Chapter V: The Children

“These Little Children are looking for Their Parents,” was a printed announcement that met me all over Germany. Underneath this announcement were the haunting faces of fifty little children—little ones separated from their parents and relatives during the mass expulsions. The little faces on the poster stared at me in railroad stations, in welfare offices, on church doors, and in public buildings.

The children who do not know their own names and whose parents are being sought; the children who know their names and who still search for their parents; the thousands upon thousands of children who have vanished without trace and may all be dead—these are the problems which present themselves in any discussion of the Expellee children of present-day Germany. There are special Search Services designed to reunite these tragic little victims with their parents and many thousands of happy reunions have been brought about.

No one was able to count the number of children, especially infants, who died in the course of the expulsions, although many have stories to tell of children who died on the roads. Often the cold, lifeless bodies of infants and small children were the first to be handed out of the windows of the deportation trains.

There are no adequate reports on the health and welfare of the millions of children who survived, and who as innocent, unknowing Pilgrims of the Night were led to the dismal barracks and shelters that were to serve as their homes from then on.

THE LITTLE LOST CHILDREN

But to return to the faces on the poster, the children were too young at the time of flight to remember their last names or the address of their parents. The descriptions underneath each picture highlight the unimaginable suffering that is meted out to the innocent in any mass expulsion.

One little child was found on the road by a soldier; another two children knew that their mother was taken to Russia from East Prussia. Another child knew that his first name was Gerhard and that he had a telephone in his house in Pomerania. Under every photo is written in a few words an individual tragedy which was implicit in the Allied decision to uproot millions of human beings in the days of chaos that followed a world war.

This poster of little lost children searching for parents more than four years after the end of the war, symbolized for me all the guiltless who have suffered in the mass expulsions of close to 12 million people from areas of Eastern Europe.

I asked also about other children who were expelled and found that between 160,000 and 180,000 children were lost in the course of the uprooting of Germanic minorities and German citizens from such areas as the Sudetenland, Silesia, East Prussia, Yugoslavia, and Hungary.

In most cases these children, still unaccounted for, were the casualties of the peacetime war action. Many died on the road; hundreds upon hundreds of nursing babies died for lack of nourishment and warmth in the chaotic days after arrival during the terrible winters of 1945/46 and 1946/47. Parents are still searching for the children from whom they were separated and whom they believe to be alive.

Public searches conducted by posters, by advertisements and by thousands upon thousands of radio-broadcasts, have given a tone of tragedy to everyday life in Germany. There are special radio programs for those children who know their names and the former addresses of their parents. There are also special radio programs for parents who still believe that their children who were separated from them during the deportation can be located somewhere in Germany or in the neighboring lands.

DAY AFTER DAY, HEART-BREAKING ANNOUNCEMENTS

Day after day, one can hear these heart-breaking announcements of parents who still hope to find their children three or four years after the separation. One might reasonably ask why parents allowed themselves to be separated from their little ones. It is easier to understand, when one hears such announcements as that regarding a young boy who had walked to a nearby town to go to the store, and before he returned his whole family was forcibly loaded on to a truck and taken to a detention camp for expulsion. Other children were placed on different deportation trains from the parents.

SEARCH SERVICES FOR MISSING CHILDREN

The lost children are a very special problem of all welfare agencies which are cooperating to locate as many of them as possible and to reunite them with their families. The children who are searching for their parents and whose little faces stare at you all over Germany from the posters I described, are, in general, well taken care of by public and religious welfare agencies. It is interesting to note that many calls have come to German welfare agencies for the adoption of these children by families living in other lands, but in general expellee children are not available for adoption because they have been taken by German families. The remainder of the unaccompanied expellee children are being kept until extensive investigations are made regarding their parents and relations.

UPROOTED ORPHANAGES

Two representatives from War Relief Services-N.C.W.C. for Germany sought out the institutions having expelled children and found some homes filled with uprooted orphans.

In the Bavarian countryside is one such institution for children conducted by the Sisters of St. Charles Borromeo. The children and the Sisters were included in the fiction of mass guilt and were expelled from a bordertown in Silesia. Given little time to gather their charges together, the Sisters managed to keep the little family intact on the deportation train. A home was provided for them all by the American Military.

The children sheltered in this home have been spared nothing of bitterness, or terror, or death.

Three of the orphans were a brother and two sisters, Klaus, Gertrude and Hilda. Klaus, as the eldest, had brought his two sisters to the safe-keeping of the Nuns before the evacuation from Silesia. His father was already dead, and when his mother died as a result of a bombing raid, he, at eleven years of age, presented himself at the door of the orphanage, holding a five-year-old sister by one hand and a seven-year-old by the other. The Nuns were keeping the pathetic remainder of the family intact because of the security it gave each child to be near the other.

Two little boys, Horst and Dieber Twerdon, were turned out of the family home at the height of the expulsions, and began walking toward the center of Germany with their mother. So great was the cold of the march, that the mother lay down by the side of the road and died. The two little boys walked on alone until they were picked up by authorities and added to the uprooted brood congregated in the Bavarian home.

So many tales of pitiful little children could be told; tales of the fatherless, of the motherless, from whom everything was taken except the love of those dedicated women who, of the little helpless beings entrusted to them, lost not any one.

CHILD LIFE IN BARRACKS

The expellee children who are living in barracks and almost uninhabitable buildings of all types are subjected to constant sufferings and agonies. One room to a family is a luxury. Sometimes, this room may formerly have been a stall for a horse. One extremely large expellee camp, the Rositen Kaserne near Salzburg, was formerly a Veterinary Center for horses. Each sick horse had his own stall in which the animal was tied to a heavy post. Now, in this former horse hospital, each expellee family lives in one of these stalls and the heavy post is a reminder to each member of the family that their home is really a stable. There is little privacy for family living in such conditions. There is less privacy when 20 families must occupy sections of large halls in the former castles that have been pressed into service for expellees. What can we expect of children who live in such constant overcrowding, surrounded by daily reminders of their degraded lot as expellees?

YOUTH WITHOUT HOPE

A Red Cross leader explaining that one of the most explosive situations in Western Germany was that of unemployed, homeless, footloose youth, stated that there are more than 300,000 young men, between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five, among the Expellee groups who are without jobs, or job-training. These young people, old enough to understand the indignity of their lot in the barracks and hovels of strange towns and villages, but too young to appreciate the cataclysm that has come to all Europe, can only look forward to nothingness. There are no places in the schools for them to learn a trade; no jobs are opening up for them in an economy that has not even jobs enough for adult breadwinners. There are at present no real chances of emigration.

These young people look backward to the day by day destruction and systematic cruelty of the war years, and to the inhumanity and chaos of the years of peace. It would not be surprising if out of this immense mass of youth without hope, there should emerge a cold dangerous nihilism. Since they have seen the depths, they might come to fear nothing, to reverence nothing, not even life itself.

The appeal of hungry and homeless children is one that goes right to the heart. No one needs to ponder, or study whether such an appeal should be answered by help even at a sacrifice. The appeal of these young people is one that must go to the mind as well as to the heart. The future of the West will have to count with these young people, whether for good or for ill. Up to now, the world has shown them by all methods possible that it does not want them, nor does it want their intelligence, or their skills. They have been driven from their homes, and driven out of participation in the business of living. Those who have parents are still under some restraints and are linked to religion, to family, to some small, eventual hope of making a contribution to society by work. But even then, the parents themselves are full of discouragement, because most of them had hoped to provide training or higher education for their teenagers, and now find themselves utterly unable to do so.

There are others who have lost all ties with family—either through death or through deportation to the East. Some young men were urged by families living in the Eastern Zone to flee to the West because of imminent danger of forced labor. Still others have come to the West after escaping from forced labor in the uranium mines. Many of these youngsters are sixteen and seventeen years of age. Were it not for the activities of Lutheran Aid and Catholic Charities in setting up homes for these boys, it is hard to say what would have become of them.

I visited such a home for homeless boys at Wewelsburg, in the diocese of Paderborn, Westphalia, and saw what stable and disciplined young citizens they become when gathered into the warm and intimate atmosphere of a home. A selfless young leader of Catholic Action directed the home, and gave each boy a sense of responsibility, a sense of belonging. A course of training, as near as possible to the capacities and desires of the boy, was provided in the neighbourhood. Forty boys lived in this Youth Home, recently rebuilt after being completely burnt out. The boys themselves worked on the building and renovation. All of the boys were Expellees, though some of them had been expelled first into the Russian Zone of occupation before deciding to cross into the so-called Golden Zone of the West. Many of them had escaped from forced labor.

“These little children are looking for their parents.”
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Home for this child is behind the barbed wire of former slave labor
barracks.
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An Expellee child in a camp in Schleswig-Holstein.
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The one diocese of Paderborn has had to set up eight such Youth Homes, for homeless, driven youth—seven for boys and one for girls. Forty Youth Homes have already been set up by Caritas in Western Germany. Many more such homes are needed in the Western Federal Republic if these young people are to be rescued for a normal, useful and stable existence.

CHILDREN OF THE DISPERSION

From a religious point of view, the Catholic children who have been expelled into the Northern areas of Germany, where there are neither sufficient churches nor schools, are at present a very pressing and special problem. These children are served by priests who come to them on foot, on bikes or on motorcycles. They are prepared for First Communion and Confirmation in crowded barracks rooms and Lutheran churches kindly lent for the occasion. The richness of Catholic life which their parents knew before the expulsion is entirely absent. The faith is kept alive only by the heroic efforts of weary and overburdened priests and dedicated lay people from among the expellees.

Much self-help has been organized among the German Catholics to save this generation of children who are living in the Diaspora, or Dispersion areas of Germany. Every year, the dioceses of South-Germany, particularly Bavaria, bring down thousands of the expellee children from the areas of Schleswig-Holstein and North-Germany to spend the summer months with Catholic families.

TALE TOLD AT NIGHT BY HOMELESS CHILDREN

Bavaria in the summer is rich in color and richer still in its expressions of Catholic life. Some of the children from Schleswig-Holstein used to sit in the evenings and tell the Bavarian youngsters what they thought of the lovely domed churches of the Bavarian countryside. The little expellee children marvelled at the colorful interiors of the churches, at the vestments of the priests, at the beautiful marriage ceremonies, at the fact that one could go to Confession and Communion at almost any time because the priest was near the church and near the people.

For the expellee children from Schleswig-Holstein, there were very few priests and their life was dark and sad. They told how they waited on the road, often without shoes and in the rain, for the priest who came to them on his cycle. They explained how their Mass was said in bare schoolrooms without any color or loveliness.

A PICTURE OF DESOLATION

A Bavarian girl listened to these stories told in the evenings by homeless and yearning little ones. These tales impressed her so much that she painted them into a picture—a picture which in its accuracy and power is a real masterpiece. The young Bavarian girl was Veronika Reich of the diocese of Augsburg in Bavaria. Veronika painted in the lower part of the picture several crowded scenes of color and joy, a church wedding, a child being baptised, a Bishop dispensing Confirmation, children being taught Catechism by the priests, children going to Confession, children receiving Communion. Behind these scenes rise the spires and the cupolas, or “onion” towers, of the typical Bavarian churches. Towards the top of the picture, the colors grow dark, and we see two little groups of shoeless children, standing by the side of the road waving in welcome to a priest on a bicycle. The buildings are plain as schoolbuildings are. The top of the picture is absolutely black in color. In this way Veronika, hardly more than a child herself, interpreted the longings and sufferings of other little children from whom so much has been taken, even the joys of their religion. I wish that every Catholic in America had seen this most unbelievable picture that came from the hearts of some children and the hand and heart of another child. Among the Pilgrims of the Night, the expellees of Western Europe, the children are the most desolate of all.