1. September 1946
The communist world is already celebrating the second World Peace Day (1 Sept 1946), and we are still sitting here as prisoners of war. But I want to endure all the hardships of captivity as penance for my many transgressions.
Since the Windau camp, the conditions in the camps I have passed through in the meantime have become worse from camp to camp. The camp atmosphere here in Smolensk is very different from that in Latvia. There you could still feel something of the European spirit (except in Salaspils). There, the Russian may still have held back a little in view of the Latvian population. Here in Smolensk the air is pure Russian. Despotism reigns here as it did in the time of Ivan the Terrible, the Bolshevik unculture of exploitation, lawlessness and hatred. Here we are no longer in or on the fringes of Europe, here we are in the middle of Russia.
Admittedly, we do not feel this every day. At times we have pleasant working conditions, friendly posts to guard us and often touching evidence of Russian goodwill. But that was due to individual people in personal contact. That was not the merit of the system. At crucial moments, we always get to feel our slave-ness. Even the slaves of Rome or the American Negro slaves were not constantly whipped, but they were unfree and without rights, human commodities and work animals, like us here.
Some things in Russian everyday life are touching and ridiculous at the same time. Informal, tasteless, sometimes impious. Some things are post-war poverty (funeral participants in cotton wool jackets). They often have only one set of clothes. Some of it is hilarious: Women in elegant dressing gowns on the street or even in the theatre. Women in brown SA shirts. Everything stolen from Germany. Not everything is cultureless. The average Russian woman is well-behaved and homespun, and that is truly no fault.
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