Willi Gerlach

“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.”

“We would take the train from Reppen to get to our place and at the Reppen train station, we saw cattle cars returning from the eastern front, crammed with wounded soldiers. That was for the first time we saw battered German soldiers. There was bloody gauze all over their smashed bodies. Before then, trains with the wounded soldiers (so-called ‘Lazarettzüge’) were well camouflaged in order to keep this demoralizing show away from the public eye. But now, the wounded soldiers could be seen by everybody. This, of course, raised question nobody would publicly answer. Then it happened. It was in January 1945. I was out with a couple of friends. We were going downhill a slope on a sled when suddenly we heard a mighty thundering sound. We remained silent for a while until somebody said: ‘that was a cannon’. Somebody else said that it was plainly impossible. Nobody would believe it at that moment. We then simply continued sledding, paying no more attention to the thundering in the background. A few days later, the first fugitives with their carts and wagons started to appear in the village. I remember that one of the runaway families came to our house. It was wintertime and a woman let me hold her little child. She instructed me to be silent, to not wake up the child. The child was awkwardly silent and I soon realized that it was dead. The woman hadn’t realized it, yet, she only found it out later. After she realized that her child had died, she broke out in tears and weeping. The people coming in told us about what they had witnessed, about the onslaught and the atrocities committed by the Red Army, about civilians being run over by tanks, being shot by Russian soldiers, women being raped. Even some of the wagons that appeared in our village showed signs of damage. The next days were calm and peaceful again.”