“Yesterday I had an offer from the cemetery administration to buy the grave. That was my goal. I wanted to buy a gravestone after the Ruhenstroth family grave was destroyed in 1945 and given up to other interested parties. I just wanted a memorial stone. Not a whole grave with all the dates of death. We found one grave and I’ve just bought it. What I wanted was, while I’m still alive, to have a place somewhere in the world for myself, my family and most importantly, for my descendants: a memorial for where our family had lived for centuries. And that place is the Opava cemetery. But I don’t want to make it a big thing. It’s just going to be a rock with the name Ruhenstroth.”
“Close by a house was on fire. I don’t know if it had something to do with the war, but the Russians wanted it put out and pulled the Germans out to do it, the men. And while they were out, it took a day, or maybe longer I don’t know, a rumour came to the women, that the Russians had kidnapped their men and taken them away. For women around fifty sixty years old that was like a death sentence. They couldn’t survive on their own. In the house they were living in there was a doctor’s practice. I later saw the house myself. And the women convinced the doctor to give them a lethal injection. So when their men came back home, they were all lying there dead. My father had nothing left to do but load my mother up on a cart, head out to the fields, dig a grave and cry his eyes out.”
“Being deployed against the partisans was always something like a death sentence. They also just shot a lot of soldiers on my side. Directly the Americans, who had meanwhile landed on the Atlantic coast. The French supported the American units by being sent out as partisans, usually behind the front lines. That meant we paratroopers also had to fight behind the front lines. There were no prisoners there. Either you shot the other person, or you pulled all the way back. And so it happened that people who couldn’t stand it any more, just disappeared.”
“Then we were only deployed to ground combat and there I saw some bad things. Very bad. Once I wrote a miserable letter home to my parents, saying what it means for a person to have to kill another. Because I was so young, you see, I could write something like that on a postcard. And when it was inspected my military superiors caught it and I got two days in prison for it.”
“But suddenly we were the German Reich. Imagine a thirteen-year-old boy, excited to watch the soldiers marching by. With the general up front on his fine steed and tanks following behind. It was a huge experience for us. But the longer it took, the older you got, the more experience you had, when you became a soldier yourself and were deployed, the enthusiasm died down.”
Wolfram Ruhenstroth-Bauer was born 1 February 1925 in Opava to the family of a classical philologist from Vienna, his mother Margareta was born in East-Prussian Königsberg (Kaliningrad today). His grandfather, the doctor and politician Gustav Adolf Ruhenstroth was head of the Opava hospital. Wolfram graduated in this town in the spring of 1943, the day after graduation he was drafted into the Wehrmacht, first he went to a training camp in the territory of occupied Poland and later spent half a year in France undergoing paratrooper training. But at the front he only made a single drop, before immediately being sent with his unit to fight partisans on the ground. There he was captured by the British for half a year at the end of the war. After the war he settled in Bavaria. On of his brothers fell on the Italian front. A year later his miserable father Rudolf also arrived in Bavaria, having been expelled from Opava and the area. His mother died under tragic circumstances in 1945, when she requested a doctor give her a lethal injection after being falsely told that her husband had been taken to the Soviet Union. Young Wolfram studied at the Freising agricultural faculty and spent his whole working life in high administrative posts in various ministries. Among other things, he spent a lot of his time working to integrate the expelled East-European Germans into German society and on cooperative development. He was awarded a number of distinctions, the most important include an honorary citizenship of the Paraná state in Brazil. As an excellent amateur pianist he went back to the Opava of his birth for the first time in the 60s or 70s. He recently bought himself a grave in the Opava cemetery, so his descendants wouldn’t forget the place his family had lived for centuries.
