Ch 6-2 Cemeteries - Gnieballen in the Forest

So where was our cemetery, that one that served the village of Gnieballen, where the Redetzki  girls were born? That’s where for 4 generations the Brumpreisches were born and raised. Taking out my trusty 1938 German topographic map I examine it closely. I can just make out a cross symbol printed right on the map fold, of course. I need a magnifying glass. The location is somewhere in those woods across the road. Time for us to take another adventurous excursion into the countryside, although in this case it will be away from open fields and deep into the woods. 

Current Gnieballen

My father told of the time his father died in Groß Sodehnen. It was a farm accident that killed George Klemm in November 1931. The body was, of course, laid out at home. As was the practice, the family took care of the preparation of laying out the body. They cut the fingernails and hair so he would be presentable and dressed him. People believed fingernails and hair kept growing out after death, even though in reality that’s not what happens. And when a person died in winter, the family might have to store the body for a while, at least until a grave could be dug with hand shovels in the solid, frozen earth.

When Edith was age six and Herta five, one of their schoolmates died. Mama wasn’t on good terms with the neighbors, pretty typical for her. She would not appear at the funeral under any circumstance, no matter how much it pained her to stay home and miss out on gossip. Of course she didn’t want to appear nosy or interested, but was nosy and interested to know details – who was there, what food was served, clothes people wore, what was talked about. So she sent her two daughters to attend the wake at the house a kilometer distant. The girls wore their finest, starched dresses as Mama pushed them out the door.

At the wake the little Redetzki emissaries stood dutifully in front of the casket. The custom was to sit around the room with the body laid out on a table. They watched all the people, who was there, who wasn’t, what they wore, who they talked to. When the food was served they ate, of course. No one thought anything odd about the presence of two little girls unaccompanied by their mother since many people did send children in lieu of adult family members. These little girls were familiar to the neighbors and certainly they knew Frau Redetzki. Many came to pay respects, but many are also there to see and be seen, a social event for the rural communities lacking other venues to gather and get community updates. The whole village showed up, a bigger gathering than turned up even for a wedding. Weddings, confirmations and baptisms – these were events to mark rites of passage witnessed by the community.  

Funerals are among the most significant life events for a group throughout history. It is a milestone for the village. We’re talking mortality here!  Death was a reality that they often dealt with. This gave them an opportunity marking the end of life, reaffirmation of faith and acknowledgement of the living.  People gathered to cook food served at long tables set up outside weather permitting.  There’d be plenty of cognac or schnapps – standard at any German event.  All this eating and drinking resulted in a pretty lively gathering.  It often ended with bawdy singing and even some dancing.  Given the hardness of everyday life, people didn’t have much to celebrate so they made the most of these gatherings.  You had to celebrate life, eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow can mean war, pestilence, death in so many little ways. Neighbors, acquaintances and the nosy showed up at the cemetery for the internment. People died at home; there was no embalming or funeral home to handle matters and disquise death.

Nowadays children are conspicuously absent from funerals.  Adults mill about and visit with each other there in the room where a body lies cold and still in a cushioned casket bed looking so unlike how we remember them.  It is thought too traumatic for children to experience perhaps?  Have we perhaps become too removed from death?  Can we pretend it doesn’t occur?

One day long ago before the war, my mother and her sister were in the Gnieballen cemetery. They found an extra gravestone near the family sites. When they returned home they asked Mama who was buried there. She gave them the usual ‘don’t ask questions’ response. Sometime later they were again at that same cemetery. They went to check on that curious marker they saw at their last visit.  It was gone!  A mystery! How could a grave marker disappear? Even more mysterious is that later they found it stashed in the attic of their home. My mother suspected it was the grave site of a child her mother had out of wedlock after WWI, before she married Julius. This child was the result of a brief liaison with a soldier passing through. There were fierce battles nearby against Russians, notably in August 1917 as described in Solzhenitsyn’s novel of the same name.  Family secrets, shame, disappointments. Soldiers and young women, a too oft repeated tale.

After parking the car properly and securely, we got out and walked into the woods on the hunt for the Redetzki family cemetery of Gnieballen.  Mom has a vague idea of the cemetery’s location, but the woods back then were not as dense and widespread as they are 60 years later. Most all of this growth occurred since the war, at least according to the 1938 maps that show very little forest.

With a touch of nervousness the two of us head off into the woods. I wouldn’t do this in an unfamiliar area of the U.S. so why was I doing this here? Why do we so often view a foreign country as safer? I could be dealing with the Russian mob here smuggling plutonium and sex slaves! How about old land mines lying around here?

Forward we go, Mom taking the lead, driven and determined to find her family graves. Maybe it is a need to connect with her past, some part of her ancestors.  Maybe that is my need, too.

The woods are very quiet.  No aircraft, no machinery, no people, no birds, no barking dogs, no cattle lowing. We try to explore entry from the western section of woods, but we are not outfitted for trailblazing through the tall understory growth. Need a machete or maybe a chainsaw. Everything is so overgrown and the trees so large it seems impossible to find any sign of an old cemetery. We could be walking over it and not even know it. There are no signs activity like litter, plastic water bottles, abandoned cars – the usual artifacts discarded by civilization. But what would they want with an old German cemetery – you’d think it would be left alone.  However as seen in the Kallningken cemetery, it is of the wrong religion and definitely the wrong ethnic group.

Back in the car we drive around to find another access road entering from the southeast, closer to Didzeln. I find a dirt road that is better maintained so we are able to drive further into the woods. We have the safety of the naive, the innocents abroad. Not having any idea what really might be going on in these woods we are fearless. At one point we come to a wide clearing and I park the car, again facing out to speed away if needed. On we go by foot. 

Tall, thin pine trees with reddish bark line up like sentinels guarding the secrets of the woods. Moss lays thick on the ground, some turned over by wild boars. Wait, could this really be evidence of wild boars?  Do they even have wild boars in the woods here?  My mother never mentioned them in her reminiscences, only talked about horrific enraged moose and her fear of them (her evil animal theme).  After the war I’m sure pigs would have roamed the area and gone wild, same as happens in the U.S. The Lonely Planet guidebook didn't mention any sort of animal life that might kill me. But then tourist books generally focus on shopping and dining and not wildlife that kills when out looking for old abandoned cemeteries. 

The boar potential takes me to think back to my student days in Germany where I was instructed of a sure-fire method to stop a boar in his tracks. Visiting friends at the University of Göttingen we were drinking beer with some Germans, likely too much. Our discussion strayed to the topic of how to defend yourself against wild boars should you encounter one in a German forest. I didn’t realize this was even a possibility. Turns out that yearly, over 200,000 boars are killed by hunters in Germany. That’s a lot of wild boars! When you come upon one in the woods (actually it will be coming upon you!) you take a stick and point it at the boar. This is exactly what I was told. It will thus stop dead in its tracks and I will not be savagely torn to bits. I think back to that lesson. How much trust can I place on information imparted to me by drunken people? I start looking for good size sticks laying about, good size so that if pointing doesn’t work I can try to beat up the wild boar.

I don’t say anything to my mother who is focused on walking straight through Lithuania to Outer Mongolia. I say nothing to her about potential boars -some things are best left unsaid – to protect her, maybe me or to pretend it isn’t so.

Her biggest fear about the woods goes back to her childhood. She feared the moose, the very big moose, convinced they were out to kill her. Come late summer blueberries were ripe. The children were sent into the woods with little pails to gather berries. These are the woods made famous in East Prussian song – land of dark forests and crystal clear lakes. These forests were full of bull moose not mentioned in those idyllic songs. One day when the little girls were off berry picking suddenly in front of them there stood a huge moose. Their little pails flew up in the air spilling the berries and the girls ran for home terrified. They got in trouble for coming home without blueberries and worse they lost their pails! 

There are no moose now, I know that. The silence of the woods is broken only by raven calls.  Are they guiding us or making fun of us?  After some time I decide this search is futile. Even if the cemetery hadn’t been dug up it would be overgrown with trees, the tombstones displaced by roots. Clearly, the local populace wasn’t going to maintain the local Lutheran, i.e. German, cemetery. For that matter, returning Germans have no interest in restoring long forgotten cemeteries with their forgotten ancestors. It is unlikely we will find anything any trace of long dead relatives.  And I don’t want to meet wild boars or wild woodsman.