The Medic by Leo Litwak

Author:Leo Litwak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2000-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

< DISPLACED IN GROSSDORF >

In mid-April we entered Grossdorf, a village that the war appeared to have passed over. At its center was a market square, and around the square a small bank, a post office, a camera shop, a two-story hotel, a blacksmith, a hardware store, a butcher, a shoemaker, two or three cafés. The railroad station was a few blocks from the center. A seed warehouse was nearby. There was a textile factory alongside the mansion where we were quartered, not far from the town center.

The town was still in business. The bank had shut down but the post office still functioned. The shoemaker was still at work. There was an elderly barber still giving haircuts. The textile factory had operated until a few days before we arrived and was still intact and ready to start up. The camera shop was open. The railroad, of course, wasn’t operating, but the depot restaurant still offered meals.

Agriculture was the main business of Grossdorf. Farmsteads were set right in town but market stalls were empty. The Wehrmacht had taken everything when it withdrew.

The village celebrated our coming. The citizens lined the main street and cheered as our truck convoy passed by. We had reached them before the Russians and they were now safe behind our lines.

I almost immediately discovered that Grossdorf had reason to fear the Russians, who were beyond Berlin and coming fast. Among the cheering citizens, there were some who didn’t cheer. Shawled women with broad, Slavic faces stood off from the others. They seemed grim and forlorn. I asked one of the women where she was from. “Wo ist dein heimat?”

“Smolensk, in Russia.”

She had fat, red cheeks, blue eyes. She looked solid and strong. She said that she and fifty other Russian women were penned up on the edge of town. There were Russian men at other camps. They had been brought here to replace Germans gone to war. She called herself, with bitter emphasis, a Sklavenarbeiter, a slave laborer.

After the Germans occupied Poland and much of Russia and the Ukraine, they abducted the Slav citizens by the tens of thousands and herded them into boxcars for transport to Germany. It was the Nazi intention to degrade the Slavs, reduce them to menials serving the Teutonic Übermensch.

Each dawn the women were released from the lager to do hard labor. They plowed, planted, hoed, raked, piled manure, drained cesspools into huge barrel wagons, swept the floors of the textile factory, cleaned the streets, were fed minimum rations.

They were now free but with no place to go. They needed food and transport home. She begged me to help. “Wir sind hungrig.” We are hungry.

I went to Lieutenant Klamm, who was busy setting up headquarters. We assumed our control of Grossdorf would last only until the arrival of Military Government with teams skilled in occupation duty. Till then our platoon ran Grossdorf.

I told the lieutenant about the camp of Russian women. He said to go ahead and check it out,

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