Tales of Displacement III

Posted by
Gerda Wever-Rabehl
May 29, 2006

Last week, I shared one of the countless stories of women who endured unspeakable hardship during or immediately after WW II. Many of the women I spoke with over the past years were expelled, violated and humiliated in indescribable ways, yet few of them had an opportunity to speak of it. Having been part of the aggressor, their stories and their suffering has not counted in the eyes of the world.

This week, I would like to share one more story, worth being told and worth being heard. It is the story of a young Canadian girl who, in a cruel twist of fate, ended up with relatives in Germany during WWII.

We had been sent to my grandparents in the hope that it would be a safer place for us to be, but we found ourselves in the heat of the last battles before Berlin. I remember the bombings. Alarms would go off and we'd find refuge in the cellar. And instead of doing homework, we searched after school for the potato beetles, which had been dropped from the planes into our potato fields. Or else, we searched for the silver-strips- also dropped from planes onto our pastures and fields. These strips, if eaten by the animals, would kill 'm. The village was surrounded and my sister, my aunt and myself scrambled like everybody else to get out of the village into the nearby forest. My grandmother stayed with my gradfather. He refused to leave what he had worked for so hard. Besides, he had been in the First World War and the soldiers of the Russian Army had been very good to him then. He had shared his food and drinks with them, and he did not worry about a thing. But when the German militaries found them there, with the heat of battle narrowing in on them, they told him in no uncertain terms to get the hell out of there. But by then it was already too late. When my grandparents reached the outskirts of the village in their horse-pulled wagon, they met soldiers from the Red Army there and were robbed of the few things they had brought with them. And as rape became a weapon to humiliate and degrade, they threw my grandmother in the muddy clay and raped her with my grandfather looking on, stupefied. When they were done with her, they dragged my grandfather away with them and put him to work as servant. My grandmother got up from the ground and walked away. She walked and kept on going until she reached Konigstein an den Elbe where she found shelter with a few old friends. My grandfather later managed to escape from the Red Army. Frenzied and raging, he started looking for her....

Gerda Wever-Rabehl, The Write Room