Ch 5-3 Matzicken - Stalag Luft 6

Located in Matzicken are the home, and one-time estate, of the Sudermann family where Herman Sudermann (1827 – 1928) was born.  Once considered one of Germany’s important literary figures he was as successful as Hendrik Ibsen.  After completing schooling at the local Gymnasium he moved to Konigsberg and then later to Berlin so didn’t actually live in Heydekrug ever as an adult.  Sudermann dominated the German stage for a quarter of a century. Later was held in high regard during World War II largely due to the nationalistic nature of his works; romanticized ideas of ethnicity and homeland fit well with the politics. But I suspect he was held more in reverence than actually read by the locals. When would farmers and fisherman have time to read in the reality of their daily existence? Did Sudermann celebrate that?

His novels did much to popularize the land and the people. These days he is a forgotten author from a forgotten area.  Probably the most important of his works is Lithuanian Stories written in 1917. Now that I’ve actually experienced this countryside, if not the life of bygone days, I might try to find that book to read so I can capture a sense of that lifestyle, those years about which my parents would reminisce.

The house of the former Sudermann estate is easy to miss.  Only after our second drive by did we notice the small plaque stuck on the front. The estate is long gone. It wasn’t clear if the building was a museum, or a private home, or if it was even open to the public.  No idea what might be on display there so we didn’t try to go inside. The place looked forlorn. 

More interesting is what we found down the road from the Sudermann house - an actual prisoner of war camp.  The grounds are fenced off and the gate locked so we couldn’t go in or look in the buildings.  My mother recalled this camp from the early 1940’s.

Ruth Redetzki

Ruth, youngest of the Redetzki girls, belonged to the BDM – Bund Deutscher Mädchen, a Hitler youth group for young girls.  We have this little photo of Ruth in her uniform, about age 13.  It shows a young girl dressed in a white blouse, black bandana held with a leather bolo, hair in two long, straight, pigtails. The family were supposed to purchase one of the regulation outfits that would have ensured the highest conformity with uniform standards.  The Redetzki family didn’t have the money to buy a new uniform and told her and the group she had to make do with the clothes she already had.  My mother remembers the old blouse Ruth had to use for the photo. Money, or lack of it, overrode politics and the need to conform to the prevailing group think.  Standards were likely to be less strict among poor, rural areas, as they often are.

My mother fought repeated exhortations to join any political youth groups. She proved evasive and avoided commitment. I don’t think it was opposition to the politics – more dislike of the group. And my mother was at an age where she was too old for a youth group. Sister Herta was also apolitical and plain not interested. Fortunately for them their location and rural life spared them the political pressures faced by city populations.

Ruth’s duties included going to the camp, for some purpose, which turned out to be quite lucrative for her and the family. She received chocolates and gifts that soldiers got in Red Cross packages. The rations for the Germans were already meager; the country was fighting a war on two fronts. Any food items from these packages were a great treat for her family.  My mother says the soldiers did it out of generosity, feeling sorry for this little kid (she was a bit scrawny and cross eyed). Ruth herself says she doesn’t remember anything from those war years. I wonder if they got the goods from the packages another way; maybe they were opened and the contents ransacked by the Germans before the soldiers ever even got them.  But that would have been kept by the officers and not given away to locals.

Once back in the states I searched for more information on this camp.  It was Stalag Luft 6 housing both American and British pilots shot down and captured in mainland Germany.  Since the camp only contained pilots, they got somewhat better treatment than other POWs. Written accounts from former prisoners talk about the very long train ride from the heartland of Germany to the frontier area of Memelland.  Much is written about numerous escape attempts, some successful.    My own interest lies in finding any reference to the area and the residents and maybe even Ruth, but there isn’t any. The prisoners thought the food was terrible, and after 1943 they were on par or maybe even a bit better than the local populace faced with severe wartime food shortages. This is where the Red Cross packages came in real handy, for all of them.

Again I read through the prisoner’s stories searching for a reference to local children who came to the camp.  Were the stories I was told true accounts, did these little girls in their neat uniforms make any impression on these prisoners?  I wanted verification of the existence of the Redetzkis, that someone knew of them.  In a way it is a validation of life if someone remembers, maybe only in a passing reference.  Ah, but to exist on the internet is to live for eternity, is it not?

Ruth was sometimes accompanied to the camp by older sister, Herta. This was their first exposure to Americans of whom they surely had no concept in any cultural or geographic sense. Herta and Ruth were both young girls, more likely attracted by the promise of food than getting to know Amis or Brits. They were so far removed from the western front, where Allied Forces fought the Germans, and never had any direct experience or propaganda information about the Allies. Herta’s interest in soldiers increased some two years later, but that was later with German soldiers. They did learn about America in school, where my mother learned that the capital of the country was New York City, something we often joked about as evidence of her backward education whenever she tried to convince us she was right about something. 

We walk along the camp fence down the lane to a small cemetery. Was this a village cemetery, I wonder?  Gravemarkers looked different so we walk in to read the inscriptions.  These are graves of Americans and British who died while interned at the camp.  Set at the back of the cemetery are more gravestones with Lithuanian names. No Lithuanians were housed with the Allied pilots; the dates clearly show these people died after the war. Guess what - they died at the hands of their liberators, the Russians.  Once Lithuanians were freed from their wretched Nazi oppressors, they then could experience death at the hands of the Russians as they were being unenslaved!  The liberators moved in and made use of the camp to house Lithuanian prisoners; no sense wasting prison space or shipping them off to furthest Russia. The pilots were evacuated by the Germans in advance of the Russian invasion.

History relates a burden on the poor Lithuanians. First, shared borders with Germany, reminding me of the old adage about sleeping next to an elephant.  (No wait, if Germany was like an elephant, what would it be like living next to the Soviets?)  Before the Germans the country seemed overrun with foreign troops every 100 years or so.  In the 1400’s the Lithuanian King married a Polish Queen and declared the country Christian in the hope that they wouldn’t then be invaded in a poorly disguised effort to convert them to Christianity. The ploy didn’t work. He married the queen and still got invaded. History books don’t indicate if they lived happily ever after as Christians.  So, the country ends up being converted, well, somewhat but not wholeheartedly.  Then the Grand Duchy of Lithuania is dissolved in 1795 by the Russian Czar.  Then ongoing skirmishes with Germany about who owns what, even French occupation troops for a time.  After the Germans, World War II and before they could even breathe a sigh of relief, in come the Russians and 50 years of Communist occupation. Could it be that finally, in the 21^st century, they are their own people with their own country?  Can they finally exhale?