Internment Camps: Surrounded by torture and death

The aftermath of World War II was anything but a relief for millions of ethnic Germans. Despite living in Eastern European communities for nearly 1,000 years, they were placed into labor camps and murdered simply for being German.  And this ethnic cleansing continues to affect generations to this day.

The stories of torment and torture (read more in the Jan.30 and Feb. 14 articles) began after the Potsdam Agreement was signed, approving expulsions across the region.  But the ensuing tragedy is best understood through the personal accounts I have gathered throughout my years of research.

This is what Andy has lived with since childhood:

Jerek was the camp I marched into at the age of 7. This village had once been a town of 4,000. By the time the partisans marched the residents of the surrounding villages into the camp there were over 15,000. We were put into the homes that had been looted of all the furniture to be divided up among the Serbian people. They separated the mothers from their children, putting 20 people to a room. We weren’t allowed to leave the houses except from 10:00 to 12:00 in the morning and 2:00 to 4:00 in the afternoon. If someone walked out of the houses they would be shot at; that’s how I learned to tell time.  

So many people died each day that the partisans assigned people to take a wagon through the streets to pick up bodies. You could always tell when someone had died because the lice would leave the body. There were so many leaving at one time that you could see a thin black line moving away; there was no blood in the body. Once that happened we had to put the body on the sidewalk. The wagon came around twice a day to pick up the bodies and took them to the end of the town to bury. When my grandmother died I followed the wagon and saw a grave with over 100 people piled one on top of the other.  The graves weren’t very deep and when it rained the bodies would float to the top, the limbs sticking up out of the ground.

I spent two years in Jerek and the nightmares have never gone away. I lost all my grandparents in the camp, most children did.  We only got a water soup with maggots floating on top. The grandparents would give their soup to the children and then they died of starvation.  I don’t even know how many thousands of people died in that camp, but I do know it was thousands more than should have.

There were many who didn’t survive the expulsion and Internment camps. An estimated 1.5 million people were murdered. Their mass graves still lay unmarked in fields across Eastern Europe. Next week our story continues with the Labor Camps that the German people were forced into suffering years of endless pain.

Ann Morrison has made it her mission to uncover history’s lost, but not forgotten,
stories via documentary films. Learn more at annsfilms.com.