Willi Gerlach

“The next day, we heard a mighty rumbling and it didn’t take too long before the first Russian tanks stood at our doorstep. The first Russian soldiers that came inside our house behaved… well, more or less humanely. There were hardly any problems with them. The real trouble started with the troops that came later. It was all a bit different with these soldiers. They jumped down from their trucks and came inside the houses. We heard shots being fired and we could also hear women screaming and crying. At night, I heard a loud bang and when I looked out of the window, I saw that our neighbor’s house was up in flames. It was the first house that had been set on fire. The next day, I mean the next night, our other neighbor’s house was burned. It was the Kiebels. My grandmother called me and my brother and told us to get the hand carts out of our barn. We hurried to the barn and tried to move the carts out of the barn but as we were pulling them out the gate, a group of passing Russian soldiers on trucks opened fire at us. I can’t really tell you if they aimed at us or not, but we were scared to death. Anyway, we somehow managed to come back to our house with the carts and I remember that on this night, it got really bad. The Russian soldiers came to our house on that night and demanded that the women – my mother, my mother’s mother and my father’s mother – come with them, supposedly to make them diner. But even before they had left – we were standing in our kitchen – one of the Russian soldiers wanted to touch my mother. When my brother saw this, he jumped in between them and the Russian soldier, who probably felt threatened, took his machine gun and wanted to take my brother outside of the house. Now my mother jumped between them and screamed ‘take me, take me’. Then the women were separated from us (me, my brother and my grandfather) and they only came back in the middle of the night. We didn’t sleep on that night, of course. I have to point out that these Russian soldiers were demanding something specific. We didn’t understand what they were saying. Then they searched the rooms and found sauerkraut. Pickled sauerkraut. They were very angry as they supposed that we were hiding it away from them. This was the point where the whole affair escalated and then our women were separated from us on that night.”

“On February 10, we were instructed to leave the village. They told us to assemble on the northern fringe of the village. Every family loaded their belongings on a hand cart. There was also a marching column of German prisoners of war. They were taken on a field bordering the village and shortly afterwards, we heard gun shots. The prisoners were shot there. Many, many years later, a woman from a neighboring village called Mesow told me that she had really bad memories of Baudach because of the many dead bodies of shot soldiers that were decomposing freely all around the village. She was talking about huge piles of corpses they saw in the surrounding meadows, forests and fields. We then proceeded to Dobersaul. Our mayor was then shot in the outskirts of Dobersaul. On the way, we met German soldiers that were just kids. They might have been fifteen or sixteen years old. We gave them some food and some clothes. I very much doubt that these boys survived the day. We moved on and we then came to a place called Topper. There, the Russians took the young girls from our village away from their families and the girls only came back the next day. Nobody asked them any questions. We just didn’t speak about it. Head down and keep on marching. Then we came to Lago. What I saw in Lago was probably the worst. I was only thirteen years old by then. We witnessed the mass executions there. I still keep seeing this scene in my dreams today. In Lago, I also saw a Russian soldier grab a little kid by its legs and smashing its head against a wall next to his screaming mother, who didn’t want to do what the soldier wanted from her. I ran away. Much, much later, a couple of years ago, a neighbor once asked me if I had helped some of those people. She had absolutely no idea what the times were back then. If I had tried to help them, I would not sit here today.”