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Hunger! Yes it hurts! – We met him in the winter of 1946/47 as refugees from the East in bomb-ravaged Magdeburg. We were five siblings aged 11 to 18 and our mother. No, actually the five of us alone, because all the suffering of the war made our mother feel sick. The cold of that winter had also been terrible: freezing temperatures well into March, with hardly anything for heating, power cuts. The cold makes it easy to crawl into a hungry man. – Well, we didn’t want to experience such a winter again.
As far as our school days allowed, we stubble everything we could find in the fields in the summer of 1947. But our oldest brother drew the big lot: harvesting work at Farmer Arendt in Eilsleben in the Börde. He came back home full and well-rounded, and the best thing for all of us: At Christmas he should get a special “Deputat” for the whole family. I had never heard that word before, but I haven’t forgotten it since. It was two days before Christmas. I was chosen to pick up the deposit in Eilsleben. The touching farmer’s wife packed my rucksack full: potatoes, self-pressed rapeseed oil, a blood sausage and a liver sausage, crumble cake – I remember exactly – and as a highlight a goose, a Christmas goose for our family. “Come on, there you have another red cabbage, it belongs to a roast goose!” I was blessed.
“Maybe I should give you a certificate of deputation to be on the safe side.” “Why that?” “Better safe than sorry,” she said. The train back to Magdeburg was full. The people were huddled together, even on the running boards, almost all of them with rucksacks. Many had tried to exchange their belongings for something edible in the country for Christmas. At the stop in Wanzleben we suddenly heard loud shouts: “Everyone get out! Raid! ”
People’s police in blue uniform drove us as a column into the waiting room. The door was locked behind us, the windows couldn’t be opened. Eerie silence at first. Nobody was outraged. The people were used to hardships and harassment due to the war and the post-war period. At the back right a door to an adjoining room was opened, the first two of us were ordered in, after a while the next and so on. Gradually it seeped through: “They take everything from us!”
What started then? No outcry, no outrage: why? What do you do with our things? It began – the big feast. Sausages, bacon, also just dry bread, everything was stuffed into it. At least eat your own fill before they take everything away from us. I was particularly impressed by the image of two men grabbing salt herrings from a large tin can, one after the other, by the tail and disappearing head-down in their mouths. Salted herrings as they used to be, in real brine! And me? I just sat in a corner, miserable. I couldn’t get enough of my delicacies to eat.
The certificate of deputation, oh, I still hoped. Of course I also prayed, I was a child of faith. The hall emptied. I mean, I would have been the last one to be ordered into the next room, together with a man, with a backpack like me, of course. I remember three vopos, one for each “delinquent” and a policewoman sitting at the table who registered the objects that were removed. Other uniformed men went back and forth to take away the confiscated Christmas souvenirs. I showed my certificate and tried to explain. But “my” policeman was somehow not listening properly. Now I noticed: He looks at his colleague and my “fellow prisoner”. A scuffle had broken out there. The man’s backpack was completely filled with sugar. Of course he should give it up, but he struggled, crossed his arms, the vopo couldn’t get rid of the straps. In a flash my controller rushed to help. The two of them managed to throw the defender on the ground, spread his arms apart, one of them knelt on his wrists …
It was all beyond my mind. The tears flowed, I wept bitterly. – And since? The policewoman motioned me to leave the room – not in the direction of the waiting room, no, outside! I still had the backpack on my back. I was the only one who could keep all of her treasures in this mass raid.
The end is easy to tell. Our train was of course long gone, and no one else drove to Magdeburg that day either. But another town would drive from the next town, Blumenberg, five kilometers away. So I walked along the embankment in the pitch dark with a heavy rucksack but a light heart and in the late evening reached my siblings, who had already been worried. Of course it turned out to be a delicious Christmas dinner: roast goose with red cabbage and real peeled potatoes!
The pleasure was only clouded a little by the fact that our mother was tormented by the thought of what the other starving refugees in the house would think of us if they smelled the smell of roast meat. But where in the world is there perfect happiness?
From Annemarie Sondermann
Yesterday’s Christmas story can be read here.
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Unforgettable Christmas. Volume 2
29 eyewitness memories.
192 pages, many pictures, place index.
Zeitgut Verlag, Berlin.
Order under: Tel. 030 70 20 93 14
[email protected]; www.zeitgut.com
Paperback, ISBN: 978-3-86614-103-2, EUR 8.90
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