Cruel World (61 page)

On the more benign side was Wilhelm Kube, Generalkommissar of White Ruthenia, the Nazi name for Belorussia, who ordered Hitler Youth emissaries to set up a youth organization to recruit and prepare indigenous children aged fourteen to eighteen for work in Germany. The organization, which is said to have sent thousands of boys and girls to the Reich, was inaugurated in June 1943 with a rather surprising ceremony in which orchestral performances of music by local composers and patriotic songs (“I Love My Fatherland”) were combined with speeches by Kube and other Nazi officials, and which closed with the “White Ruthenian national anthem,” whatever that might have been at the time.
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Kube’s project did him no good: he was assassinated by an indigenous chambermaid who planted a bomb in his bed.

Efforts like Kube’s were the exception. One of the easiest places to find “recruits” was among the people who had been under German control since the first days of the invasion, many of whom had already suffered considerably at the hands of the Soviets. The experience of the Abramov family, who lived near Smolensk, is typical. The father, executed by the Soviets in 1938 for being a Trotsky sympathizer, had left a wife and six children. When the Germans arrived in 1941 the Abramovs’ home was taken as a billet for soldiers and the family was moved into a neighboring house with four other families, totaling twenty-five people. This house was burned in a Soviet aerial attack, and their cow, “which served as our wet-nurse,” was also killed. In return for food, Mrs. Abramov and the older children were required to clean and cook for the Germans. Their dreary but relatively safe existence changed dramatically one day, when all the families of the village, who do not seem to have been involved at all in partisan activity, were selected to go to Germany:

The group was taken first to an internment camp in Mogilev, on the Dnieper, and, after a time, loaded onto trains and taken to another typhus-ridden camp in Latvia. Here the many dead were put in coffins and taken outside the gates, where their bodies were dumped in a ditch so the coffins could be recycled. When Mrs. Abramov became ill, her children, fearing she would be sent to the infirmary, from which no one ever returned, “covered her with our emaciated bodies, so she wouldn’t be noticed” until she had recovered.

The Russians were “lined up by family to be sold … as indentured servants … we were chosen like the slaves in ancient times.” The five older Abramov children were sent to different farms and only the youngest boy, aged seven, stayed with his mother, who was sold to a farmer whose son was serving in the German Army. Her job was to keep house and maintain the barnyard while her son took “two horses, three cows, two calves, seven sheep, and five pigs out to pasture.” By August 1944, the farm was in the midst of the battle lines, and everyone made frantic efforts to save themselves and the livestock. An explosion severed Mrs. Abramov’s leg at the knee and knocked out her son. After the battle, Mrs. Abramov was nowhere to be found. The farm owner claimed that she had been taken to a hospital, but the reunited children, after a long search, found her body hidden under a pile of branches in a bomb crater. Red Army medics who examined the body told them that their mother had died, not from the leg injury, but from a “dagger or bayonet thrust under her left shoulder blade.” The farmer was arrested, but was soon released when the Red Army moved on, and the children, now orphans, survived for some months by working on other farms until they were returned to Russia.
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Vladimir Kuts, fourteen, would not have any family to comfort him. He was arrested in the Ukraine when Nazi police found propaganda leaflets dropped by Soviet planes in his mother’s house. Left to fend for herself when the Soviets sent her husband to Siberia, she was not interested in the propaganda but was drying out the papers in order to use them as fuel. Vladimir was sent alone to a railroad repair facility in Germany. Too small to do the heavy railroad work required, he was moved on to a camp near Stuttgart, where he was given the task of filling bags with lime. This was little better: the filled bags were still too heavy, the fumes and dust in the
works made it hard for him to breathe, and the lack of food inexorably weakened him. He was saved by the intervention of some adults who told the foreman that the boy’s father was in a Stalinist prison, and persuaded the plant authorities to send him off with a group of workers being made available to farmers. He was in such bad shape that at first no one chose him, and he was about to return to the lime factory when a farmer, who had been delayed, rushed in and took him away. To this day he feels that the farmer, a kindly man who nursed him back to health, was sent by God.
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Russian orphanages were another fertile source of recruits. Tatyana Bessonova, fourteen, an orphan from Orel who had been sent for upbringing to a collective farm at age six, was now forcibly taken from there and sent, with two other girls, to work at a small sawmill in Hanover, where she was treated “fairly.”
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Aldona Valinskaya was not so lucky. Before the war, the Soviets had executed her father and arrested her mother in Moscow, and Aldona had been sent to an orphanage in the southern Ukraine that contained some 400 inmates classified as “children of enemies of the people.” When the war began, most of the staff fled, leaving the children and a few teachers behind. The children, some very small, survived at first on field greens, fruit, and sunflower seeds. After a time they were briefly caught up in the front lines. As the Germans moved in, the remaining caretakers disappeared and the children were left alone, but found some work and food at a nearby collective farm. Eight of them were chosen for Germanization. The Jews among them were told that they were being taken to “the ghetto.” But their fellow orphans, who had given them little souvenirs before they were driven away, learned the next day that all the Jewish children had, in fact, been executed in the night.

Later, some of the older Russian children were sent to Germany. Aldona, sixteen, and eleven others were supposed to go to Cologne. But just across the Polish-German border they were approached by a
Volksdeutsche
woman who told them to get off the train, took them to a café, and sold them to German women who “examined their teeth and hands like cattle” and took them off to various employments. Aldona went to a farm where she was expected to do hard manual labor. Her boss was tough: the Russian girl later noted that “German women whose husbands were at the Eastern Front were more cruel.” Aldona managed to escape with two other workers, but they were caught and would spend the next year living on prison trains so awful that the real prisons in which they occasionally stopped seemed luxurious in comparison. At one such stop, a subcamp of Buchenwald, Aldona, who had clearly been classified as a criminal type as well as an
Untermensch
, was sterilized. The interrogations
and transfers continued until 1944, when a relatively merciful camp commander let her work in the kitchen of an air base where no German would stay, as it was constantly being bombed. There she survived and was liberated by three Americans she has never forgotten, named Michael, Lester, and Fred.
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As the partisan warfare intensified and their parents were killed, imprisoned, or sent to forced labor, more and more children related to the resistance fighters were left alone without any shelter at all. In many places the easiest thing for the SS to do was just shoot them, as had been authorized from the beginning in the efforts to reduce the Soviet population. But many felt the children could be useful. The notorious SS partisan hunter Oskar Dirlewanger, a released convict, employed them as human mine detectors: women and children were sent across suspected minefields to clear them for Nazi troops.
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By the fall of 1942, Hitler, Bormann, and Himmler, encouraged by labor recruiter Sauckel, had also persuaded themselves that the unaccompanied children and young people in the Ukraine and Belorussia might be utilized. In January 1943, Himmler, whose Jewish slave labor forces by now were being depleted by mass exterminations, ordered that partisan children and juveniles were to be collected in special camps and that those “of racial value” were to be assigned as apprentices “to the plants of the concentration camps.” This was not the same “racial” evaluation that sought out children for Germanization, but seems to have been limited to weeding out Jews and hard-core Bolsheviks. Those who passed were to be educated, giving “special consideration to ideas concerning obedience, diligence, unconditional subordination and honesty towards the German Masters.” They must be able to count up to a hundred and read traffic signs, and would be trained to be “farmers, blacksmiths, masons, spinners, knitters, etc.”

Implementation of this order seems to have been somewhat trying to SS underlings. It was ignored or even resisted in some Nazi quarters where more moderate treatment of the indigenous population was beginning to seem like a good idea. Nevertheless, SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, in charge of anti-partisan activities, who would later win eternal notoriety for his vicious suppression of the Polish Resistance in Warsaw, was reported to be “establishing camps for children between 1 to 10,” while, from Berlin, SS economic czar Oswald Pohl ordered a camp for Russian “children of partisans” between ten and sixteen to be set up in Poland as a branch of the adult concentration camp at Majdanek.

By the summer of 1943 many were having second thoughts about deporting children. One SS police unit in Latvia, either for lack of facilities
or of desire to deal with the problem, reported that they had “been forced” to return the approximately 1,000 children in their custody to Russian families, even though, regrettably, “this would lead to a strengthening of the Russian ethnic group in Latvia and in due course to an education of the children according to Russian principles.” Later they explained defensively that the children were from “harmless Russian people.” By July even the SS leader in the Ukraine had clearly begun to think that the removal of small children of partisans was bad propaganda. He proposed that “the … public … be shown clearly that we even conduct … antipartisan warfare with all the humane spirit compatible with our interests of self-preservation. The Ukrainian public shall know that innocent children will be spared.” From now on, he suggested, the seized children should be put in local camps supervised by security forces, where care, upkeep, feeding, and “handicraft education” would be carried out by “indigenous personnel.” The age limit for entrance to these “humane” camps would be limited, however. In his view, “only children between 2 and 6 years of age can be taken into consideration, since with more grownup children the idea of hatred and vengeance cannot be eradicated.”
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Even this small “humane” idea was blown away a week later by a Himmler order declaring that the Führer had decided to clear the entire population out of the partisan areas of the northern Ukraine and central Russia. The men were to be handed over to the labor authorities “with the status of prisoners of war,” the women sent to forced labor in the Reich, and “a part of the female population and all children without parents” would go “to our reception camps.” From these camps, Himmler mused, the children could, among other things, be sent to work on farms or plantations of kok-saghyz, a plant used in the manufacture of synthetic rubber in factories being developed by I. G. Farben, whose labor force would consist in large part of the children’s parents and older siblings.
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The proposed plantations and much else would fall by the wayside once it had become clear that the Germans’ huge offensive at Kursk, in which they had hoped to regain territory lost after Stalingrad, had failed. There would be no rubber plantations. Instead, the Nazis would soon issue scorched-earth orders and begin a massive, yearlong retreat that would gradually move the
Volksdeutsche
settlers and the occupation administrations back to Poland and Germany. Along with them would go as much of the local population as possible for use as forced labor.

The Nazis were aided during their exodus from the USSR by collaborators who knew that they would be killed by the Soviets if they did not retreat along with the German forces. Among them was Mieczyslaw
Kaminski, half Polish and half German, brought up as a Russian, who had established himself as a pro-Nazi, anti-Soviet warlord near Briansk, just to the west of the Kursk battle area, where he set up a nice economic empire for himself and helped the Nazis hunt down partisans.
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When the Germans began to withdraw, Kaminski offered his services and that of his “army,” a motley collection of outlaws of various descriptions. One of his services was to organize human shields of women and children for the retreating Nazis. Olga Pavlovskaia, five years old at the time, was put on the leading edge of such a formation and remembers picking flowers in the woods during a rest stop. She and her mother managed to escape further along by hiding in the bushes.
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Things did not work out so well for six-year-old Nikolai Mahutov, his ten-year-old brother, and hundreds of other children who were forced to drag logs with long ropes along the roads ahead of the Germans, in order to detonate any mines. His mother and three-year-old sister were also in the human screen.