9. Oktober 1949
GEO INFO | ||||
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Minsk | ![]() | |||
Baranowitschi | ![]() | |||
Brest Litowsk | ![]() |
Longer stay at the Minsk goods station. I crawl up a steep slope on the southern edge of the goods station. There are a few houses at the top. After about 3 hours, the journey continues. Via Baranowitschi we roll on to Brestlitowsk, the Russian-Polish border station. The train stops outside the town. It is the last stop on Soviet soil. Everybody out for the last big frisking. Even before we got off the train, we got a little taste of what was to come: On one Landser, the guards had discovered a sheet of newspaper supposedly with a pencil note written on the edge. He was taken out of the carriage with his poor bundle and led away.
We sit waiting in the grass next to our luggage and I think about my smuggled papers. Some of my comrades know about it and implore me to throw the box away. Just as I had made up my mind with a heavy heart and was about to take it out of my rucksack, our group is called in for the search. Fate, take your course!
We enter the barracks and have to strip naked “for a medical examination”. And while we were being superficially examined in one room, our luggage and clothes were subjected to a very thorough search. The medical examination was a farce. It was just a pretext for examining our clothes and luggage. It had gone so quickly that I was still able to watch my clothes being searched. A uniformed man in a white gown searched all the pockets, carefully patted down the items of clothing and took one piece after another of my other belongings out of my rucksack to inspect them. Even the wooden box. It was half the size of a cigar box and contained lots of odds and ends, such as sewing kit, nail scissors, an embroidered Berlin coat of arms, the “Brandenburg Gate”[1]. The Russian turns the box back and forth in his hand. Now there was still a danger: that the Russian would take a stab and pierce the wall of the box. They did that sometimes. But my inspector didn’t seem to be a fanatic. He continued to work calmly and eventually put the box aside. What nerves of steel I must have had back then! I was allowed to leave, gathered up my clothes and left the room to pack my rucksack outside. Lieutenant Stockmann was already standing by one of the carriages and called out to me. Inexplicably, I answered him rather brusquely,[2] that I had to stow my things away first.
After travelling through Poland, we reach the German eastern provinces. Polish names are already written everywhere on the railway station signs. - We stop between stations. There are several farms some distance away. A girl comes running up. She is German. She points to one of the farms. It belonged to her family, but now there’s a Polish farmer on it and her family work as farmhands and maids on their former property. Then the Pole becomes visible over there and the girl runs back because the Pole “otherwise scolds”.
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- ↑ This coat of arms with the Berlin bear (not the Brandenburg Gate), which a comrade or fellow prisoner had made as a side business, still exists
- ↑ after the stress he had just endured, it was actually very understandable