“We weren’t allowed back in our flat, instead the Russians took us out on the street, with all the German women and children and old people. Because all the men capable of fighting were at the front, or dead or prisoners. And that had one purpose. Every evening after sundown a terrible ruckus started up and the soldiers drove up from the front in open-bed trucks singing marching songs. (And later it was a bit traumatic for me when the Soviet ensembles were performing in the GDR, because they sang some of those same songs again.) Were they building up their courage with those songs? The dropped the side of the truck bed, which clattered, then they jumped out in their rubber boots on the pavement, that clattered. And then they raped our mothers and sisters.”
“And then another young Russian came along and stood between our mother and our sister and then… Our mother moved in front of her daughter. Our sister wasn’t even fourteen yet. At the time she was emaciated, there was nothing feminine about her. But he… And as a result, for our sister who just recently now turned ninety, from then on for her it was as if the male half of the population no longer existed.”
“In the morning someone came with a microphone, shouting out loud that all the Germans still present have to gather at the train station at ten o’clock. But we had been preparing for a long time, we were clearly expecting it. For example Mum had this zinc bath tub, which had two axles with little wheels at the bottom and you could push it around, with difficulty. And inside she had some crockery and some food. And then she had another good idea… Our flat had, in the mezzanine, a common toilet for two households. And in winter, when it was cold, my Mum had this big chamber pot with a lid on top. So we could go to the toilet in the flat and then carry it out in the morning. And so Mum said: ‘We have to take the chamber pot when we go!’ And that chamber pot was then used by the whole train car! Because the train was always locked and from time to time it stopped and we were allowed to go out. There was no toilet there and that chamber pot was very popular. There was only a little straw on the floor and whatever we were allowed to bring with us. And it took us three days and three nights to travel a route that would take me two hours by car today.”
“Dad worked for a while with the Polish firefighters. And he was given the following task, if I can say it directly. His task was to go with the others to houses and search the flats and cellars to see if there were any corpses in them. And there were corpses there, as I talked about previously. But meanwhile a few months passed and then he returned in summer. Then he came back home and said: ‘You have no idea what it was like, we have no protective clothing, nothing like that. We just haul them out of the cellar, dump them on the cart and move them to the cemetery to bury them.’”
“The first school I went to was the Melanchthon school in Görlitz. Fourth class. And one time this teacher came along, he clearly had orders, and he asked us whether there were any refugees in the class. At least half of the class raised their hands. And then he just asked where we were from and we told him. Next, he explained to us how incredibly happy we should be to have landed in the Eastern Bloc, or after 1949 in the GDR, in this country of workers and farmers not that periphery of the Americans, the West. And that we should be grateful to be accepted in this happy GDR. And that the country (Silesia) had always belonged to Poland.”
Hans-Dieter Haim was born on 7 March 1938 to a German family in the Silesian town of Bunzlau, now Bolesławiec. After air-raids in February 1945 the family left the town and spent several days in deadly peril on the front lines, then in camps and on farms guarded by Soviet soldiers. There, Hans-Dieter witnessed the rape of his mother and his thirteen-year-old sister. On returning to Bolesławiec, the town was in ruins and under Polish administration. In the autumn of 1946, the Haim family was expelled by train to the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. The post-war suffering of women and expulsion from Poland were taboo topics in the GDR, things you couldn’t talk about. Hans-Dieter Haim caught up with the schoolwork he had missed from the post-war years, finished his studies and became a professor at the Dresden University of Technology. He first returned to the Silesia of his birth in the sixties, recently he has been visiting more often and is excited to see how Poland is developing within Europe.
