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Old July 31st, 2012 #20
Bernie
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Australia
Posts: 1,302
Default Non-Jew Recollections of the Concentration Camps

By mid December of 1944 my mother and her companions had crossed Ukraine, southern Poland and finally reached Germany's eastern province Upper Silesia.

This is a story I've heard all my life. I post it to do my small bit to debunk the 'Greatest Hoax of the 20th Century'. My mother was six months pregnant with me in December 1944. I dare say I am the only WN on the internet who was in that sense actually in Auschwitz.

She was a 24 year old Ukrainian Schoolteacher fluent in German and all Slav languages engaged by an agricultural unit of the German Army as an interpreter in Poltava district eastern Ukraine. In late 1943 the commander of her unit shot himself rather than order an execution. A few days earlier, one of his soldiers had taken a Ukrainian girl out for a moonlight ride on his motorcycle. They were ambushed by partisans who killed the popular young man and badly roughed up the girl.

The German Wehrmacht had protocols dealing with such matters: It meant the commander, Kapitan Nagel had to select a number of men and boys for the firing squad from a community in which by now they had made many friends.

War really is hell, he simply couldn’t do it, so Nagel went to the latrine late one night and pointed his service Mauser to the roof of his mouth. It left my Father, a Leutnant, in charge of the small non combat unit at a time the Red Army was well and truly back and had blood in its eye.

The men had long feared the inevitable arrival of the enemy and urged my Father to ask Nagel to retreat. But Nagel was your old style Prussian career officer and always said, ‘My orders do not include a retreat’. Now was their chance. Before Nagel’s body was cold Father and his men rounded up all the stuff they needed for their retreat back to the Reich. They left all mechanical equipment including a Fieseler Storch aeroplane behind and took a herd of horses, numbering perhaps a hundred, for transport and food.

The Red army by this time had already set up bridgeheads on the mighty Dnieper river and would hardly welcome the retreating Germans, so they had to swim the herd towing their Russian ‘Droshky’ or ‘Britshka’ carts across at night. They were by now deserters and behind enemy lines. They spent the better part of 1944 evading capture while attempting to reach Upper Silesia, Germany’s most easterly province.

Upon arriving on German soil my Father took a moped (bicycle with a small motor) from the garage of an empty house and rode it 350 kilometers to his brother’s house in Halle, near Berlin, telling him to expect the arrival of his Ukrainian wife after she gives birth to her child in March. He then rode the Moped 1,000 Kilometers all way down to the Rhineland which is quite a story in itself. His intention was to surrender the Brits or 'Amis' and after many attempts he succeeded around Christmas 1944. He finished up in an American camp on French soil where he lost half his body weight and was not released until October 1945. He walked all the way back from France to Halle near Berlin.

This left my mother six months pregnant alone in a foreign country losing a terrible war. But she wasn’t alone for long, pretty soon she joined a group of about twenty five women, some with babies, all on foot heading west sometimes in front and sometimes just behind the unstoppable Red Army.

On a freezing afternoon in mid December 1944 the women arrived in a smaller German Town and as they passed through it they came across a huge building complex she saw as a gigantic ‘Fabrik Werk’ the like of which not one of them had ever seen. The town was Auschwitz.

Among this small group of ‘fluchtlinge’ were half a dozen or so Nuns, some quite elderly. Two of these Ladies approached the uniformed German guards while the remainder waited anxiously outside in the snow. It was already quite dark and they were tired and cold, hoping to find a place to sleep and something to eat.After a few minutes an older man wearing the SS Uniform came out to the waiting women and invited them to follow him into one of the buildings.

In 1996 my daughter and nieces asked me to write down their grandmothers remarkable wartime stories so I ‘interviewed’ her. I have posted this on TOO and here before. Suffice to say she saw nothing at Auschwitz remotely resembling the holocau$t fable and went on to say that she was among about two dozen women who spent 3 or 4 days there and not one of them had anything to say about their stay apart from how NICE and POLITE the OLD GENTLEMEN of the SS were to them and how pleased they were to see the Nuns, especially so close to Christmas.

She is now aged 92 still with most of her marbles. Born in 1920 to a prosperous Kulak family she was one of five girls. In 1932 her father sent her to live in Poltava. She did not see her father again until 1941 when the German Army rattled through a small Town in east Ukraine. Late in 1942 she was sent to Stalingrad for Russian prisoner interrogations. Instead she was to ride at nights in open Railway shunt cars, just her, a German Officer and one armed soldier. She with a megaphone in front of retreating German Hospital Trains carrying wounded men out of the hellish battle for the city. She was there to warn Russian Partisans not to attack the train or face sever German revenge squads on the nearest Village. She did this for three months and never lost a train. Her four sisters each lost one husband in the Red Army, one lost TWO!