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Victory Day against Nazi Germany became the beginning of a new hell for the mothers, wives, and children of yesterday’s enemies, from whom the victors, when no longer needed, deprived not only of life, the honor, but also home, country and even the right to be human. Olaf Pasenau, who grew up in Lithuania, is an uncomfortable witness to the bloody and criminal victory of the Soviets, who he says carry the Black Cross in their hearts for 75 years.
The black cross in the heart
Olaf was John for almost 50 years. Just then there was no other way out. It couldn’t be Olafu, although that was the name his parents gave him.
His parents were gone: he was the only boy, then 11 years old, who had survived the most beloved man; the terrible death of his mother, he never hugged his father again, and the sister, who met many decades later, doubted that he really was her brother, and finally refused to communicate.
Olaf’s childish world collapsed in the spring of 1945, when only torn corpses were dumped, the ruins of not so long ago beautiful cities clouded over and drunken “liberators” lurking.
“Perhaps it was too small and I did not realize that there would never be a home again. There would be no more homeland. Only a few, cold, hunger and a terrible longing. Longing for mom, sister, father and that Kionigsberg who will never return to be. Childhood also died. ” – Olaf will write later, experiencing something he would never wish on anyone.
We have seen everything and we remember everything, we tell everything to the world.
The Black Cross in the Heart, the so-called essay published by the German magazine Memeler Dampfboot 13 years ago.
“My homeland, East Prussia, the land of dark forests and crystal lakes” has become a terrifying field of punishment for us, the locals, the women, the grandparents, the children. The Soviet army with its special units “Smersh”, NKVD and others destroyed not only our homes, cities and towns “We also became homeless, then took away our mothers, sisters, brothers, friends from school. That is not enough They took away our names, childhood, the right to be human, “wrote O. Pasenau.
Withdrawal: As the front approached, residents of East Prussia were ordered to evacuate along with the Wehrmacht army. (Heinz Schön. “Ostpreußen 1944/1945 im Bild” and “Als die Rote Armee das Land besetzte. Tragödie Ostpreußen. 1944–1948”)
The ghost of a white cat
Olaf mentions 741 eastern Prussian villages and hamlets that the Soviets irreversibly swept from the face of the earth.
They were not renamed even by Russian names, all that was left was empty land filled with blood and tears.
“To this day, the ruined church bells ring in our ears. These are the requirements of those who lived here: Anna Klafs, Frida Swars, Else Kisling, Martha Pasenau and thousands of others. You will never find them again and you won’t find their graves. ” , crucify, kill, crush the tanks of the Red Army. It was no longer war, it was genocide (“for the sake of peace”). We all had to disappear, “Olaf was suffering.
Olaf and his wife Angelika visited Kionigsberg, today Kaliningrad, much later, and tried to find a happy childhood home.
Found, today the building still stands, other people live there, who, of course, know nothing about the tragedy of the former owners.
I don’t know: East Prussian people fleeing the horrors of war had no idea if they would get to safety, the front was inexorably approaching. (Heinz Schön. “Ostpreußen 1944/1945 im Bild” and “Als die Rote Armee das Land besetzte. Tragödie Ostpreußen. 1944–1948”)
“We stopped at that house and stayed for a long time. I offered Olaf to come in, look inside. I say maybe people will understand and come in. We almost decided to cross the threshold when a little white kitten suddenly appeared at the door Olaf even froze, like he saw a ghost. Only then did they say they raised exactly the same cat in this house when they were young. Anyway, we didn’t go to his childhood home, “said Olaf’s wife, Angelika Pasenau .
“We were still waiting for Dad”
Olaf was born in East Prussia, Allenstein, in 1934. on October 16 in the family of Bruno and Martha Pasenau, where the eight-year-old daughter, Ingeborg, was already growing up.
Olaf’s father was a soldier, he had a husband. lieutenant, mother housewife.
As the children grew older, the family moved to Kionigsberg, where they lived in a shack area, in a service department.
With the outbreak of World War II, the father was brought to the front.
Marta was left alone with the children. When the residents’ evacuation began, he decided to send his daughter Ingeborg alone to her parents in Osterode.
Ingeborg then arrived in Germany and stayed in Frankfurt am Main.
Martha and her son Olaf stayed in Königsberg, waiting for the knowledge of her husband.
Fear: This photo captures Klaipeda’s war refugees. They did not even realize what awaited them in front of the “heroes” of the Red Army. (Heinz Schön. “Ostpreußen 1944/1945 im Bild” and “Als die Rote Armee das Land besetzte. Tragödie Ostpreußen. 1944–1948”)
“And we were still waiting for my father. We received a letter from him saying that he was surrounded by Stalingrad (now Volgograd). My mother cried a lot. My mother and I were going to read the names of the dead, but my father was not among them, “Olaf wrote in his memoirs. .
1944 At the end of the 19th century, the news came that B. Pasenau had disappeared without a trace.
The retreat was too late.
[1945-January/SovietArmiesmoderatedKionigsberg[1945EneneroelejércitosoviéticorodeóKionigsbergThe retreat was too late. Olaf and his mother had to survive the terrible rages of the Red Army and the first winter of famine.
They, along with others, were taken to a wire-fenced camp area and held there.
“People died en masse. They were buried in wells with bombs, without coffins, without prayers, without tears. There were no forces for that. People were given half-baked bread, which they became infected with typhoid fever and died” recalled the 12-year-old boy. Olafas
1946 In that camp, Olaf’s mother, Martha, died of starvation.
After placing his body in a wheelchair, an old man carried him out of the camp headquarters and collected the bodies.
Olaf was very ill at the time. But the next day he managed to get to the place where his mother was buried.
Chaos: Often when children boarded a train, young children would get lost from their parents. (Heinz Schön. “Ostpreußen 1944/1945 im Bild” and “Als die Rote Armee das Land besetzte. Tragödie Ostpreußen. 1944–1948”)
“I will never forget that terrible image. A well, and in it – children, women and the elderly. Skeletons. Tortured,” wrote O. Pasenau in his memoirs.
After what he saw, the boy decided to save.
He arrived at the train station where his mother once cleaned the cars.
“It was the Moscow-Kionigsberg train, the ninth carriage. The satellites are major Belarusians,” Olaf said.
These people took the exhausted Olaf together and took him to Belarus.
I miss and nobody needs
Olaf spent about three months with them and returned, believing that his homeland, devastated as it was, would be better than in a foreign country.
“I returned to Königsberg. No one needs a twelve-year-old boy. I slept in the rubble. After that, I settled in the Ponarth camp,” Olaf wrote.
Once the capture of children began. Group them in cars, not knowing where they were going to transport them.
Olaf was also found in a cart. On the way she jumped from him. This is how it was found in Lithuania, near Vilkaviškis.
It was in 1947. spring
“Wet, cold, foreign land, incomprehensible language”, such a first impression was made in Lithuania by the little poor of East Prussia.
Some people gave him food, others took him away.
For a long time, Olafa was protected by the Paplauskai family, who lived in the town of Mačiūnai (now Prienai district).
Olaf recalled: “In four years I learned the Lithuanian language, in six years, writing and reading in Lithuanian. It never occurred to me to anyone who wanted to study.”
I had to work very hard all the time. At first he worked stumps in the Ežerėlis bog, then in the forest, then he worked in the Prienai shipyard.
In 1956, he acquired the combine harvester specialty and worked for twenty years at the Prienai motor transport company.
In the same year, O. Pasenau managed to receive documents under the name of a stranger: Jonas Balsys.
The son of the wolf, forever?
After Lithuania’s restoration of independence in 1991. East Prussian children who lived in Lithuania after the war joined the Edelweiss community (in 1993 the community was called Edelweiss – Wolfskinder).
O. Pasenau was elected president of this community.
Most of the wolf’s children, including Olaf, began searching for their loved ones, whom they had not seen in nearly five decades.
He discovered his sister Ingeborg, but after several meetings he refused to admit that Olaf is his brother.
It was a painful experience for Olaf.
“It doesn’t hurt myself, it hurts my mother’s memory. If a sister rejects me, then she rejects a mother who starved to death in Kionigsberg. The mother who gave birth to her grew up, loved her,” Olaf said. crying for sister’s self-determination.
Olaf’s father, Bruno, returned from a Soviet prisoner of war camp to Germany.
He searched all the time for his son Olaf, but received the answer that his wife and son had died in Kionigsberg.
Bruno married a second time, raising two daughters. He died in 1983 without seeing his son.
Bruno’s daughters, Gudrun and Ute, are in close contact with Olaf.
1994 Olaf Pasenau received a German entry certificate and a German travel passport.
1998 went to Germany After a time he settled in the city of Granze, which looks like East Prussia.
“The war in East Prussia left terrible wounds. Slavery and daily contempt were terrible. It would be good if no one had to survive,” Olaf wrote.
They forgot nothing
Historians from the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Struggles collected the testimonies of Olaf and dozens of his friends from East Prussia and prepared the exhibition “Wolf Children: Bread on the Road from East Prussia to Lithuania 1945–1948”, which received considerable echo.
The newspaper wrote about it in the publication “Silent Crime Fleece” (“Klaipeda”, November 16, 2019).
Admittedly, this article was followed by a stream of insults and contempt for those who survived hell after the glorious Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.
“I understand the reaction of the readers. A normal person feels the horror that the children went through. Well, and some send and attack to bite. Probably those who raped and kicked us hungry are those who cut the leg of a living woman because they needed shoes. ” “It was difficult to remove the shoes of a hungry man. The traditions of those ‘liberators’ were probably passed down to the grandchildren. But there are still living witnesses,” the werewolf Olaf reacted to the attack.
“Former Soviet explorer Viktor Suvorov, who was researching the history of World War II, found evidence that I read in the Polish press (” Uwažam Rze History “) that when Soviet units arrived in East Prussia, the leadership began to distribute pornographic impressions of ordinary soldiers. Olaf’s wife Angelika, who has made a significant contribution to the organization of an exhibition on child wolves in Germany itself, where the subject of victims of the civil war is not yet entirely ” politically correct “, especially on the anniversary of victory, he was sentenced to murder, not to mention robberies. occasion.
“As with all crimes, witnesses were unnecessary. But they forgot the shadows that crawled in the ruins. The impoverished, wounded and overwhelmed creatures were nothing. We were the children of East Prussia. We survived. We saw everything and remembered everything, we we count everything to the world. ” that we are lucky. Hardly. Do you think it’s easy to go through life with the burden of those memories? “- rhetorically asked O. Pasenau, who is still experiencing the nightmare of Soviet victory.
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