George Rebane
[This autobiographical sketch recounts the Rebane family’s entrance into the post-war world of displaced persons just after the war ended in Germany, and before the ‘final disposition’ of the east European refugees would stabilize. We and thousands like us were still in mortal danger of being forcefully ‘repatriated’. This was to be our second escape from Augsburg.
The chronological order of these sketches and their links are listed below. These and future additions, including other related travels, are assembled in the My Story section of RR. Background on Estonia and stories from my earlier years during the war are marbled into the series 'Road Ruminations' written during our June 2008 return trip to Estonia.]
‘Christmas in Stettin – 1944’ , ‘The Last Train from Stettin’ , ‘1945 – The year Easter was cancelled’ , ‘The War Ends in Liederberg’ , ‘Sixty years ago today – 4 May 1949’
This piece follows the events described in ‘The War Ends in Liederberg’. The upcoming story of the Geislingen Displaced Persons Camp years will conclude the pre-America phase of my life.]
Our ride south from Liederberg in the back of the Army ¾ ton truck ended in Augsburg, the war devastated city where in 1518 Martin Luther was examined for heresy and escaped northward in the dead of night. Within two weeks of the war’s end on 8 May 1945, the western allies established a series of collection points – it was too early yet to call them actual camps – for the hundreds of thousands of east Europeans who were lucky enough to find themselves west of the Red Army when the bullets stopped flying. Vello, Ellen, and their son Jüri Rebane were among the very fortunate – or were they?
Unbelievable scenes occurred at the German POW camps as American GIs herded frightened and starved Russians into cattle cars at gunpoint. They all knew their impending fate in Mother Russia. Many committed suicide on the spot, using sharpened pieces of metal and utensils to cut their own and each other’s throats and wrists. The psychological toll on the GIs was unbelievable, they were forcibly sending their allies back to execution. The massacre shipments were not limited to Europe.
At war’s end 154 Russians and other Eurasian ethnics had been captured with the Germans during the course of the war and shipped to detention barracks at Fort Dix, New Jersey. They came from backgrounds as varied as former Red Army officers to simple refugees caught in the maelstrom of battles in eastern Europe. All of them knew what awaited them if Stalin’s demand for their repatriation was carried out. They were determined not to be shipped to their certain slaughter.
On 29 June 1945 they had prepared for their end and refused to come out of their barracks as ordered. Three of them had already hanged themselves from the ceiling rafters. After being tear-gassed, the remainder charged out with sharpened sticks and cot legs screaming at the armed guards to shoot them then and there. A melee followed during which the uprising was put down with minimal loss of life by guards firing at the prisoners’ legs. Deliberations followed at the highest levels of government. Several weeks later Truman opted to give them back to Stalin hoping to gain Soviet co-operation in putting Europe back together again. The surviving prisoners were shackled and returned to Europe, and on 31 August 1945 they were handed over to Soviet authorities in Hof, East Germany. None of them were ever heard from again.
“And from Moscow, Ambassador Averell Harriman was reporting that trainloads of Russian POWs returned every day from Europe -- and every deserter was summarily shot.” (The Trentonian) The American personnel, in Europe and the US, who conducted the repatriation of these ‘deserters’ were ordered not to speak of what they had seen and done. Little by little and over the years the stories started coming out; the Ft Dix episode took 54 years to see the light of day. However, the truth about Stalin’s repatriations became known to every refugee in Europe before that summer ended.
In May 1945 the three Rebanes had already been dropped off into the guarded and barbed-wire fenced part of Augsburg that saw more and more east Europeans brought in every day. That summer we were prisoners for the first time since fleeing from Estonia because Stalin was also demanding the repatriation of all Soviet citizens along with his captured soldiers. And according to Soviet law, the Rebanes had been declared Soviet citizens in 1940 when the Red Army first invaded and made Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into Soviet Socialist Republics – the newest additions to the workers’ paradise. Everyone in that compound knew that any day trucks with armed soldiers could pull up, and we would be ordered to climb aboard for the one-way ride back.
Babenhausen near Frankfurt was the site of a German military base which had been converted to another such refugee collection point for Balts. Balts is the name for the people from the small Baltic Sea nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. An indication of the confusion, and hence the danger, all of us refugees faced during those days was that the Balts brought to Babenhausen were peremptorily put on a train and shipped back to Stalin before anyone knew what policy the western allies would follow in response to Stalin’s demand. They, of course, disappeared forever. (An irony of my story is that Babenhausen was to be my active duty station twenty years later as an Army lieutenant, but that’s for a later chapter.)
The best I can tell is that it was Ambassador Harriman’s horrific reports which caused President Truman to stop the forced repatriations of the civilian refugees that summer. Truman didn’t actually say that he wouldn’t send us back, only that he wouldn’t send us back just yet. And that without more deliberation and investigation about who was what, and what they had done during the war, all had to be determined before a final decision would be made. Thus began a limbo that would not see final resolution for another three years.
Once we were inside the Augsburg compound, we were for all intents and purposes sealed off from the world. Every family was assigned a single room in the various apartment blocks that had survived the bombings. All I remember is that we were assigned a small room on the third (top) floor of a dull brown brick building. But that summer the most important thing for me was that I was now ready to go to ‘school’, which was actually a kindergarten daycare center that some ladies had started out of necessity. It was located in another building about four or five blocks from our building.
That summer most of the time for the adults was taken up standing in long lines to be interrogated and have inspected whatever documents that had survived the war. It was confusing who actually ran what part of the interrogation and screening of the refugees. The Augsburg camp was ostensibly under the administration of the United Nations Refugee Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) which was funded by the United States and immediately began setting up more permanent displaced persons camps all over what was to become West Germany.
But many of the interrogations, my parents later told me, were done by uniformed Americans who were probably connected with one or more intelligence services. Their main job was to make sure that the refugee was who s/he claimed to be, given all the available documentary evidence and lots of cross-examinations. Primarily they were looking for ex-Nazis and possible Soviet spies. Apparently my parents passed and were accepted as Estonian refugees with strong anti-Soviet sentiments. We received our official displaced person’s (DP) papers, and were now under UN care with the proviso of possible forced repatriation still outstanding.
At the beginning of the Augsburg adventure I was told that I was now a big boy and would be going to kindergarten all by myself. I remember my mom taking me by the hand down the street to the corner and showing me important landmarks. There I would make a left turn that would head me north for another two blocks (“remember two, not one”) on a street that had been pretty well cleared of all the rubble from the destroyed houses now in piles of jumbled bricks, burned wood, and cracked concrete. Then we turned right again, crossed the street, and walked two more blocks on a similar street. There were no street trees, they had all been blown to shreds or burned into charred stumps.
We finally arrived at the kindergarten building and mom took me in to register with the lady in charge. She told me I would coming alone every day, and was informed that almost all the other children would be arriving in the same manner. We then retraced our way back to our building with mom pointing out the landmarks and how they looked when coming the other way. This was pretty heady stuff for a five-year-old, and I could hardly wait to dump mom and make that journey all by myself like I had always seen the bigger kids do with such purpose and cocky confidence. Now I would be a big kid too.
And so in the mornings I would venture out into the streets alone seeing people coming and going, some riding bikes, and every once in a while a car or truck would come down the street. I tried to walk as nonchalantly as I could, but I do remember being a little worried about counting the blocks properly on my first solo. Soon I was an old hand at being ‘far away’ in public by myself.
In my memory the weather that summer was almost always fair. Our kindergarten took a lot of what later would be called field trips. These were essentially group walks during which we had to go two-by-two holding hands so as to make herding the ducklings a bit easier. I recall that the only problem with holding hands was that we all felt that this was for ‘little kids’ since almost all of us walked the same streets alone twice a day. I think the purpose of the walks was to get us tired out so that indoor time was a bit easier for the teachers.
My class numbered a little over ten kids, and our very favorite outing was to the ‘merry-go-round’. The merry-go-round was actually the gun-mount of a German 88 anti-aircraft cannon that had been emplaced in a bomb crater from where it could get some protection from bombings and strafings by American P-51s and P-47s. The whole field of rubble was full of such large bomb craters, and almost all had about a foot of water at their bottoms. The long barrel of our 88 had been removed when I first saw it. (This cannon was the workhorse of the Wehrmacht, and it was made in many configurations for primarily anti-tank and high altitude anti-aircraft use. Its formal name in German was ‘Flugzeugabwehr-Kanone’ from where the acronym ‘flak’ derived.
The cruciform gun mount became a merry-go-round when we were all allowed to clamber on and get purchase on whatever part was handy. The teacher would sit in the gun’s ‘azimuth seat’ and turn the crank wheel. The whole gun platform would then rotate round and round, and I had my first merry-go-round experience. The teacher always put the oldest and most responsible kid in the ‘elevation seat’ and told him not to turn the crank wheel which would make the mount go up and down and maybe crush a little hand holding on at an unfortunate place.
I don’t recall that I was ever allowed to sit in the elevation seat when we were all going around. But afterward there was always a minute or two to get the kids out of the crater and formed up for the walk back. It was during those precious seconds that some of us boys would climb into the two operator seats and turn the cranks in all directions while making gun sounds pretending that we were firing at attacking planes. It usually took more than one threat from the teacher to get us off the gun mount and out of the crater.
At the housing blocks the refugees ate in common mess halls and took turns operating the kitchen and cleaning up. Everyone was on a duty roster. It’s odd that as much as I liked food, I don’t remember any of the eating arrangements in Augsburg. Besides working on assigned jobs taking care of the big compound and being interrogated, most adults spent a lot of time writing letters to different agencies, friends, and relatives still thought to be alive to get information on what the world would be like now that the war was over.
Summer turned into a gray fall and, along with the sunny skies, the barbed wire and guards disappeared. While still under the authority of UNRRA - this agency would be replaced the following year by the International Refugee Organization (IRO) - we could now walk out of the compound and attempt to make it ‘on the economy’. But in reality Europe’s economy was essentially non-existent. General Lucius Clay was busy trying to organize European reconstruction, and the Marshall Plan had yet to be conceived. I suspect the Allied countries wanted the refugees from the east to leave on their own recognizance and just disappear. But there was nowhere to go, so everyone just stayed put, did what they were told, and waited for something to develop.
As the leaves put on their fall colors, some people started packing up and leaving the Augsburg compound. The news was that UNRRA was setting up camps for ‘displaced persons’ (the new name for refugees) all over western Germany – the part under the control of the American, British, and French forces. Soon the new West Germany would have tens of DP camps housing various east European nationalities.
In that fall of 1945 the Iron Curtain had yet to formally descend. And even with the failings of a sick FDR (meeting with Churchill and Stalin) at Yalta in February 1945, the structure of post-war Germany was still to be decided. A key point coming out of the conference was, “Citizens of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia were to be handed over to their respective countries, regardless of their consent.” One thing was certain – the Red Army had already set up checkpoints on the boundary between their East and our West. All people were being registered, and the refugees under Red Army control were being transported back to their home countries or directly to the Gulag. A steady stream of Germans from the Soviet east began their haphazard migration to the west. As I have said, all civilians of whatever nationality already knew about the coming structure of Europe, a future that western diplomats were then still attempting to sort out in a place near Berlin called Potsdam.
Toward Christmas word came that the small southern German town of Geislingen an der Steige (Geislingen on the Steige mountain railway) was to be an Estonian DP camp. Geislingen was located on the main rail line from Augsburg to Stuttgart (see map). Our family received authorization to be interred there, and my father decided that he would go first alone to make preparations for mom and me to join him. He wanted to make certain we had a place to stay that was out of the early snows which had already arrived that year. A week later we were told that the Rebane family had been accepted into the Geislingen camp and that we should follow Vello Rebane to that next and new place of unknowns. Mom and I were assured dad would get the word and that he would be there to meet us at the train station in Geislingen.
I remember mom again packing our two or three suitcases. How we got to the Augsburg train station is lost in memory. It must have been in the back of one of the small UNRRA trucks that we saw passing through the compound, sometimes they had people and baggage in the back. In those days DPs got real used to being transported here and there in the back of open truck beds. I do recall the train ride to Geislingen after the sun had set. As we passed towns along the way, each with a burning street light here and there, we saw that snow had started falling again.
During these leaps into uncertainty, mom always made me wear every stitch of the few pieces of clothing that I had. I guess the theory was that this would keep me warm, I would be carrying my own stuff that didn’t have to go in the suitcase, and, no matter where we would have to run or be separated from our suitcases, I would still have some clothes to wear. I think the big people did the same thing. I remember dad always had two pairs of pants on and it took a while to unbutton his flys when we both stepped behind a tree to ‘see a man about a horse’.
A light but steady snow was falling when the train pulled into Geislingen. And to our relief my father was there, waiting on the dimly lit platform. After hugs and hellos he grabbed two of our suitcases which left mom with one and me with nothing to carry. We walked into the sparsely lit city streets of a buttoned up downtown Geislingen. Few cars passed us and the few people we saw were rushing to get out of the snow which was now starting to thicken. We walked and walked into a darkness that revealed nothing of the little city that was to be our home. I remember asking a few ‘are we there yet?’, questions typical of a five-year-old. A brusque ‘Varsti’ (soon) from dad was of no help.
The road finally crossed a bridge over a fast flowing river (The Eyb) and we started climbing to a packed dirt or gravel street that had what to me looked like huge apartment houses on our right. I later discovered that they were actually three story duplexes for well-to-do Germans who had been evicted in order to make room for the DPs. Dad turned in to one of them and marched us up the walk to what looked like an imposing front door that had a bare bulb illuminating its front stoop. It was not locked and, after wiping our feet, we followed dad into a dark hallway and up the stairs.
On the second floor was another square hallway with four doors. Dad walked to one of them, put down the suitcases, and took a key out of his overcoat pocket. This told mom and me that we had finally arrived at our new ‘home’. When we walked through the door, dad turned on the lone ceiling light; mom and I stared into a single corner room measuring almost ten feet by not more than fifteen feet. In it were three standard issue canvas US Army cots on bare floor, a small table, and two chairs. Each cot had on it a stack of three or four olive drab woolen Army blankets. These would be our complete bedding for the night, sheets and pillows would come later.
At that moment it all looked pretty bleak, but the room had a radiator against one wall and it was putting out enough heat to cut the chill from the long walk through the snow. Dad said that tomorrow he would be getting more stuff for our new home, but tonight we would make do with what we had in the room. I remember that mom immediately opened a suitcase and miraculously produced two small table cloths with which she covered the bare windows for privacy.
The only other thing I remember about that first night was dad showing us where the bathroom was. It was behind one of the four doors in the hallway and had in it a four-legged tub, wash basin, and a toilet with its waterbox high on the wall. The floor and half-way up the walls were covered with small white tiles. The lock on the bathroom door would have to be fixed, and I was told always to knock since we had to share that bathroom with six other families who would soon occupy the three floors of the duplex. One of the rooms downstairs was the kitchen, and it too would be shared by seven families, each living in their single rooms.
We did not know it then, but this was to be our home for the next three and a half years. It was here that my real growing up would start. Here would form friendships and memories that have lasted over a life time. Here my parents would discover talents they never expected, and also experience feelings unique to refugees permanently displaced from their homeland. And here in that little room they would make the decision that I have celebrated for the last sixty years.
An excellent telling. Thank you, George.
Posted by: Bob Hobert | 05 December 2010 at 02:46 PM
Another good one George. DC
Posted by: Dave C | 05 December 2010 at 02:56 PM
Thanks George for sharing. I hope someday you will put each of the chapters in a book for your grandkids and your friends.
Russ
Posted by: Russ Steele | 05 December 2010 at 04:46 PM
Very enjoyable; as always. We've much to be thankful for.
Posted by: Mikey McD | 05 December 2010 at 05:41 PM
Thank you George.
Posted by: Paul Emery | 06 December 2010 at 08:46 AM
Thank you for sharing George.
Posted by: kim pruett | 06 December 2010 at 10:49 AM
Fascinating read George. American history books jump from the end of the war in Europe straight to the Marshall Plan, glossing over the chaos and tragedy between the spring of '45 and the spring of '47. Thanks for your compelling story.
Posted by: Michael Anderson | 07 December 2010 at 07:58 PM
George,
This really does need to be made into an e-book...if not one of the paper and binding variety.
Aaron
Posted by: Aaron Klein | 07 December 2010 at 11:54 PM
Great story and recollection. I see now why it took so long...very long for you and your family. I'm interested to read how you finally came to the United States. I know this was an option for my mother instead of returning to communist Yugoslavia, but she opted to go home to her family.
Posted by: Pat E. | 11 May 2011 at 03:31 PM
Thank you PatE. I think RR readers would appreciate knowing more about your mother's war and post-war experiences. In what DP camp was she interred after the war? Was it a camp mostly for refugees from the Balkans?
Posted by: George Rebane | 12 May 2011 at 09:13 AM