A Woman's Tale of War

This blog will focus on one of the many stories of unspeakable suffering by German women immediately after WW II.

Rather than just talking about the stories of German women in the abstract, I would like to share a short excerpt from one of those stories. It is one of the countless stories of women who endured unspeakable hardship during or immediately after WW II. Many of them were expelled, violated and humiliated in indescribable ways, yet many have had few, if any, opportunity to speak of it. Their stories, their suffering has not counted in the eyes of the world.

This is how one of the women describes her experiences:

I was eight years old when we got back to the village early that evening. The earth shook as it endured bomb after bomb, the darkening sky was thick with smoke. The orange brilliance of distant fires was the only color among the greys of dust and smoke. All that was left of our village was rubble. Burnt out tanks littered the road. Inside our home, we found only vile waste, decay, disease and pollution. In the basement lay the decaying body of Sam, our dog. The filth and destruction, the embodiment of defeat and subsequent devaluation, immediately etched itself into my mind. The exile and the hiding in the forest had been frightening, but for me, it was also a bit exciting, it had given me a sense of adventure. But the direct exposure to death and destruction provoked terror. We stayed that night in the one small house that still stood and had not been vandalized. While the world was raging against us with merciless forces of destruction, we anxiously lay beside dirty and wounded German soldiers, many of who were moaning and crying. As soon as the new day dawned, we became a few in the mass of refugees we were trying to escape the fighting.

Stripped of our dignity and selfhood, defeated, inferior and powerless, we were now faceless women, easy prey for the angry and resentful soldiers of the Polish and Red Army. Defeated already, women were randomly taken from the slow moving rows of refugees to be sexually used, raped and exploited. A mother here, an aunt there, a sister there. Once part of the occupiers, the women became the occupied, the sexually invaded. Mass and random rape degraded, humiliated and destroyed the women so effectively that after a while, they became numb to it. In many towns and villages we crossed, every woman between ten and eighty had been raped, mostly by soldiers of the Red Army, but sometimes by French, American and British militaries as well. One day, my aunt became one of the millions of women who were raped during the last months of World War II. Four soldiers grabbed her satchel, tossed it in the gutter and raped my aunt right beside the road, in the cold wet earth of the ditch. My sister and myself, terrified by her screams and paralyzed with fear for the soldiers, just kept on walking. Weeping soundless cries, we walked and walked and just kept on moving along with the throngs of lost people until my aunt caught up to us during a standstill.

Gerda Wever-Rabehl, The Write Room

www.thewriteroom.net