Warrant Officer Josef Bürger

“While in the quarantine we were in the right side at the bottom, away from all that was happening. There were only officers, mostly generals over on the other side (in the German part of a POW camp near Moscow – ed.´s note). We were placed in a special quarantine zone down there, and we were not in touch with them. We then learnt that the field marshal Paulus was held in that second zone. We could see these kuchas, as the Russians called them, beautiful wooden houses. High German officers and marshal Paulus were held in these houses.”

“My name is Bürger Josef, I was born on 5th December 1923 in Chlum u Křemže in the district of Český Krumlov. I spent my childhood on a farm, we had some 15 hectares of land, which meant we did not fall into the category of kulaks yet. There were eleven of us children, three died and eight of us remained. My father died when I was ten, so we farmed with my brothers and sisters. We were farming all the time, and I did not want to do it, farming was not my cup of tea, I rather wanted to learn some trade. When I was riding to the field, the horses would turn and they would not obey me, I was too weak for them. I was not a tough boy, I was petting the horses, and they then did whatever they liked. I was farming till I was seventeen but when I was fifteen, I wanted to go and learn a trade. But my mom told me: ´Son, it’s not possible.´ My father died of facial cancer, it ate up all his nose and lip, he basically died of starvation, because he could not chew nor swallow, nothing. When I was ten, he simply died. The farm was encumbered in debt, 105,000 of the prewar Crowns. This equals to over a million of today’s currency. Therefore it was not possible for me to leave and learn a trade, I had to work on the farm till I was seventeen, and only then I was able to go into a vocational school. I chose the plumbers´ and locksmiths´ trade.”

“During the wehrmacht´s retreat, I was trying to keep in the back, and I eventually stayed there. I thought: ´If they look for you know, you cannot go straight in the same direction, you have to go sidewise.´ So I walked a bit to the side. My feet were cut from ice, and I looked like a ball of mud. Around 3 a.m. it was already dawning, I saw some bush, and I made towards it. I was not alone, Bremen, one student, joined me, and he asked me in German, whether he could go with me: ´Wenn du willst. If you want, come then.´ So there were two of us, and we crawled towards the bush. I got rid of everything, I threw away my rifle, and everything, I only kept my photos in the linen case in which we carried a gas mask. We walked a bit further, and we came to a tree, and there was a lorry standing there. We opened the door, and a dead driver dropped down from the cabin. We were on the front now, not knowing from which direction the Russians would come. Suddenly, bomber planes arrived there, there were many of them. They were dropping bombs, later I learnt that these were five-kilo concrete bombs. They were dropping them in the same way like when you are sowing peas. We stood a bit aside, but it killed all those from whom I had run away. When the planes were gone, we came out and we knew that now it would be only Russians who would come there. They came, but they did into shout ´halt!´ as soon as we got up, they started shooting at us. I dived to the ground, trying to dig into the ground. A bullet flew past my head and hit my shoulder, but only slightly under my skin, it did not matter. My comrade was hurt in his arm and leg. They came closer and we raised our hands. When he was wounded like that, I even bandaged his wounds. And they asked: ´Who bandaged him? ´- ´Me,´ I said, I could speak Russian quite well. They made a face. I explained to them in Russian that the guy had joined me, that he wanted to go with me, and they... They weren’t taking any wounded.”

“One day we had to go collect dead soldiers. Such a coincidence… I was loading the corpses of a father and his son, both from my unit. I learnt about it by accident, the son was allegedly killed by a mine or a machine gun, he got hit and fell to the ground. And his father couldn’t bear to see it, he jumped after his son, and he also got hit. And I was now loading their bodies onto our truck. You won’t believe me, but I did not eat for three days after that. I thought I would rather go and get killed than to load our dead boys again. This is something so terrible, when you have them in your team, and then you are collecting their bodies. It is horrible. I was a reserve driver, and you could not choose where to go. It was all in a hurry, and I had to drive whenever I was given an order. And this happened to me.”

“At first we observed how the life in the prisoners´ camp was, and one day an NKVD guy came, he was carrying a bag, and he pulled out seven blocks of fat. This was cut into very small cubes and put into a soup. He returned five of them into his bag, and I thought ´what, only these two blocks?´ There were three thousands of us. The soup was watery, perhaps it was some vegetable broth, maybe they were putting something like that in it. You could not live on that. They were giving us 200 grams of bread, and in the evening, we had two spoonfuls of mush, that was all. The boys were even cutting nettles, they were so hungry, and they were cooking them in a cup over fire, and adding salt to it. There was enough of salt, but it was a raw salt, it was not clean. There were barrels with tea outside, you could take as much as you wanted, but the tea was about a month old. They were only pouring new and new buckets of tea in, it was impossible to drink it, it was so grouse. There was a doctor from Carpathian Ruthenia coming to our third zone, and when he learnt about the nettles, he strictly forbade it: ´If you ever want to return to the army... You can withstand hunger, but if you drink nettles, you will not go anywhere.´ People would then begin containing water, their faces and legs would become swollen, they lasted a week and then they were gone.”

“I returned back to the barracks and there were not any people whom I had known anymore. There were only older guys, fathers taken away from their families. It was way after the Stalingrad, and the army was short of soldiers. We rode on a train for three weeks, over Poland, we also passed by Auschwitz. And the soldiers knew it was Auschwitz. That was interesting. The railroad track went just by that wire fence.” – “I would like to ask you one more thing, when you arrived to Russia, what did you do in the wehrmacht?” – “We were in the second line, which needed to be made. Not all of us were soldiers, neither was I. We were digging, with the people, and then I had to go to the front line. I was on guard to watch the Russian soldiers at that time; they were without their sweaters, sitting around a fire in one large barn, and playing cards. Some of them were picking lice from their hair and throwing them into the fire. We eventually went to the front line to relieve the German army. The Russians knew it, and when we went there, we were under fire until we got to our trenches. We did not even know where to jump. The lighting bullets at least allowed you to see from where the fire was coming. We were running and zigzagging, we were scattered all over the place, and each of us running in a zigzag line, trying to avoid the fire. Some of us lay on the ground and waited whether they would be hit or not. Then we got to the trenches.”