25. No Way Home
The day victory was declared in Europe—May 8, 1945—forty million people in Germany were not where they wanted to be. Maria and Edward were among the displaced—twelve million foreign forced labourers and internees of POW and other camps.
The remaining twenty-eight million were Germans. They were German soldiers who had surrendered to the Allied forces and were now POWs, German citizens bombed out of their homes, and Germans living in Poland and other occupied areas in Eastern Europe who were no longer welcome there and were returning to Germany homeless. It was a chaotic time. People had endured months of intense bombings. Half the dwellings in Germany had been destroyed, and people were looting and searching for food amid a burgeoning black market.
The Allied armies rapidly established three military zones—French, British, and American—while the Soviets occupied eastern Germany and Poland. The military was responsible for the immediate care and relief of the millions of displaced people—DPs. They were assisted by civilian rescue teams established by the United Nations: the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). By June 1945, over three hundred UNRRA teams with 2,500 individuals of all nationalities were on the ground to help, along with many other relief organizations such as the International Red Cross.
The relief organizations commandeered the least damaged buildings: hotels, hospitals, schools, former military and SS barracks, literally any building that had not been bombed out. Some displaced people were housed in the same leaky, drafty, bug-infested barracks they had inhabited as forced labourers or POWs. The situation was meant to be temporary until people could move back to their home countries.
The complexity of the effort to support displaced people was daunting. Feeding people alone was an enormous challenge in the immediate post-war period, as was providing religious and other activities, schooling for children, and figuring out how to get people back to their home countries. Meanwhile, many people were moving around, searching desperately for surviving family members. Almost immediately, some Polish men and women, anxious to return home, began making their way back to Poland from the chaos in Germany.
For a host of reasons, most displaced Poles remained in DP camps. Some did not know where their families were. Others feared retribution in a country now part of the Soviet Eastern Bloc. Some women had heard reports of rape and assault by the Red Army, who had “liberated” Poland. Others were reluctant to return because of the long history of bitterness and mistrust that coloured relations between Poland and Russia.
The Soviet-backed Polish government sent recruiters to the DP camps to arouse patriotic feelings and encourage people to return home. Banners were hung in the camps, encouraging repatriation. Notices were placed on billboards and pasted onto lamp posts, promising a friendly reception in Poland, jobs, and free transportation. The Polish DPs were told there was not much hope for resettlement elsewhere and that returning to Poland was their only option.
As an incentive, UNRRA promised to finance food supplies for the first sixty days for those returning to Poland. Kathryn Hulme, a former UNRRA relief officer at Wildflecken, one of the largest DP camps housing mainly Polish forced labourers and concentration camp survivors, described the displays of the food rations in her memoir. Ninety-four pounds per person of flour, dried peas, rolled oats, salt, evaporated milk, canned fish and a mountain of lard were laid out on a large table. The DP camp where she was posted set up food displays for families of four to make it even more enticing. The DPs, who had been deprived of food for months on end during the war, filed past the displays with huge mountains of food.
Maria was first registered as a DP five months after the end of the war, on October 17, 1945. Records provided by the Arolsen Archives placed her in three different DP camps, all in the vicinity of the picturesque city of Amberg in Bavaria. I had always assumed that the UNRAA resettled Maria in Holland immediately after the war. But that was not what happened. Two years later, in mid-1947, 1.5 million displaced people still remained in Germany, including 155,805 Polish women. Maria was among those who resisted the ongoing entreaties of the UNRAA workers and remained in Germany.
I can only speculate why Maria did not want to return home after the war. She may not have known where her family was following their expulsion from their home. After my parents had immigrated to Canada, my father helped my mother search for and reconnect with her family, a search that required patience and several postage stamps.
Maria may also have heard of the atrocities committed against women by the Red Army. Unpleasant memories of her hardscrabble life in Poland may have lingered. Her decision might have been influenced by a friend she made in the DP camp, who encouraged her to stay. Whatever her reason was, she remained steadfast in her hope to find a free country and a chance at a life with opportunities. But if she hoped to immigrate to a Western country, it was unclear where she could go. No country at that time wanted displaced people. Doors everywhere remained firmly closed until the second half of 1947.
Belgium was the first country to accept a few hundred men to work in mines. It took several months before the men could be joined by their families, who had to stay behind in Germany. Other European countries started accepting displaced people for factory work as their economies started up again. Canada was initially reluctant to accept the refugees, but by mid-1947, the trickle into Canada began. The United States opened its doors around the same time.
Maria remained in a DP camp until August 26, 1947, when she finally got her wish. She was resettled in Holland, where the Phillips Electric Company employed her on an assembly line making lightbulbs.
Shortly after Maria was registered as a displaced person, a trial began in Nuremberg, seventy kilometres from the DP camp where she was. I had always associated the Nuremberg trial—officially the International Military Tribunal—with the Jewish Holocaust. I have since learned that Maria’s experience as a forced labourer was included in the Nazi war crimes. The charter setting up the International Military Tribunal defined the crimes under its jurisdiction: murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against the civilian population, including deportation for forced labour. The charter specifically mentioned deportation from Eastern European countries.
Fritz Sauckel, the principal architect of the Nazis’ foreign-labour policy, was one of the twenty-three defendants charged. The evidence against him was copious and damning. Local officials had carried out his directives, but he knew they used force, violence, terror, and the threat of execution. He was complicit in depriving forced workers of food, proper housing, and medical attention and subjecting them to horrific conditions as they toiled in German factories and on farms. Sauckel, the man responsible for Maria’s fate, was sentenced to death and executed.
Arthur Greiser, the Nazi official who served as the district leader of Wartheland, responsible for executing the orders leading to the expropriation of Maria’s family and her transport to Germany for forced labour, was arrested and tried by a Polish court in Łódź, Poland. Found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, he was executed in 1946.
Maria may or may not have been aware of the Nuremberg Trial. She probably did not know who Fritz Sauckel was. She may have never heard of Arthur Greiser and may not have been aware of his trial in Poland. What remained etched in her memory were the faces of the policemen who forced her from her home and the leering eyes of the guards who compelled her to strip at the transit camp. She couldn't forget the shouts as they pushed her with the butts of their rifles into a cattle car. It was the nameless individuals who carried out Hitler’s Nazi racist ideology, making her life a living hell for five agonizing years, that she would remember. And then, for the rest of her life, try to forget.
While details of Maria's specific experiences remain unknown to me, I have pieced together what I imagine may have happened based on countless women willing to share their stories. The places and details may be different, but the big picture is the same. It's undeniable the forced labourers endured loss, deprivation, hardship, and trauma, both psychological and physical. Maria suffered profoundly alongside a million of her Polish sisters.
I can't blame her for not telling me her story. She held her secret because it was unimaginable to someone who was not there. There was nothing about it that I could relate to. Nothing you would want a child to know.
Forced labourers may have been globally forgotten in the decades after the war. In Poland, they may not have been designated as victims in the same way as camp survivors and POWs. But at Nuremberg, they were acknowledged; there was no doubt about the crime of the infamous Nazi leaders.
And the nameless individuals? They were the hundreds of thousands of German men—and some women—who, after the war, returned to their lives, jobs, families and probably the relentless PTSD that whispered, "Maybe you had a choice," every time they looked in the mirror.