of human
cargo into their midst.
Public welfare agencies find that their heaviest burdens in welfare
and in unemployment payments, come from the presence of the expellees.
Local taxes go in large measure to the upkeep of the expellees who
are invalid, aged or infirm. Payments to expellee dependents of dead
servicemen, to the disabled, and to the necessitous Expellee families
on an emergency basis, etc., totalled one billion three hundred and
fifty million D marks in the last three years. The religious charitable
agencies have performed a work of rescue that is almost unparalleled
in history. For example, Caritas, or German Catholic Charities, had
collected up to the end of 1948, 210 million D marks for direct help to
expellees. In addition to this, scores of new institutions have been
opened since the war to take care of the aged, the sick, the orphaned
and returned POWs of the expellee group. The Hilfswerk and the Innere
Mission of the Lutheran Church have performed a rescue work of similar
magnitude and Christian generosity.
However, the solution of the expellee problem is far from being
found. The crisis of expellee help is now. Unless energetic action is
undertaken within the next year to find basic solutions for the problem
of the twelve million expellees, of whom seven and a half millions are
in the Western Zones of Germany, it is unlikely that Western European
recovery will become a fact.
THE PYRAMID OF CHAOS
As this is being written, unemployment in Western Germany is rising in
such a way as to suggest the terrifying army of the unemployed in an
earlier era—the era that ushered in Hitler. More than 2,000,000 men
are already out of work, with prospects of a rise to 3,000,000 in
the winter to come. Any economist who analyzed the pyramid of chaos
in Western Germany could have foreseen the shattering of a false
prosperity by so enormous a drop in employment. The pyramid of chaos
of post-war Germany is a five-tiered structure, at the base of which
is the indescribable destruction of modern warfare with its saturation
bombing of urban centers. It would have been the task of a generation
to restore life and health into a battered and almost lifeless economy,
without the hindrance which came from the next tier, or block, of the
pyramid—the division of this highly centralized nation into Eastern
and Western zones. In addition to the sealing off of the zones from
each other by artificial economic and governmental barriers, there is
the graver problem of the complete detachment from Germany of large
agricultural and industrial areas to the East. The products of these
areas might conceivably have made the difference between solvency and
economic bankruptcy to a Germany which must eventually attempt by
some measure to feed its own population, and balance expenditures for
necessary imports with credits earned by exports. A third tier was the
dismantling of factories that had been turned to wartime uses—a program
that provided much employment during the three years immediately after
the end of the war. Such dismantling activity was deceptive because
it gave a wrong impression of the problem of unemployment in post-war
Germany. But all the time, the workers knew they were destroying their
own livelihood with every day’s work; and they knew, too, that many
of the plants could have been reconverted to their earlier peacetime
operations.
Higher in the pyramid of chaos is the problem of the forced labor
of German prisoners in Russia. By virtue of this, a labor force of
enormous proportions is kept from the reconstruction of a destroyed
economy.
As the highest block in the pyramid, and conceivably the block that
will topple the whole structure of Germany’s economic life, is the
presence of the Expellees, if we wait until the structure topples, as
well it may when and if 3,000,000 Germans find themselves unemployed,
there will be frantic measures, hastily rushed into execution, to meet
such problems as that of the Expellees. But waiting only endangers the
stability of Western Europe as a whole, because nothing can happen in
Western Germany without deep repercussions in Free Europe as a whole.
It would be well then to take a realistic view of the Expellee problem
and see it as the “inflammatory material” for the West that it really
is. It was the High Commissioner for Germany, John J. McCloy, who
stated in his broadcast to the nation entitled “Progress Report on
Germany” that, “Inflammatory material exists in the _vast numbers of
refugees_ and in homeless youth.”
Whether we look on the expellee problem as a human, social, religious,
or as a predominantly economic problem, we cannot escape the fact that
this group of expelled and unsettled people is a danger to the recovery
of Western Europe as a whole.
That little piece of earth which a man owns and from which he draws the
sustenance to nourish his children, belongs to him under the laws of
God and man, and cannot be alienated from him without breaking asunder
those laws. The only real solution to the problem of expelled human
beings is to restore the operation of the natural law, and of the moral
law which used to guide nations as well as individuals, by giving back
their homes, farms, and businesses which were expropriated. Regardless
of any political considerations, regardless of frontiers, regardless
of historical bitternesses, or desire for retribution, this fact is
irrefutable. Naturally, anyone with a broad vision of Europe’s past,
present and future, must see in these mass expulsions of millions of
human beings from the land which gave them sustenance, the unmistakable
symptoms of a deep and malignant sickness of society.
The vision of Europe with these millions of homeless driven creatures
is one that must give rise to the deepest concern, since peace cannot
be established without real justice, and real justice demands that all
those from whom homes have been taken should have these homes restored
to them—whether it be in Eastern Poland or in Eastern Germany.
Failing a solution based on real justice, there are other solutions
which take the problem as it presents itself, and proceed from there.
Herewith are four ways in which we as Americans, with concern for
our neighbor’s welfare, can at this moment approach the problem of
expellees:
(1) RECOGNITION OF EXPELLEES AS INTERNATIONAL PROBLEM
Since the expulsion of these people was begun and given impetus by
international agreement, it is unthinkable that the whole burden of
resolution should lie upon the people of an impoverished and destroyed
nation. This problem internationally created (after the Potsdam
agreement) should be studied and resolved by international action of
the countries who can help or receive the expellees.
(2) RELOCATION WITHIN GERMANY
The expellees were distributed in Germany and Austria on a haphazard
basis. Intellectuals were unloaded in out-of-the-way villages, farmers
were dumped into industrial towns, and skilled workers and artisans
found themselves in agricultural sections. The land reform in Germany,
with its breakup of the remaining larger estates, will allow for the
resettlement in Germany of only a certain number of farming families.
A. _Agricultural Resettlement_
A brilliant overall study of the Expellee problem has been prepared
by the Catholic Refugee Council of Germany under the sponsorship of
Cardinal Frings of Cologne, the Papal Protector of Refugees. This
study, published as a pamphlet in English and German, and entitled
_Economic Rehabilitation of Expellees in Western Germany_, analyses
the make-up of the refugees as regards former livelihoods, and finds
that more than 250,000 families now in Western Germany (embracing a
total of 750,000 persons) were self-employed as independent farmers
before expulsion from their homesteads. It is estimated that in the
next decade about 80,000 farm holdings in Western Germany will become
available for resettlement, owing to lack of heirs and other causes.
Forty thousand of these farms will be allotted to Expellee farming
families. In addition to this, the breakup of larger estates, the
utilization of former army and Nazi property, and the reclamation of
waste land and unused farmland, will release farmsteads to accommodate
another 60,000 Expellee family groups. Even the resettlement in this
manner of 100,000 Expellee families would require the use of more
credits than now seem available in the German economy. But granted
that these 100,000 family groups are placed back in their professions
on the land, there is still the problem of 150,000 family units whose
accustomed mode of life was independent farming. We will mention this
group again in discussing emigration possibilities.
Another 1,400,000 persons in the Western Zones were engaged in forestry
and in other forms of agriculture; many of them were laborers and
agricultural artisans. The resettlement of this group has been somewhat
easier, since many have already adapted themselves to a life which
involves working on the farm holdings belonging to the native German
population. As the Expellees belong to more favorable age and sex
groups than the native population, their placement in such labor was a
natural solution in innumerable cases to a shortage of manpower.
B. _Redistribution and Rehabilitation in Work_
Very little further work can be done in the advantageous placement
of workers according to their skills until the haphazard dumping
process of the Expellees on the German landscape has been corrected by
a planned redistribution of the newcomers in areas that can in some
measures absorb their particular work-experiences. While I was in
Germany, a general relocation of this type was getting under way—the
process of transplanting the Expellees from their temporary haven in
Schleswig-Holstein to the Southern area of Germany, or what was the
French Zone. While Schleswig-Holstein, a poor province industrially,
had to accept an enormous number of expelled people, the large area
under French occupation did not take any of the homeless group. The
argument was that as France had not signed the Potsdam Agreement,
allowing for the mass expulsions, the French authorities were not
obligated to accept any of the people uprooted by the expulsions. Now
that the three Western occupation Zones are unified in the Bonn Federal
Republic, the area of the French Zone is being used to accept settlers
from the most overcrowded provinces.
The redistribution process begins with the finding of job opportunities
for the working member of the family. The worker comes first, and
after living quarters are found for his dependents, the family unit
is reestablished. This process of relocation, while it relieves the
population pressure in Schleswig-Holstein, does not solve other
economic problems. Uneconomic family units, for example, widows
with small children, grandmothers or grandfathers with younger
non-employable family members, are not accepted in such a scheme, and
must remain in the relatively poor province as heavy burdens on public
and private welfare agencies. However, the relocation of the workers is
in itself a great good, since many people who could not find work in an
agricultural area will become producers in a more diversified economic
setting.
This redistribution process must go on all over Western Germany, until
the maximum number of Expellees are again made producing citizens
in fields that are allied to their experience and skills. Already
the native diligence of the various groups among the Expellees has
manifested itself in the setting up of enterprises under the most
difficult and unpromising conditions. In this connection, I would
mention the St. Stephen Village, near the destroyed city of Darmstadt.
Here in a sandy waste, marked by bomb craters, a group of Hungarian
Expellees of Germanic origin saw the opportunity to grow vines similar
to those they had cultivated on a sandy tract of Hungarian soil. With
help from Catholic agencies, this group cleared the sandy expanse, and
not only planted it with vines, but with the other crops, including
potatoes, that are complements to the vine-growing economy. Working
at first with borrowed tools, the men later found it possible to make
their own cultivators and other farm tools from the scrap they found in
the neighborhood of flattened Darmstadt. Three barrack structures were
erected for the first settlers, and later, 14 families were placed in
barracks quarters in a nearby village. The little village, named after
the patron saint of Hungary, was created out of zeal and faith during
the darkest days of hunger and chaos in Germany.
A similar tale of zeal and hard work comes from the village of
Mottgers in Hesse, where a group of weavers from the Sudetenland found
themselves placed after the expulsion. In a few abandoned army huts,
they immediately set to work to fashion handlooms. When twenty had been
made, and by some means the men and women were already busy weaving,
these ingenious exiles were granted seven mechanical looms as long as
they could manage to obtain the raw material. In a short while, the
new enterprise was turning out 22,000 yards of textiles every month.
This particular group was a unit under the guidance of its parish
priest who, fortunately, was able to stay with his parishioners in
their exile. Under the guidance of the parish priest, the workers are
now able to mobilize their resources to turn rubble into bricks for
the erection of new homes. Wherever some kind of work is provided, the
hunger for a little home asserts itself, and every privation is endured
until the four sheltering walls are raised.
Other enterprises of the Sudetenland exiles already under way are
glove-making, glass-making and lace-making establishments. These
growing businesses are further testimony to the traditional energy of
the people of the Sudetenland area, the products of whose hands and
brains were for a long time made for world markets. The taxes on the
Sudetenland enterprises were a large source of the monetary support of
the Czechoslovak republic.
[Illustration:
Rubble is turned into homes. All the family helps.
]
[Illustration:
The St. Johann housing development for Expellees proceeds as the
builders place their homemade bricks one upon the other.
]
Twenty-five thousand among the Expellees in Western Germany are said to
be former owners and operators of independent industrial enterprises.
About a fifth of their number have already established small factories
or industries in their new environment. One of these industries I
saw in operation near an Expellee village in Westphalia. An old barn
had been converted into a wood-working establishment, where skilled
woodworkers turned out door frames and other necessary items to convert
mass barracks quarters into individual dwelling units.
Statistics reveal that there are among the Expellees, about 150,000
formerly self-employed artisans, or skilled handicraft workers. These
in the main lack tools, raw materials, and places to work, and are
therefore prevented from making any real contribution to the economy of
their present surroundings.
The self-help projects initiated by the Expellees with such
indescribable ingenuity, have been carried just about as far as is
humanly and materially possible. After the currency reform, when
holdings in marks were all but wiped out, the Expellee enterprises
suffered cruel set-backs. It must be remembered that the small capital
of the Expellees was in marks because they did not own equipment or
real property. Some of the small industries, begun with such sacrifice
and back-breaking work, went under after the currency reform. The
capital levy (lastenausgleich) for the equalization of burdens, was
designed in some measure to equate the sacrifices of the money reform
over the whole community by taxing real property. But the exiles often
lost their precariously organized livelihood just the same.
From all accounts, the greatest need in the setting up of productive
enterprises today, is for credit. The larger, well-established
industries, if they are operating at all, get help under the E.C.A. in
the form of raw materials. The health of German economy, and of German
social life as a whole, depends and will depend in a particular way, on
the nurturing and keeping alive of the small industrial enterprises.
These are the economic units that can absorb the skills of the uprooted
and the disinherited, and turn them back to the ways of peace and of
contribution to others—rather than to the nihilism that surely faces
them if their hands are idle, their skills unused. The nurturing
of these smaller enterprises would be the only way to absorb into
useful work the half million youths whose lack of future imperils a
whole generation. Too great a rationalization of work processes with
labor-saving devices is no solution in an economy where there are so
many idle hands. The small workshop would seem to be one answer. The
various land governments of Western Germany already understand this and
have managed to guarantee credits of 300 million D Marks for workshops
and small industrial enterprises. Even this sum is only a small
beginning but it shows an awareness of social and economic realities.
Now that the D Mark is more stable, and gives a real economic incentive
to work because of its buying power, the availability of credit is
crucial to any revival of employment in Germany, and for the increased
employment of Expellees in particular. To avoid the further social
disintegration of greater unemployment, I would propose that the new
Ministry for Expellee Affairs in the Western German Republic be given
a real role to play. This Ministry might receive through E.C.A. the
means to extend credit for the continuance and initiation of Expellee
enterprises and for the necessary redistribution of the Expellees
according to their skills. Some counterpart funds have already been
allocated for this, but it would hardly be fair to tie up a great
amount of counterpart funds in this way. What I am suggesting is an
entirely new grant under E.C.A. for the uprooted people of the West as
a token of understanding of the urgency of the problem.
A special study of the costs of the economic reestablishment of all
the Expellees within Western Germany, reveals that about twenty-seven
billion D Marks, or about seven billion dollars would be needed for the
task. A fraction of this sum, if allocated now, would obviate great
tensions and dangers later.
Already the Expellees are forming into political units to plead their
cause. If little recognition of their plight comes to this disinherited
group from the West, there are fears that a nihilistic trend will seize
them—a trend of thinking that nothing could be worse than their present
sub-proletariat existence.
“Here is the rock on which all our plans can smash,”[2] an Allied
official was quoted as saying in reference to the success of political
agitation among the Expellees. Political strategists are described in
this dispatch from East Germany as trying to take advantage of the
fact that “the refugees largely unemployed and many of them living in
desperate poverty present an area for political agitation unparalleled
in any Western European country since the advent of the Marshall Plan.”
It is precisely because the Marshall Plan has not touched the lives
of these forgotten people that it is proposed here that a substantial
grant be made through the Western German Federal Republic to the
Ministry for Expellee Affairs. The lifeblood of credit would then begin
coursing through the economically moribund community of exiles.
C. _Reestablishment of Families through Housing Projects_
I have tried to describe the housing conditions in which the Expellees
have been living these years of peace. A few figures will clarify the
overall situation. Approximately five million housing units are needed
in Western Germany as a whole to give a decent minimum of living space
to the inhabitants crowded into the already densely populated area.
Even if a quarter of a million housing units were built each year, it
would be twenty years before the situation would be regularized.
The Red Cross of Switzerland surveyed the housing situation in Bavaria
with reference to the Expellees, and came to a more pessimistic
conclusion. Whereas in May, 1939, there were just about seven million
rooms for the seven million inhabitants in Bavaria, there were in May,
1949, only six million two hundred thousand rooms (as a result of war
destruction) for an increased population of nine million four hundred
thousand inhabitants. To return to the conditions of ten years ago,
three million two hundred thousand units would be needed. Were these to
be constructed at the rate of 100,000 yearly, it would take thirty-two
years to return to the housing situation of 1939.
The Catholic Church in Germany has been in the forefront of the
struggle for improvement in housing conditions for Expellees, as well
as for bombed-out native Germans. There existed in Germany, until it
was liquidated by the Nazi regime, a Catholic Settlement Service, for
the promotion of adequate family dwellings and housing developments.
This Catholic Settlement Service was reconstituted on the initiative
of Bishop Maximilian Kaller by the Fulda Conference of German Bishops.
In every German Diocese there is an autonomous branch of the Catholic
Settlement Service, whose headquarters are located in Cathedral Place,
Frankfurt-on-Main. Already, housing developments for Expellees are
springing up all over Germany, developments that show remarkable
degrees of initiative and community cooperation.
The diocesan Settlement Committee consists of representatives of
Caritas, or Catholic Charities, and lay representatives including
engineers and architects. This Committee serves as advisers to the
self-help group which initiate the projects. There is a three-month
course given at the Frankfurt-on-Main headquarters of the Catholic
Settlement Service on the planning aspects of housing developments,
while another three-month course in the actual building and financing
processes is given at a new housing development in Hettingen near
Buchen. The housing project in Hettingen was one of the first to be
realized, and is under the inspired direction of a forward-looking
priest, Father H. Magnani. In Hettingen, the Church gave to the
homeless some land it possessed, and a building cooperative was formed.
Planning was done in the winter, and in the spring housing for 150
homeless people was begun and carried to completion.
In the diocese of Aachen, the Church deeded over enough property for
4,000 people to plan homes for themselves on a self-help basis. In
the diocese of Augsburg, the “Christian Housing Aid” has rebuilt more
than 1,000 homes, while in the Bamberg diocese a large housing project
for Expellees is under way. This is the “St. Joseph Expellee Housing
Project” in Bamberg itself, while in Erlangen, in the same diocese,
the diocese has set aside a large parcel of property for a similar
development.
Many more examples could be given of the Church’s tremendous struggle
to put the uprooted families back into homes of their own. The
Catholic Church works side by side with the Lutheran Church on this
social problem, since there exists also the Settlement Service of the
Evangelical Church to carry out a similar task. The mutual concern of
the Christian Churches is the protection and rehabilitation of the
family, and of family life.
The energy and zeal of Church leaders in this regard has been
magnificent, and is matched by the hard work of the homeless, once
they see there is hope of reestablishing their families outside the
barracks or mass quarters. In almost every destroyed town in Germany,
the visitor can see men and women making bricks, often with the aid of
rubble-crushing machines. Children join in the work after school, and
the houses are raised in record time. Voluntary effort, however, can
only point the way. Large-scale resettlement within Germany calls for
extensive credits and overall planning. A housing development plan for
Expellees, wisely planned in connection with relocation according to
skills and available work, would go far toward solving the unemployment
problems for several years to come. Without these extensive credits,
which can only come through the E.C.A., there is no real hope for so
large a scheme.
(3) PLANNED EMIGRATION
Much has been said regarding emigration from Germany as a solution
for the Expellee problem. Within limits, there is certainly much to
be said for the emigration of some groups to areas of the world that
could absorb them. However, one must bear in mind that the demographic
picture of the German population is catastrophically out of balance
now, and that any emigration which would unbalance it further, would
be a disaster. Thus, any large-scale emigration of able-bodied men,
already so few in relation to the dependent population (orphans, aged,
war-wounded, etc.) would cause great concern to those interested in the
future well-being of the people as a whole. As was mentioned before,
there are about 150,000 formerly independent farming families for whom
there is little hope of reestablishment within a Germany from which 28
per cent of all arable land has been taken since the end of the war.
There are among Expellees, as I have pointed out, many groups who come
from far away, and who by the fact of their history and experience
are natural pioneers. These are the Germanic groups from Yugoslavia,
Rumania and Hungary, whose fame as hardy farmers and colonizers is
well known. These people are not attached to German soil because their
forebears have not lived on it for generations. In this, they differ
from the native Germans who were expelled from such areas as Silesia
and East Prussia. The Germanic groups from East Europe would make
excellent emigrants.
At the same time, a siphoning off of about one hundred fifty thousand
to a quarter of a million families by emigration would allow the
remaining Expellees to be integrated into the industrial and
agricultural life of Germany. The St. Raphael’s Union, a Catholic
emigration organization which was disbanded by the Nazis because of its
rescue work for persecuted Jews, has now been restarted and is ready
to help in any and every emigration scheme. However, the St. Raphael’s
Union, though helped by funds from American Catholics, has not yet been
able to effectuate much in the line of emigration from Germany because
of the restrictions placed by the Allies on any such plans. Since its
reactivation, the St. Raphael’s Union has been able to resettle only
9,000 people in various receiving areas of the world. The inclusion
of 54,744 Expellees in the latest United States D. P. bill, and the
assurance of paid transportation for them as for other displaced
people, give increased proof of the growing realization that active
measures must be taken towards a resolution of the Expellees problem.
Renewed hope for the reactivation of the program of emigration has
arisen as a result of the inclusion of 54,000 Expellees in the latest
United States legislation to admit DP’s.
Selected groups from among the expert farmers and technicians might be
valuable adjuncts in any and every scheme to raise the living standards
of peoples in backward areas—and might well be used as colonizers in
connection with certain aspects of the so-called Point Four Plan for
the development, industrially and agriculturally, of far-flung areas of
the world.
(4) CONTINUATION OF VOLUNTARY AID
It is understandable that Americans are beginning to wonder why it
is necessary to continue giving to Europe so many years after the
war was ended. They know that their taxes are being used in the
economic rebuilding of Western Europe. So great was the catastrophe
of destruction and mass expulsions, that Western Europe needs every
help that can come from governmental sources, as well as the continued
support of religious relief organizations. It is hard for us to realize
the staggering difference between World War I and World War II in the
indescribable immensity of destruction and dislocation of life.
Caritasverband, Catholic Charities of Germany, is heavily overburdened
with the large dependent groups among the Expellees. It is Caritas
which reaches out to the helpless aged and the helpless young, to
the orphaned, to the sick prisoner of war who comes back from slave
labor to find that his family has disappeared. Three hundred and three
Caritas institutions have been founded or replanned to serve the
Expellees in the past five years of privation. Of these, one hundred
and sixty-eight are Homes for the Aged, sixty-five are Children’s
Homes, while the remainder are hospitals, Prisoner of War Hostels and
other institutions to meet special Expellee needs. If the protective
and loving hand of the Church of Christ were removed from these people
in their hour of helplessness and need, their night of despair would be
unrelieved by any light.
The religious problem presented by millions of Catholics in
predominantly Protestant sections, destitute Catholics who lack
churches, parish centers, schools and even cemeteries for their dead,
is a problem that we Catholics can ignore only at great peril to the
future of the Church. These little chapters have been attempts to bring
closer to ordinary Christians the enormity of the burdens placed on
other ordinary people—and to remind all who are able to help that they
must give that help in this time of crisis.
THE LONG PROCESSION
Up to now, the expellees living in their slave labor barracks, in their
half-destroyed hotels, even in their stables, have not been recognized
as a great international and human problem. It is because of this
that they have been excluded from international help and international
planning. We have called them “The Pilgrims of the Night,” because they
have walked a road that was so dark and impenetrable in its misery and
hopelessness. We Catholics of America, whose hearts are so open to
the anguish of others, must see them as part of the long procession
of those who have suffered since the beginning of the persecution in
Europe in the last fifteen years. The dispossessed have been driven
forth, wave upon wave, from their homes: Poles and Balts to the unknown
wastes of Siberia, Jews and Poles and the rest to the ovens of the
crematoriums. There are the Displaced Persons of many lands who can
never walk back to their beloved homes and homelands, the men and women
and even little children who flee in terror from the East to the West,
and the Expellees, whose procession is so long because there are so
many millions of these poor driven human beings still unsettled, still
homeless.
In an article entitled “The Homelessness of God,” Ida Gorres relates
the homelessness of the millions to the homelessness of God who has
been driven out of our hearts. She says:
“Millions of men have been taken from their native soil and driven
like loose sand over the face of the earth, refugees from every class
and of every kind, defenseless strangers meeting with strangers,
having a good reception from good men and a harsh one from hard
men. How many new words our language has produced which would have
been incomprehensible to anyone some years ago, and all intended to
describe the one thing, that men are without homes any more. In every
street in the world, down to the last out-of-the-way village, one
can hear strange tongues and see strange faces belonging to foreign
peoples and to different stocks but all betokening an encounter with
the same cruel fate, both men and women, young and old. No, never
since the dawn of history has the like been known. Is this not in
truth a sign, a pattern and a likeness of what we have ourselves done
to God?”
If we did not contemplate this long procession of anguished humanity
with the eyes of the spirit, it would be difficult not to give in to
despair. Only the Christian answer to the great mystery of suffering
gives any clue to the understanding of the limitless anguish that
has beaten its way over the face of the earth in our time. The long
procession only has meaning when we remember that each poor driven man,
woman or child who walked in it trod in the very footsteps of One who
long ago made a lonely pilgrimage—burdened by the cut tree that is the
symbol and explanation of all our suffering, and of all our hope.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] _New York Times_, February 19, 1950.
Transcriber’s Notes
Pg 26 Changed: at any time during his capitivity
To: at any time during his captivity
Pg 52 Changed: between the ages of fourteeen and twenty-five
To: between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five
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