Yesterday a friend from church passed away from the corona virus. Hans was 88 years old. When he began attending our church a few years ago I was introduced to him because he was interested in telling his life story, which he entitled "Running Away from the Russian Army." He shared with me what he had written as a first draft, but we were only able to get the first chapter in publishable form before he moved to a nursing home.
This first chapter details his early years in what was then Poland. He recalls being required to stand along the main road when Hitler came to the town. Following the war, the Poles, having gained their independence, required all Germans to leave the area, so he fled to East Germany where he completed his education and training as a machinist. But because of the oppression of the Russians, he, along with several others, paid someone to escort them across the neutral zone into West Germany.
It was while working there for the German subsidiary of a company in the US that he was asked to come to the US main facility because of his skills. He did not know any English, but signed the forms he was given without being able to read them and soon found himself in the Lehigh Valley, PA. Here he learned English and lived the remaining years of his life.
In honor of Hans, I have chosen to publish the first chapter of his life story here in my blog. I hope that you find it interesting.
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My name is Hans-Dieter Waldemar Eckard Plachetzki. I was
born on March 3, 1932 in Storkow
near Stargard in Pommern
on a very large farm. Our
family was comprised of my father, Adam, my mother, Berta, and six children:
Willi, Hildegard, Anneliese, myself, Kurt and Eckhart. My father was a very
good man. He played the violin quite well and he spoke both perfect Polish and
perfect Russian in addition to German. [I found out only much later when I
visited my hometown after 45 years that he was originally from Poland, but we
were all German citizens and I still am.]
The name of the farm was Rittergut Ludwig Schrader. In
addition to our family, there were 19 other families. Everyone old enough to
work working on the farm – so in addition to my father, Willi and Hildegard
also worked. The farm owner owned all the homes and provided each family with
housing in addition to coal for heating, firewood for cooking and all the
potatoes for the year. In addition there was a very small pay called Dipotat.
We had our own cow for milk and one white and one black
sheep for wool. We also raised three pigs each year for meat, these were
butchered twice each year. We also raised 20 to 30 rabbits each year for food,
also 15 geese, 15 ducks, and 16-20 chickens. After harvesting them for food in
the fall, we kept two geese (one male, one female), two ducks (one male, one
female), several chickens and one rooster and perhaps eight rabbits (one male,
the rest female).
We also had our own smoke-house upstairs where my parents
smoked all the meat. We also made butter from the cow’s milk and had buttermilk
all the time.
All the smaller animals were kept close to the house, which
was a row-home with four families connected together. The cows for all the
families were kept together in a large barn. One of the men watched all the cows
and during the summer he took them out into the fields during the day.
My mother milked the cow each day, brought the milk home and
ran it through a cloth to strain it and remove any dirt. We kept the milk a few
days in a storage room (I had never heard of a refrigerator) and the cream
(which we called sane) settled to the
top. When we had enough cream she put everything into a butter churn which was
perhaps 8” in diameter, 24” high, and with 1” thick walls. After pushing the
plunger up and down, adding a little bit of salt, the heavier cream would turn
into butter and the rest into buttermilk.
A few times my brother Kurt and I went into the store room
where the milk was settling, took a spoon with some sugar on it and scooped up
some of the sane, taking several
scoops. We thought that we would get away with it, but the sane had left a ring on the bowl and our mother came home and saw
it – we were in big trouble!
At that time the form of punishment was with a belt that was
about 16” long and ¼” wide. The top of the belt was nailed on a piece of wood
which had a hole in the end and a leather string to hang it on a nail on the
door frame. We called it kanschen. So
after my mother had seen the sane
bowl ring on the side she could see a lot of the sane was missing. Kurt and I got our smacking with the kanschen, at least 5 or 6 swings. It
hurt quite a lot, so we stayed away from the sane for some time. Of course we eventually got attracted to it
again and got it again from the kanschen.
When the family ate a meal together at the big table in the
kitchen my mother had that kanschen lying next to her plate so that none of the
children would leave the table before finishing all their food. The motto was was die kelle gibt wird gegessen (what
the big spoon gives you, you eat).
The kitchen was large with half gray cement floor and half
wood floor (we called it dielen)
which was painted orange. We had a big stove in the kitchen which was heated
with wood. The wood would be cut into pieces about 8” long then split
(originally by my father, then as we got older by my older brother and later by
me and Anneliese or sometimes Kurt – Eckhart was too little). So we were all
busy in the fall chopping wood for the stove which we called spallern.
The wood would be split into pieces about 1”x1” and was
stored outside in big piles around a frame about 2 meters (80”) in diameter and
up to 50 centimeters (20”) in height, tapered on the top like a corn cob. The
inside would be filled but not packed tight as otherwise the wood would not dry
properly. When the inside of the frame was filled we would pack more on the
outside. We were taught as soon as we were 5 or 6 years old how to chop
firewood with a hatchet (called a beil).
It was very sharp. My father showed me how to sharpen the hatchet on a
sandstone about 1 meter in diameter and 3” thick. My brother had to burn the
stone with a handle in the center while putting some water on it to keep it
wet. I sharpened all the hatchets. I also sharpened the saw with a 3-corner
file – a method which I still use to this day. So when we had that pile of wood
full we let it sit outside, even in the winter when we had a lot of snow.
Our cooking stove had iron rings in it so when you had a big
pot you did not use any rings, but with smaller pots you put in the appropriate
number of rings. You needed special pliers to lift the rings out or put the
smaller ones on as the stove was very hot. Since we had a big family we
generally used the bigger pots.
We had no running water in the house, so the whole town had
to go to the center of the town to a very big pump and pump water. In the
winter in the snow and ice the men would cover the pump with thick layers of
straw as we had plenty of that on the farm from all the wheat fields. We had to
bring all the water home with buckets, two at a time with piece of trageholz (carrying pole) like you see
the Chinese using in movies. We also had no drains in the house, so all the
dirty water needed to be brought outside to a sandy area way behind the house.
Because the water was from a well, it tasted very good. But
we also used it for washing. To do so you had to heat the water up. We had a
big steel tub that you could only sit in one at a time. The girls took their
baths first, then the boys. If the water got too dirty then my mother would
scoop some out and add some fresh water. Everyone in town did the same thing as
no one had running water, even the owner of the farm who was quite rich with
1000 acres of land.
Once my little brother went in the big tub with something in
his hand which he kept closed and wouldn’t open. My sister lifted him in and
opened his hand that then started screaming because a mouse was swimming in the
water. My mother came and took the mouse out and let it fall to the kitchen
floor (we had two cats that got that mouse in a second and took it outside to
eat it). My brother always had things in his pockets or hands, so from that
time my sister always checked his pockets and his hands even before he came to
the table to eat. Because this was a farm there were always lots of mice and
rats. Also because when you have sheep you have them, so our cats always had a
lot of mice/rats to eat.
We all slept upstairs in a very big room which had no heat.
So we also covered our windows with straw blankets that my parents made and
later we kids slept on straw bags (I never saw a mattress like I have now). We
had feather pillows and feather covers filled with feather from our geese and
ducks (but not from the chickens). My father also sometimes brought up two hot
water bottles – they were oval steel/copper containers which he put hot water
in and wrapped towels around. The straw blanket over the window could be rolled
up/down with a big rope. My mother and the girls made a lot of them and sold
them in the city of Stargard – the city people liked them a lot.
All my siblings and I went to a big one-room school house
like you may have seen in pictures, the older kids on one side and the younger
on the other side. Mr. Luhrer Suemlich, the teacher, was very strict. His
method of punishment was to have you lean over a table and he would spank you
with a hazelnut stick. We even had to go and cut the sticks ourselves. He also
used these sticks to point things out on the blackboard.
For math (rechnen),
a group of several kids would go out of the room on the floor and one of the
older kids would be in charge. We didn’t have paper to write on, on slate
tablets in a wooden frame (schiefer-tafeln
and griffel). You wiped it clean with
a wet cloth.
We went to school with six years in the lower class and two
more in the upper class. After four years you had to sometimes write in a paper
book (tiente) with ink, so you
couldn’t erase/correct anything. We had to sit with 4 kids in one bench, each
student having a hole in the bench with ink (tiete) in a glass container with a lid on it (tientenfass). If you got any ink on your fingers it would take two
days to wear off. The teacher showed us how to cut a feather, a large one from
a goose or duck, by cutting one end at an angle of 30 degrees. Then you dipped
the feather in the ink before writing in the paper book. You had to be careful
not to put too much ink on, otherwise it would make a bit blot of ink in your
book. That not only looked bad, but your parents would not like it – so every
kid was very careful with the ink when they used it.
Our teacher also had a very nice garden with lots of fruit
trees in it. He had Red Delicious apples that tasted very good – if you could
get them. We got in by climbing trees outside the fence which we did quite
often. A couple of boys would stand lookout while 2 or 3 of us would climb the
trees and throw the apples over the fence to the grassy area where the rest of
us were waiting and watching the baby geese or ducks which had recently
hatched.
I remember one batch of ducks which my mother had put under
one of the chickens because there was no duck female to sit on them. After the
little ducklings had hatched, all six or eight of them were very soft to touch.
When the time came to let them outside to eat some new grass right behind the
teacher’s garden, they spotted perhaps 50’ away a water tank (50’ x 50’ and 5’
deep for fighting fires). The ducklings smelled the water and went running like
crazy towards it and all of them hopped in. The mother chicken who had helped
hatch them went running after them and also jumped in – but of course she
couldn’t swim but she was screaming for her “children” and wanted to rescue
them. One of our boys jumped in after her and rescued her. After drying her
off, we tied one foot with a string close to the tank so she could see the
little ducklings, but short enough that she could not jump in again. This went
on for at least two weeks until finally the chicken mother would allow the
ducklings to go in without her trying to “rescue” them. My mother never tried
having a chicken sit on duck or goose eggs again!
Going back to the teacher’s garden, one day my friends Olly
Diedel and Gerhard Puttlich were seen by the teacher when they were hanging in
the trees and picking apples. The next day called them to the front of the
class and he had them lay over a bench in school and each got five hits with a
hazel branch. He then asked if they knew why they had gotten this discipline.
They said, “No”. He then asked if they were the two guys in the trees and they
had to confess. It turned out that none of those of us who were looking out for
him had noticed him in his bee-house – he had 10-15 of them in his garden. So
from that time on we also sent spies to check out the bee-houses to make sure
that he was taking his afternoon nap before we tried to pick any apples. Olly
and Gerhard were still the ones chosen to climb the trees while the rest of us
waited outside the fence. We got a lot of these “fall apples,” as we called
them, since the trees were quite large and always full of very tasty fruit.
The farm boss, Ludwig Schrader, also had a very large garden
with lots of strawberries and a couple of apple trees (the apples being the
size of a tennis ball and very, very sweet). The branches hung over the fence
right across from our house, the wall being five feet high and topped with
barbed wire. But we found a way to get on top of the wall by getting on another
boy’s shoulders and then you only had to deal with the wire. Olly and Gerhard
were always our chosen apple pickers here too.
But this garden was also guarded by a little dog who was
there all the time and who would make a lot of noise so the owner would come
running with a whip like you see in the circus so he could hit you from 10-15’
away, not caring where he hit you. Since it took time to get back down from the
barbed wire fence and run away he got us several times. On a few occasions the
girls from town dressed up the dog like a doll and distracted him so he
wouldn’t give us away. But we still had to deal with the turkeys who nested in
the apple trees and could make a racket even worse than the dog. We always had
to work hard to get our goodies!
