A German Family in Silesia
This is a record of an interview with Sigrid Scott (Laura Davies's "Oma" - German for grandmother). She was interviewed on 11 and 12 December 2001 at South Hunsley School.
An Interview With Sigrid Scott
I was nine when the war broke out on the 1st September 1939. I was living in a place called Silesia. It used to be in East Germany and is now part of Poland. I lived in a little country town of 22,000 people. The name in Polish is Boleslawiec. The old German name was Bunzlau. My father died when I was very young. My mother was an overseer in a wool mill, which was changed over to build parts for aircraft for the German airforce. All the staff stayed and began to make aircraft parts and so she had to retrain.
Family life
As I come from a working class family I only went to an ordinary school.
In our school we didn't learn any second languages.
We learnt Maths, History, Religious Studies.
I can still speak German; it is my mother tongue and I will never forget it, although sometimes it takes me a while to recall certain words.
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It was indescribable how anyone could treat another human being like that. |
Outside school I did baby sitting, I worked on a farm and I liked swimming.
But most of the time, during the war years, school children were encouraged to work on the farms, doing the harvest and helping gather potatoes.
Most of the farm workers, especially many of the men, were either called into the army or they were called into the munitions factories.
The Nazi regime
The Nazi regime...when you live during the time, you don't realise.
I remember my first introduction to the Nazi party was when they carried out Kristallnacht against the Jews and that was a horrifying experience
for us children.
It was indescribable how anyone could treat another human being like that.
Most of our young teachers were called into the army.
Retired teachers were called in to work again.
They told children: "If you see a Jew (they had to wear yellow stars, so you could tell they were Jews) you have to run them off the path, or
spit on them".
I could never understand why you should treat another human being like that.
I asked my grandmother: "Why have we been told to do this?"
My grandmother just shook her head and she said: "You behave how you would normally behave.
Don't you follow suit."
Jews and prisoners of war
We had quite a lot of prisoners of war there in our town.
We had French and Polish prisoners of war and all were supposed to be well treated by us, but the Kristallnacht was unforgettable.
Our town smelt like a brewery, because the brewery was run by Jews and that was all smashed.
The liquor and the beer was running down the road.
The synagogue was in front of the Catholic kindergarten.
That was burnt to the ground.
All Jewish shops were smashed to smithereens, the goods were thrown out on the road and trampled on.
It's something one doesn't forget.
My aunty was nearly arrested twice, because she fed some Jewish prisoners.
They were starved and walking about like skeletons in blue and white striped suits, like pyjamas.
They were working on the road where my aunty lived.
She caught them stealing potatoes that she had boiled, from her back kitchen window.
Knowing this, she made packets of sandwiches with some cigarettes and threw them out for them.
She was caught twice and they nearly arrested her.
She had to go to the Nazi headquarters and because of my uncle being a soldier she escaped.
Otherwise she would have been put into concentration camp.
The Nazi party's rules
You had no freedom of speech.
You were afraid to talk to your next door neighbours, because you didn't know if they would report you to the Nazi party and get you into
trouble.
At the age of 10 you had to enrol into either the Jung Mädchen, (Young Girls) organisation and boys into the Young Boys (Hitler Youth)
organisation.
If you wanted a job, you had to join the Party.
If you didn't, you didn't get a job and you were known as an undesirable in the country.
You would be arrested for no reason whatsoever.
You wouldn't know where you were ending up.
You could go to a labour camp, but it was only after the war that we discovered what really happened to those people.
God knows how many of them died in those camps, with the excuse that they had maybe an illness and they died of an illness.
We only discovered after the war how evil the Nazi Party really had been, because there was no freedom of speech.
There was only one newspaper in our town and that was censored.
They only let people know what they wanted us to know.
No one discussed the Nazi Party, because you were afraid you spoke to the wrong person.
Even children were encouraged to inform on their parents to the Nazi Party.
The majority of people just kept quiet, because they were afraid of being arrested.
Persecution of Jews
Our house was not taken over.
However, across from our girls school, there was a Jewish doctor and he was thrown out of his house.
He had to leave everything as it stood.
Luckily they had no children, as he and his wife walked out with a little handbag.
The Nazi doctor moved into his house.
I will never forget him.
He was in the SS and he always wore his uniform and he was not a very good doctor.
The Jewish doctor was a very kind doctor, he saved my brother's life.
My mother saw him one day and she did not recognise him and he warned her she would be arrested if she spoke to him.
She asked what had been done to him and we heard that 3 days later he and his wife poisoned themselves, because they knew that they would be
transferred to concentration camp.
My aunty used to work for a lady and she was a Jew.
My aunty was told not to work for her anymore.
Then it was discovered that this old lady had tried to commit suicide, and so they called to my aunty and told her to work for the lady
again and they would turn a blind eye.
Well that old lady got a letter that she had to bring all her valuables and she was sent accordingly to an old people's home.
She had some contact with my aunt because she wanted my aunt to hold some valuables for her.
In her last letter to my aunty she said they were going to be transferred again and they didn't know where.
That was the last my aunty heard from her, so she must have ended in one of the concentration camps, God knows where.
Concentration Camps
I never saw a concentration camp.
I have been very fortunate not to see one.
In the war we did not know.
After the war we were horrified to see the pictures.
I knew a little about the treatment of prisoners from my mother, as she worked among prisoners in the factory.
They got soup, which was like water with a few cabbage leaves, with
a slice of bread, this
was their food all day. |
In her department, there were some Russian and Jewish prisoners.
My mother would come home and she couldn't eat.
She said the treatment of those people was unbelievable.
They were starved.
They got soup, which was like water with a few cabbage leaves, with a slice of bread, this was their food all day.
They were not well.
They were beaten with big rubber tubes until they could not walk any more.
My mother left extra lunch food for the prisoners.
She left it in secret under a bench.
After the war, we met some of the Russian prisoners.
They were looking for the boss to hang him on the nearest tree.
Being a Refugee
I was the eldest in my family, but I have four cousins and an uncle who served in the war.
One of my cousins was in the infantry and was killed in Russia shortly before his 21st birthday.
The other cousins and my uncle had very bad injuries from the war.
Let me tell you, war is horrible, war is bad and if you are a refugee nobody wants you.
You are like a cast out.
You have to leave your home with a handbag, not knowing if you will see your home again.
It is a very horrible feeling.
I was a refugee.
I still have my refugee identity card.
If you are a refugee you have lost everything.
In 1945 on the 10th February, we were evacuated from our home town to Czechoslovakia.
The evacuation to Czechoslovakia happened because of my mother's work.
We stayed in a school, which had been made into a refugee camp, which is where we stayed until the war finished.
We expected the Americans and British to come in, but unfortunately it was the Russians who came in.
The Russians had made an agreement with the US and Britain that they would stop on the river Eger in Czechoslovakia and that's what they did.
So, Russia took all that part of East Germany and Czechoslovakia.
We knew if the Russians came we would be treated worse, but now I cannot blame them, because the Germans in their country did not respect
people, or property, or anything.
You cannot blame the Russians for repaying us.
That wasn't very pleasant.
They raped, they burnt, they plundered.
They took people away as slave labourers.
Young girls and young women were most vulnerable.
I was lucky, I was in hiding.
Nowadays I realise that they did exactly the same as the SS had done in their country.
Returning to Silesia
After the war ended in May 1945, we walked from Czechoslovakia back home to Silesia.
On the way home if things got too heavy you threw them away to make the load lighter.
We came through Dresden.
This had been very badly bombed.
There was a firestorm.
There was nothing left of the whole city, it was just ruins, like a ghost town.
Of course, when we reached our home town, we found our flat had been plundered.
There was nothing left in it.
There was no electricity, no water, no shops.
We had no money, because we were robbed on the way home, including of our jewellery.
Hunger was the worst part of it.
Luckily our cellar was still full of potatoes, so we lived on potatoes with salt.
Then the Russian command took over the house and my mother and I worked for the Russians, washing and cleaning and they fed us.
That was very fortunate.
You had to get by with what you had.
We walked two miles for drinking water and got cleaning water from the pond.
You always lived in fear, especially when the Russians had drink in them.
They would look out for young women and young girls.
You had to hide.
If they caught you running away, they would think nothing of shooting you.
Things started to get better and the electricity came back, then the water.
We had just settled again and then we were told to leave, in the summer of 1945.
We were then put in a Polish military camp and used as slave labour for getting the harvest in.
The Poles treated us as Germans had treated them in the war.
You were shown how, and if you did it wrong you got the boot, and if you
refused, the rifle butt. |
It was work I had never done before.
You were shown how, and if you did it wrong you got the boot, and if you refused, the rifle butt.
We were told we would be found if we tried to run.
Two of our young people did try to run away and they searched for them, they found them and they shot them and they brought them back to show
us the bodies so we would know what would happen if we ran away.
So you thought about it twice.
You worked from dawn, until you could not see for the dark.
There was no machinery, so everything was done by hand.
We slept on hay and straw and even on top of the pig sty.
At least we got bread.
Leaving Silesia
Then we were moved again.
All the Germans in Silesia had to get out, or take Polish nationality.
When Silesia was given to Poland, in our town we weren't asked, we were told to be ready to leave at 10 a.m. the next morning.
We had to get out of the flat and they sealed up the door so we could not get back.
Then we were put into a camp until there was a train load of us together and we were moved over to West Germany; as the Americans, French and
British had agreed to take the refugees.
Then I met my husband in 1953.
I was married and lived in India for 17 years.
Then we lived in Ireland for 14 years.
Then Ingrid, my daughter, got married over here in England and when my husband died I came to live with her in South Cave.
War is horrible
Let me tell you war is horrible.
As children we thought that it was a great event.
Excitement it isn't. War is bad.
You're killing a person you don't even know, who hasn't done you any harm.
It is not an easy thing to accept losing family.
Being a refugee means walking out and leaving everything, not knowing if you will ever see home again.
At the end I had left just what I stood up in, not even a change of clothes and no shoes of my own, just men's shoes.
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