Cruel World (96 page)

If there was a single thing that changed the feelings of German children toward the British and the Americans it was perhaps the Berlin Airlift, the extraordinary operation to keep the people of West Berlin alive when the Soviets tried to block access to the city by the Western Allies. For almost a year, day and night, the RAF and the U.S. Air Force flew in coal, food, and other necessities. All over western Germany, children watched the planes being loaded, and cheered as they took off. In Berlin, the constant sound of the engines became a comfort instead of a signal of imminent destruction. Fifty-four airmen were killed in the effort, and life in the dark, unheated city was harsh indeed. But all concerned were determined to succeed, and an extraordinary team spirit soon developed. Children collected aircraft numbers and everyone knew which flying or tonnage record had been broken on a certain day. Boys and girls took presents to the airfields for the pilots and clamored to be taken to see the British Sunderland flying boats landing on the Schwanenwerder, part of the huge lake also known as the Wannsee, in the western part of Berlin.
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Gail Halvorson, an American pilot, touched by his encounter with a group of hungry children, told them to wait at the end of the runway that evening. The next time he brought his plane in for a landing, the crew tossed out candy bars on parachutes that the men had made out of handkerchiefs. Soon everyone was doing it, using old shirts and whatever other materials came to hand. German Youth Activities members were recruited to make more parachutes and funding for the project, called Operation Little Vittles, was provided by the Air Force. CARE dropped twenty-five Schmoos, the little creature from the comic strip
L’il Abner
that loved people so much that it would turn itself into the object of their desire, usually a ham or other food item. This time the Schmoo, when taken to a CARE office, would turn into ten pounds of lard, an incredible treasure in starved Berlin.
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The Schmoos were topped at Christmas by the far more dramatic arrival of Clarence the camel. Before his trip to Berlin, Clarence was sent around the American Zone to encourage people to give contributions for the airlift. He did pretty well, collecting some 5,000 pounds of candy and tons of toys, but before he was able to fly to Berlin with his takings, he was injured by a kick from a nasty Army mule. A replacement Clarence, in fact a lady camel, was rushed in. His, or her, arrival (not by parachute) made a lasting impression on the children who swarmed to the airport to greet him.
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Clarence the Camel
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(photo credit 16.3)

The Russians backed down in the spring of 1949. A fifteen-year-old Berlin girl wrote that the pilots’ sacrifices in the airlift “remind us that in this world there are higher things than national egoism—namely humanity and the existence of all peoples in human dignity.”
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Humanity, as always, had shown itself in the individual actions of the blockade, which were contained within a larger and more pragmatic context. By the time the last plane landed, the Cold War was a fact and the Marshall Plan, or European Recovery Program, approved only weeks before the start of the blockade, was well under way. General Marshall had described the objectives of the plan, which have lost none of their validity:

The Soviet Union had been invited to join Europe and take part in the program, but Stalin refused, thereby making Hitler’s dream of uniting the Western Allies and Germany against the East come true, though not quite as the Nazi leader had imagined.

During all the months and years of their travails, the young people swept up in the Nazi whirlwind, if they were old enough, preserved an inner vision and memory of home. Returning there was their hope and aim. Home had not always been idyllic. Many of the displaced children came from the poorest levels of their society and many had been in orphanages in their own country. But home means many things. It is language, a familiar street, a certain light, the sounds of known birds, accustomed food, friends and relatives. It is, above all, the fact of belonging. In times of hardship, a virtual walk in the mind’s eye through beloved places, lingering over every remembered detail, can, for a few moments, transport one out of present horror and into the happier past. Few would find home and its inhabitants unchanged by the war when they finally returned. And for millions, home would have to be re-created in a new land, among strangers.

For older children, the instinct to return to their own was very strong, and in unstoppable bands they walked, hitchhiked, and used any possible means to get home. They crammed themselves into the coal bins and every other space on trains that were so crowded that one Polish boy strapped himself to a brake handle with his belt to keep from being pushed off.

Some of the travels were full of adventure, especially for Soviet citizens, who, before the final surrender of Germany, had to travel in the war zones if they were going east. Vladimir Kuts, a forced laborer, now seventeen, who had been liberated from his kindly farmer by the Americans, was enlisted by them because of his language abilities and familiarity with the terrain. They gave him a uniform and trained him to drive and shoot. He accompanied them in their victorious sweep to Munich in April 1945. The war was still on, but Vladimir was determined to head home, and his GI friends found a confiscated German Mercedes for him. To protect him from air strikes they painted the roof bright orange. Exhilarated by his freedom, Kuts said, “I didn’t drive, I flew.” At one point he was surrounded by a retreating SS unit, but he was able to rush on unnoticed. The trip did not last long. Ordered to stop by an American MP, the young Russian put on the brakes, which did not work, and ran into a line of parked Army Studebakers. Arrest followed. But this American unit also found the boy useful, and took him along as they advanced toward the agreed demarcation line between American and Soviet forces. Once the two armies met, Kuts, under pressure because he was the son of a Gulag prisoner, was recruited by the NKVD, to whom he provided information about his former hosts. When his NKVD mentor found that the boy was under eighteen, he sent him home and advised him never to mention his service with the Americans. (This promise Kuts, like many others, would keep for more than forty years, until the dissolution of the Soviet Union.) Home was not as he remembered it. Vladimir found his mother there, but the house had been destroyed and his older sister killed in a battle near Moscow. His father was still in Siberia. There was little food, and the youth fell ill. His euphoria gone, he even contemplated suicide. Eventually, once again with help from his NKVD connections, he was able to get an internal passport, and went to Siberia to join his father, who had by now been liberated. There Kuts became an engineer, married, and stayed for twenty-seven years.
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A Russian family comes home to devastation
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(photo credit 17.1)

This pattern was not unusual. Returning DPs and POWs who did not pass NKVD scrutiny, or who refused to cooperate with the Soviet authorities, were executed or sent into the Gulag. Many of those who were allowed to go home would be forever suspect and unable to advance in their careers. Their status would also prevent them, until very recently,
from claiming the disability payments and compensation that was given to other veterans and victims.

Younger children did not usually have these political issues, but their homecoming could be equally difficult. Nikolai Mahutov, eight, liberated with the rest of his partisan band at the Polish border, got home in the fall of 1944 with the help of the Russian Red Cross. He too found little to eat. He was so hungry one day that he ate dried clover from a bale of hay, and then “fell down … and had sweet dreams.” He thinks that the clover acted like a drug and that he “slept for three days.” People told him later that he “looked so happy and pink-cheeked lying there that they didn’t wake him up.”
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The dreams were not so sweet for others. Whole families of siblings, their parents dead and their towns destroyed, were sent directly to orphanages. Others went to these institutions on their own initiative after they had gone home only to find that everyone in their family had perished. Little is known about the Soviet orphanages, but life in comparable places in Poland in 1946 was harsh:

Elena Putilina, by now eleven, and her little brother, who had been liberated from the Lodz-Konstantynow camp for Eastern children, were treated for malnutrition and then taken to a children’s home in the Soviet Union. There, social workers tried to weave their memories and the names they remembered into addresses. Their mother was finally located, but could not come to them for over a year because she was ill. In the meantime, people tried to adopt Elena, but she refused to leave her brother. Their mother did finally arrive, unannounced, one day at dinnertime:

From the children’s home, Elena, Petja, and their mother made their way back to Vitebsk and then to their village. Petja was excited and impatient, but reality was a shock:

Elena later managed to get herself admitted to a boarding school in Vitebsk. Her father, one brother, and a sister had all perished. Petja stayed home, and still lives in the village with his children. There were hundreds such villages where mud huts were the norm, and where there were no horses, so women had to pull the farm carts. The reigning hunger did not just affect humans: in one town, children going to school were terrorized by a pack of starving German shepherds left behind by Nazi forces.
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The arrival back to desolation was not limited to the USSR. Similar scenes greeted those returning to Yugoslavia, Greece, Poland, and many other places. Stefanie Burger-Kelih, now nineteen, had been in the so-called Youth Protection Camp at Uckermarck, a subsidiary of Ravens-brück, where, in addition to being used as forced labor, the young inmates were used in “biological” juvenile delinquency experiments developed by the same Dr. Ritter who had “analyzed” the Gypsies. She did not get home to Slovenia until September 8, 1945, after traveling for months in trucks and trains. She covered the last few miles on foot: