Dieter Groffig

“At one point we had to get out of the train and there were trains everywhere. The bridges had been blown up and so you had to wait on the other side, until a new train comes to continue the journey. And that was when the women were raped. My sister who was fifteen, was raped by one Russian. My mother stood in front of her, she wanted to stop it and the Russian then wanted to shoot Mum. So she gave up. And then they raped my fifteen-year-old sister.”

“In Reichenbach, when the Russians came, there were suitcases filled with stuff in the cellar air-raid shelters. These suitcases were locked and since most people never returned, the suitcases just stood there, abandoned. When the Russians came, of course they went straight to those cellars and broke open the suitcases and picked out the nicest things. The cellars were full of clothes from those suitcases. But the main thing was that the Russians, on their way out of the cellars, they turned all the taps on and let them flood with water. The whole town had flooded cellars, because the Russians were afraid that some German soldiers might later hide in them, or the so-called partisans, who might come out against the Russians. That’s why they flooded all those cellars. And because we didn’t have anything to eat as Germans, I had to keep diving into those cellars as a nineteen-year-old boy, I took a deep breath and collected all the clothes lying down there and fished them out. It was very warm, May or June 1945, sweltering. And so next I dried all the clothing out. And then we carried it all to one Jew. As I said before, the Jews had opened small shops there. And one Jew then sorted all those clothes out and sold the best pieces.”

“We lived for a year and a half under the Poles and one day the Poles came along and lead us out of our houses. We were allowed to take ten kilograms of hand luggage with us. They sealed our houses up, they put seals on the doors. The Poles had dogs and guns, they took us and lead us to the train station, with their dogs. At the station, two cargo trains had been parked. These used to be for pigs. They were still filled with about thirty centimetres of pig manure. It was dripping from the bottom of those cars, that manure. And so now we had to, us thirty-five Germans, they divided us up precisely, get in one of those livestock cars. But we were lucky. There was this large coal shop there, the man was called Otto, Otto the Coalman they called him, he was a millionaire. He had his own railway track, bulldogs, horse and carriage, all kinds of things. And this Otto the Coalman, he had to teach the Poles about his store, so they knew how to carry on the business. And once he’d done that, well they shoved Otto the Coalman into one of the cars and it happened to be the one that was for us. The good thing about that, was that Otto the Coalman of course had a lot of workmen who cleaned up all that manure from the car. That took a few hours.”

“I always went to Berlin, I took an extra blue shirt for the occasion, the kind they wore in the FDJ (the Free German Youth). And a red tie, like in the FDJ. And then I collected the literature in West Berlin, the magazines, and I hid it by wrapping it around my legs. And on my back. There were checks in all the trains. And when the police arrived, I always stood so that my back was to the wall, so they couldn’t touch me. Of course they wanted to see my ID card, and I showed them. And then they wanted my luggage. I said: ‘Here’s my bag!’ And you couldn’t just sit on a seat, otherwise they’d pat your legs and want to see if you have anything under the seat. And then they’d notice I have something hard there, not just muscle. And when something like that happened, you were done for, they took you to a special division and you didn’t come home. So I always stood up, so they couldn’t check me. And then they opened my bag and I had this thick book in there. On the book it said ‘The Young Guard’. It was a Soviet book. And then they opened the book and there was the dedication. “To Mr Dieter Groffig for good results in his apprenticeship exam.” So of course they thanked me, first I had the blue shirt and then that dedication. And so I always made it through and they never caught me.”