Armin Scheiderbauer - Adventures in My Youth

The factory was already partly in operation again. We prisoners were detailed, in the Russian fashion, into so-called brigades, groups of about 10 men each. My brigade worked on making multi-layered wooden trestles that were used in the construction of a larger container. We worked under the direction of Russians, who were all members of the technical units, as shown in the names of their service ranks. So, for instance, the normal sub-lieutenant was called Mladschy - Tjechnik - Litenant , in German Unter - Technik - Leutnant . The so-called Natschalnik , the commandant in our area, was an elderly first lieutenant, of good-natured appearance. He was a teacher from Tambov, a provincial town halfway between Moscow and Samara. The foreman was a sergeant-major from Tomsk in Siberia, a skilled craftsman as far as I could judge. He must have been a mix of Russian and Mongolian. With him I had the impression that it embarrassed him that officers were performing menial tasks for him as prisoners.

During the fighting the high factory chimney had received a direct hit from an anti-tank gun. But it had only made a hole and had not brought down the chimney above it. To all appearances the Russians had suspected there was an artillery observer on the flue and had wanted to clear him out. A topic of conversation was how, and by whom, the hole could be repaired. Rumour had it that a specialist, a Russian buzz-word, had been offered 8,000 roubles to repair it. Such a specialist had been requested from Moscow and was already on the way.

It was autumn. We had been working for some weeks in the factory. Our working hours were 10 hours a day, only Sunday was a day off. But one Sunday there was a ‘voluntary’ work detail in which every prisoner capable of working had to take part. However, the unusual thing about it was that we did not have to go to work in the factory. We were loaded up on lorries and driven into the area of the new frontier between Russia and Poland. The process of drawing the frontier had apparently not yet been fully accomplished.

In the frontier area we had to gather up stinging nettles and similar weeds that were supposed to serve as fodder for horses. On that work detail I must have caught cold. The following Monday I felt ill. With difficulty I dragged myself to work in the factory. I was completely weak on the march back. I felt a stabbing pain in the right side of my chest that I could not explain. The lung that had been injured had been the left one. My strength deserted me more and more, and I was in danger of being left behind. The men next to me and behind me had apparently not noticed, and gradually I had reached the end of the column. I was afraid that I would soon collapse, when quite unexpectedly I got a hefty blow on my back.

The frequent cries of dawai , dawai by the sentries who brought us, or rather drove us, to work, was something that we were used to, and were part of the prisoners’ every day experience. Until then and, I have to say, also later, there had not been any mistreatment. I fell, and it was only with difficulty that I could pull myself up again. But two comrades got hold of me under my arms, and supported me on either side. They saw to it that I did not drop out of the column again. It was not the physical pain that hurt me and brought tears to my eyes, it was the mental torture I suffered through the degrading and humiliating mistreatment. I can still see the guard who hit me with the butt of his rifle in the small of my back. He was a young chap with a pretty face, if it had not been disfigured with pockmarks. Back in the camp I reported the incident, but Herr Kahl could do nothing. The only thing was to be treated by a doctor. By the evening it was obvious that I was running a fever.

Meanwhile, there was no doctor in our camp. Only a ‘field medical assistant’ who was a medical student without qualifications. As best he could, he fulfilled the function of camp doctor. It is true that he had a thermometer, a wooden stethoscope, a few dressings and iodine. He was an Upper Silesian by the name of Lebek. He listened to my chest and diagnosed an inflammation of the lining of my lungs and my ribs on the right hand side, but could only prescribe ‘bed rest’ for me. Of course I was incapable of working. I had a fierce stabbing pain in the right side of my chest. The only treatment Lebek could give me was repeatedly painting that side of my chest with iodine. He monitored my temperature and my general condition, but apart from that had to leave me to my fate.

During the following weeks I ran a heavy fever. I lay on my bunk without straw mattress or blanket, dressed in my uniform and covered with my old overcoat. The days were bleak while my comrades were at work and, God knows, I felt myself to be abandoned. There were no scales in the camp, so that it was only by seeing my bones protruding more and more, that I realised that I was losing more and more weight. We did not have a mirror in which I could have seen what I looked like. One time, when I had got out of bed, I saw that my knees were thicker than the bones of my upper leg. I was wasting away to a skeleton. I presented a similar picture to those I afterwards saw in photographs of the inmates of concentration camps. Night and day I used an empty jam tin as a urine bottle. I had to stand it next to my head, so that I did not accidentally knock it over, and I could reach it with less effort.

Throughout the winter, sick and weak, I remained in the camp. I could not and did not work. The winter, with temperatures as low as minus 15 degrees, was said not to have been a harsh winter for East Prussia. We had a stove in the room, so that at least cold was not added to hunger. There was also a good feeling of camaraderie in the cramped room. There was no one who acted in an underhand way, with one exception. He was, of all people, a circuit judge and a Reserve Oberleutnant . He was once seen drinking a comrade’s soup as he brought it from the canteen. Everyone could see how he was tortured by shame over this lapse, and so the incident was passed over in silence.

It was a different kind of anger for the community when Herr Rauchfuss, in civilian life a police official from Potsdam, sold his watch. He had been able to hold on to it through several ‘friskings’. But then he did a deal with a Russian sentry who obtained for him some additional rations. In particular he paid for a tin of American corned beef with a label in Cyrillic script. It was as painful for the rest of us to know of the existence of that supply, as it must have been for Rauchfuss to eat those additional rations alone! He knew how much the others envied him. But camaraderie no longer extended to giving to other people even a bit on the end of a knife.

Another man in our room was an artillery Oberleutnant Theo Krühne. He came from Leipzig, was a junior lawyer, and the son of a Reichsgerichtsrat . He occasionally spoke with pride of his father, who in his job was a leading jurist. After I returned home I found out through Paul Eberhardt what a dreadful fate Krühne’s family had met. In the artillery school in Jöterbog he had become acquainted with and married a girl from the nearby small town of Kalau, from where the Kalauers come. In the little town near Berlin the family thought they would be safe and had fled from the bombed city of Leipzig to Berlin to his young wife’s parents’ house. Krühne spoke with great pleasure of his wife and his small son. He had a red moustache and had striking blue eyes. It was a cruel stroke of fate that the house in which the family was living, including those who had fled, received a direct hit. A total of nine people lost their lives as a result.

Paul Eberhart, whom I have just mentioned, was Krühne’s close friend. He came from Augsburg and had relatives in Bregenz. This had given him the idea of passing himself off as an Austrian. It was not important in the Holstein camp, but only later in Georgenburg. In Holstein I was already instructing Paul about the importance and the significance of the Heimatschein for him, as an Austrian. In actual fact he did succeed in getting released with us and in getting back home to Augsburg.