Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Common Occurrence Reads as Shock and Horror to a 21st Century Audience


Too much of history is told from the perspective of those who fought battles, ignoring the greater impact on civilians and therefore on society and culture in general. This is especially true of World War II, as social history didn’t emerge until the 1960s. In 2001, historian Sönke Neitzel discovered, at the British national archives, nearly 800 pages of unedited and only recently declassified, transcripts of covert recordings from holding cells, bedrooms and camps that housed prisoners of war. He then found about twice as many reams of the same at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Neitzel and social psychologist Harald Welzer used a careful study of these documents to unleash what came as a surprise to most readers: soldiers in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the German navy and military in general, behaved with callous, inhumane brutality against civilians. In their 2012 book, Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying, Neitzel and Welzer use the transcripts from tape recordings of some 13,000 inmates over four years to reveal the kind of details that I’d heard firsthand since childhood.

“I used to shoot at everything, certainly not just military targets.  We liked to go for women pushing prams, often with children at their sides.  It was a kind of sport really,” boasted Oberleutnant Hans Hartigs. His is among the less graphic and grotesque admissions. A junior officer junior officer bragged about what he and his fellow soldiers did to a woman they thought was a Russian spy: “We beat her on the tits with a stick, clobbered her on the ass with a pistol, then all eight of us had her, then we threw her out and as she lay there, we threw grenades at her.”

You’ll recall I wrote about my mother telling me: “When we still were in Russia (Belarus) where my brother died, the German soldiers would cut off the breasts of young women that would not submit to them, and in the wintertime they would tie them to the sled naked and parade them around so other women would see what happens to them if they do not submit to them. At that time, I didn’t understand what it was. I only figured it out afterwards, when my mother was telling other people, but it still was really terrible to see that.”

Reading that quote in a post I’d written triggered additional memories for my mother. The Partisan soldiers were just as cruel and brutal as the German soldiers to my family.

She recalls when she and her parents were living close to the tiny village of Lemnistsa, in an area that was patrolled by German soldiers during the day and by Partisans at night, “quite soon after Germans occupied Vitebsk Oblast.”


The Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 under Operation Barbarossa, and German forces occupied Vitebsk Oblast on July 11. Soviet forces seized the initiative from the Germans after the battle of Stalingrad in late 1942 and early 1943. The Soviet army liberated Vitebsk on June 26, 1944.

My maternal grandmother took my mother and her younger brother “Mishinka” (affectionate for Michael or Mikhail) to Lemnitsa to get some food my family had planted there. “When we got there the Partisans came and they sort of arrested my mother. My father came home from the Soviet Army on leave just before war started. He didn’t go back so they called him a traitor. The Partisans called my mother a spy for the Germans, and detained and interrogated her. They were about to kill my mother and she said ‘just give me one promise, if you kill me, you kill my children with me.’ There were a lot of scenes my mother had seen where a mother would be dead and the child would be crawling over her trying to breast feed.”

My mother uses the term scene to describe a real-life atrocity my grandmother witnessed on a daily basis, and to me they play as if they are graphic movie scenes. It often is less painful for me to imagine my mother’s early childhood from a cinematic lens: a grainy, black and white moving image that seems far more distant than it really was. I’ve never studied filmmaking, save for a graduate level non-film course where we made a short film with still images, and managed to earn an undergraduate minor in studio art without ever taking a photography course, and I express images through words. Still I see everything that is told to me and everything that I imagine as moving image, often passing by too quickly for me to effectively capture with the articulation and detail it deserves.

“There were three ladies whose husbands were Partisans and they came and said ‘if you kill this woman we will not work for you,’ so the Partisans let her and me and Mishinka go. These ladies knew when Germans would be on watch and told my mother when to escape and she took us when it was getting dark and she was carrying Mishinka. The Partisans saw us, but we were far enough away that when they shot at us they didn't kill us. Some Russians working for the Germans were called Politsay and they let us get back to the German zone. My father was there and he didn't come with us because they would have killed us. He was working for the Germans (as a forced laborer.)”

My mother, along with her mother and brother, made it safely back to the German zone in Vitebsk Oblast, but a solider wanted to take my grandmother back to the Nazi headquarters believing she was a spy for the Partisans “My mother said she was not leaving without her children and finally they took us in a horse driven carriage and the German soldier took her to the commandant and said she was a spy for the Partisans and that she went to tell Partisans how everything is situated on German zone.”

That same solider had taken my maternal grandfather’s cousin and his wife and it wasn’t until my grandmother was being questioned that she learned they had been killed just for being under suspicion of spying for the Partisans because their daughter was a girlfriend of a Partisan solider and was in the Partisan zone.

“My mother took me and Mishinka in her arms to some kind of a river and was going to drown us and her.”

Just as my grandmother walked toward the water with her two young children, pulling a prayer (or “holy letter”) from her pocket to read as she walked to their death, “this man appeared who happened to be my uncle’s friend, deugushka (grandfather) Sidorka, and he was a cook for the Germans, a slave laborer, and he said she was not a spy. He said, ‘if my signature if not enough I will give my life for her she is not a spy. The commandant said to ‘take this woman and never bring her back.’”




2 comments:

  1. It's remarkable how quickly the past gets "normalized." Edited to make sure that our own eras could never possibly cross over into madness like this. I'm reminded of an interview I heard on NPR once from someone who was in Rwanda when the atrocities were happening there. He said it was impossible to imagine if you hadn't been there. He said people would come on the radio and tell you to kill your neighbors. And people did. The shock, it seems, is how easily humans make something like this an everyday thing.

    It's a powerful act to refuse to accept that elision.

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    1. Exactly. Just think of the ongoing wars that don't even register -- like the Colombian conflict that's claimed hundreds of thousands of lives since 1964, with nearly 4,700 killed last year; or the Iraqi insurgency that's still raging with thousands of civilian fatalities after U.S. troops withdrew.

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