(part 3 of 5) Hello again
- But in the spring and summer it was so much light, that they put their seeds for salad out and in 2 weeks the salad (Kopfsalat) was ready to eat - and all the "Herzchen" used to have seeds for salad, vegetables and flowers with them, they told me, because the so called "Ration" for foods was never enough for the ill ones, the hungry soldiers and pilots and themselves. Each time in that war, when they arrived in a place to stay some month, they set their seeds in the earth, for to eat healthy things, and for flowers, too, for to have a tiny private joy. They didn't destroy any ancient building where they lived in, because ll the Hessians remembers the 2 Prinzesses of Darmstadt-Hessia who died in Russia 1917 as wife of a Tsar and his brother. I lived in a little city that belonged to Grosherzog Ernst of Darmstadt, and I saw in the family albums again and again zhe first sides with fotos of the unhappy Tsar family and of the last Grosherzog-Son Georg and his family who died by an accident all together in 1 week after Ernst died. - In a villa - manor house or castle - they had different stations - they repaired wrotten things they got, perhaps rotten by gunshotts or shells - well, it was in the midst of a war, polished the windows and furniture and cleaned this as eagerly as their hospital stations and felt daily some minutes alike Princesses themselves. They even tell this in their "Etappen-Reports" I was allowed to read through. The rule of Red Cross was, that each one had to write a report about their last station - and then after the war they found out, they were 40 women and had had 40 places to care for in that war, beginning in Antwerpen, then Somme, then Paris railway station, then near the Mediterrean coast so days recreation, then Lille, again the railway care, then Walk, then Gatschina /Lrasnogwardeisk railway care and Luga, then Riga, then a quick rescue of the wives after the "Kurland Kessel" was a bit opened again, then over the sea to Schleswig-Holstein, and then in different after-war-prisoner's-camps, now with Germans inside.
- U understand, these little housewifes loved theitr "station" in Gatschina, beause it was the castle of their beloved daughters of "Grosherzog Ernst Ludwig the last". When my mother wrote to her husband, my father, that she has his child coming, inside, he wrote back: if a son, give him the name of Georg. That should be an influence of his brave "Herzchen". In our total great family nobody was a Georg. I'm sure, he didn't think about king George of England. Maybe he remembered faintly the Saint "George, The Helper of the Ridders".
After the war the friend and instructor of my father, a Dr.Enders, based in Narva, found us alive, my father KIA (killed in action, he never saw me in his life on earth) and heard that I was severely ill from the beginning of my life in Sowjet-occupated Koenigsberg, he invited me to his home for half a year, in Vienna (Wien, then I was 5 years old) - and he was a catholic and indeed a ridder, when he died. We had the cance to meet him later again, when I was 16 years old. He had a pack of fotos from Gatschina and we were allowed to look them through, perhaps to get some pics of my fasther - when we were driven out of Eastern-Prussia we were not allowed to take with us a single paper or book or fotos of our beloved ones. We only "smuggled" an oil painting and a little sample of (torn) fotos of my family.
Now, the fotos in Vienna included a seria of Gatschina-postcards, I remember the 2 great stone-bulldogs at the entrance to the garden, and some of the happy wallpaintings of the time of Great Catherine, the Emperess, with the "story of the lover and the maiden" - he told, rooms and rooms, this story went on, and all the soldiers were much amused to have detected a forgotton old nice-painted "striptease-collection" - and each who could made fotos - but then came the SS-troops and stole the walls (maybe I didn't understand this correctly, I was young - they didn't destroy them but with archaeoligical know how they let them pick from the walls as an Egypt fresco, piece by peace and sent them to Germany to reconstruct them later for a museum's sake).
And one of the pics was this Pavillion of Venus, from outside - and one from inside. It was painted over and over with little angels of love - Amor, Cupido - U know - very nice, I assume in Rokkoko style. Not coloured fotos, but made for the use as postcards. We assume, the Bolshevists didn't look at and held some goats in the pavillon or used it to store things inside, as they used to do in those times. The German's army found them funny and the SS not enough "worthful" to steal it also. - Later, when urged to leave the place, a special troop was used, by Stalin and by Hitler, to destroy anything with dynamite, bridges, greater buildings to have bureaus in them, stores, wells, anything, what might be useful for the enemy - they only, both sides, were in hurry if thus time arrived to do, then the buildings stayed intact
- then the little Pavillion might have had the luck of "not important" - and only nobody cared for it, when windows broke.
The "Herzchen" had the fotos of the Pavillion and from the great castle those both bullogs - no foto from inside. I assume, inside was the SS in the better rooms, and the "Flighter aces", sometimes, and bureaus for the SD, and "better" special-doctors, flown in for hurt people which needed quick good help, especially the airbase chiefs and their better clientel.
As for my father, the doc of Gatschina-hurt soldiers, his "fee" (Sold) was 70 RM - to rent a seria-dwelling for a family with 3 rooms in that time U needed 60 RM in Koenigsberg. He needed foods from home to do his job. He had "good" relatives on farms to sent him such, and he had his proud parents. Their first doctor in the family
- and I became the 2nd.....
- This Gatschina-station was combined with another Luga-East, maybe in a wood - they toold of driving with a horse-driven vehicle to a lonely bureau half the way from Gatchina to Luga-East, I assume, this must have been a Wehrmacht-barack and needed "some papers", routine - perhaps a "Feldpolizei"-Station? to write passender-visa to work, if new Red Cross personel had arrived? - or a weekly report, who loved and who was dead? - some of the Red Cross people were in Luga, some in Gatschina, here in that nice villa of the B.u.V.Stelle, and some in the wide gardens of Pushkin castle with a whole city of Baracks of this "Krankensammelstelle" for to help the wounded ones.
(continues)
