1994 Schlesien Revisited

mit Irmgard Hammer

In the Summer of 1994 my 80-year-old aunt Irmgard Hammer offered to travel with me to Schlesien to visit the places of my childhood for the first time after 50 years. It was like time was running backwards. In and around Habelschwerdt nearly everything was completely unchanged. The greatest discovery was the landscape. I had never understood what the near mystical word "Heimat" means. For me it is the landscape which I carry deep in my unconscious.

Irmgard and our old Jetta on the road to Habelschwerdt, which lies hidden behind the trees.

Turning around at the same place as above I was unexpectedly confronted with ghosts: Along this path, in 1945, Mother and I dragged my emaciated father across the Jestelkoppe to Spätenwalde. And in the following winter Mother and I went into these hills to get wood for our stove. Years earlier, in better times, Father and I had gone on a ski tour along the same path....

This used to be the view of the Weistritztal and the hills from our house. Now some ugly Soviet prefab apartments hide it, unless one walks a few kilometers along the road towards the Wasserwerk, (waterworks) and Altlomitz.

On the first try I missed our little house. The former Gartenstrasse is now called ul. Lienskogo and the house numbers have been reversed to 31. My borther Dieter had tried to find it in vain, but here it is only little changed. The new owners built a roofgarden on the veranda (which had more windows in our time) and a solid garage with a car repair shop. The window of our room was on the roof, the Herrenzimmer the second, our dining room the first window on the first floor. My parent's bedroom the row of windos were above the verandah, where I slept during the summer. The huge birch father planted 1937. It was in a bird house in this tree where Mother hid her jewelery in 1944. The property used to include the new sidewalk, the fence is also new. The white half of the duplex belonged to Frau Dr. Futter, the mother of our pediatrician in Glatz .

Magda, Waclaw, Margund, and Krystyna Poniewierski, ul. Lenskiego 31, 57-500 Bystrycza Klodzka, Poland

On a second visit to the house the small, long-haired woman to the right came out and surprised me in German, was I the former owner? With a failing voice I told her that the house had been my father's. Krystyna took my hands and invited Irmgard and me to come inside. Where Krystyna's husband Waclaw, her older daughter Margot, the younger Magda, and a boyfriend of Margot waited for us. We sat in my mother's living room. They gave me a tour of the house, a new kitchen and bathroom, a roof balcony, the steep staircase to the upper level.... Everything was so small. Margot spoke German. It turned out that Krystyna had been born in the house in 1950 and her children too.... All my anti-Polish dragons collapsed. I still have a sporadic correspondence with Krystyna.

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A panorama of Habelschwerdt/Bystrycza Klodzka in 1994, almost unchanged since 1946, from the Floriansberg.

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Memories from a Lost World.

The Schwimmbad, public swimming pool, on the Floriansberg, where Herr Schulmann tried in vain to teach me to swim, very close to the monument where we celebrated the last birthday of Adolf Hitler a few weeks before the Weltuntergang.

The Volksschule, where we three older siblings went to. The statue of Germania had been torn down.

The Aufbauschule where I went to for a couple of years in 1943-44.

The "Kino" where I saw my first movie in 1936, Leni Riefenstahl's Olympic Games. It was still the only cinema in town.

The "Ring" which derives from the Polish word rink, marketplace with the Mariensäule. The baroque house used to be the königlich priviligierte Apotheke, pharmacy

The Salzmarkt, salt market with the Staupsäule where criminals were flogged and the protestant church in the center background, where I was confirmed in 1945. Now a museum of match boxes On this square we were loaded on wagons in 1946 when we were expelled from Silesia.

The smithy where I worked shooing horses from September 1945 to May 1946

The church of "Maria Schnee", the small white dot, on the slopes of the Spitzberg near Wölfelsgrund under the Glatzer Schneeberg. A popular place of pilgrimage which mystified me much during my childhood. I drove Irmgard to all these places of my memory, and they were all still there. As in the beginning it was the landscape that moved me most.