“They would browse among the neighboring stones of long dead elders with the look on their faces you see in libraries and museums where we study the lives and work of others to learn about ourselves.” Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking.
Today we head out to find other villages, or at least the places they once stood. On the road from Grabuppen, about one kilometer northeast heading toward the old border with Lithuania, is a bend in the road. Mom tells me the cemetery for Kallningken is located at this small curve ahead. Visible is a large area of overgrown grass. Cultivated fields surround it, trees line the back of the overgrown plot delineating it from the plowed fields of the collective beyond. I turn the car onto a field track that ends a few yards in from the road. This grassy section has never seen a plow, somewhat odd, because it means they have to take the tractors around this section and can’t cultivate straight rows as part of that large field beyond.
Years ago each village of only a couple hundred inhabitants had their own small cemetery. Several villages filled the landscape. Of course, the cemeteries are differentiated by religion, but Catholics in this area were such a minority they didn’t need scattered cemeteries. A large Catholic cemetery, very large, very intact looking, is in Heydekrug that we pass almost every day on our excursions. The rural burial grounds are Lutheran, or Evangelisch. There was a Jewish cemetery located on the edge of Heydekrug but all that remains is a memorial plaque; destruction took place prior to World War II.
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| Didzeln in 2001 |
Here in this field we get out of the car as my mother is certain this is the right location even though there’s no visible sign of a cemetery. She recalls the time she and sister Herta were sent off on an errand to Didzeln, a village just across the road, maybe a kilometer away. Tante Anna Brandt, their mother’s sister, and her family lived on a farm there near a patch of woods. With night approaching these roads were dark and lonely. The surrounding woods looked scary to the little girls. Nighttime was filled with creatures that came right out of their bad dreams. But their mother Else didn’t care about their childish fears and they had to go. They hurried along as fast as they could to outrun their fears. Even in bright daylight fifty years later, standing on the quiet roadside, the memories are frightening.
We wander through the tall grass looking for evidence of a cemetery. There are two old gravestones left above ground but only a faded outline remains of pictures and plaques ripped off. A small rectangular planter that once lay on a child’s grave now stands askew; it has a full bouquet of wild meadow grass. Clearly this area has been left untouched and untended. Wild heather sprouts up in patches of purple blossoms between the grass. It brought to mind the old German song “Auf die Heide”. Then I thought back to the military songs my father would listen to, where soldiers sang about Erica, a female name but also the word for heather. Erica was in bloom, small purple flowers on a woody stem.
A white object in the grass catches my eye. I pick it up and study it. It is round, about two inches across. Looks somewhat like a little seashell. I hold the white disc between my fingers turn it around and ponder as to how a seashell would end up so far inland here next to cultivated fields.
"Mom, why would there be seashells here?”
She has no idea and is also busy looking around through the grass for traces of the cemetery she once ran past with in the dark with Herta. She knew people who were buried here, she attended their funerals.
I am perplexed by this odd shell. It is round, but has no hinge side, which I’d find on a seashell. Slowly I continue walking through the grass, peerng intently as I look for more shells. There among the blades of grasses and tufts of heather I see another white object. I bend over to get closer. Now this one is long, it is very long, not round. I start to reach for it when suddenly it strikes me what I’m looking at! It looks like a bone! It is a bone! A human bone!
Whoa! I call Mom over. We both stare in the grass and now we see bones, more bones, they are all over the place. There are many bones laying about but the grass has grown over and around and through them effectively hiding them. With horror I realize my round shell is a kneecap! The ground everywhere here is littered with the bones, pieces of bones, human bones. This cemetery has been dug up. The reality takes a moment to sink in. Gently, I lay my ‘shell’ back among the grasses and stand there silently, absorbing this revelation.
“Oh my gosh,” my mother finally speaks. Now it makes sense - the lumpy ground, the reason tractors plowed around the area, trees growing only at the far edge of this field. It is a burial ground; everyone knew it. They avoided the site.
After a moment of thinking about this, our dark sense of humor returns.
“Mom, since Sabine didn’t want to come along on the trip, maybe we should take one back to her as a souvenir of her relatives.”
My mom replies quick as a flash – “No, this wasn’t our cemetery. We’re not related to them.”
We wondered about what happened to this burial ground. Maybe it was true that poor Lithuanians envisioned rich Germans buried with their gold so dug up the bodies in the aftermath of the war. They were destitute. That seemed a likely explanation. Why else would anyone dig up a cemetery, desecrating the dead?
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