Navozhonnaya Galina Aleksandrovna

Interviewers: Olga Ponomareva (Ukraine), Irina Sidorovna (Ukraine), Stef Schweinschwaller (Austria)

Tell us about yourself

My name is Galina Alexandrovna Navozhenaya (née Karpova). I was born on 17 October 1926. I was born in Konstantinovka; but my family came from the Kharkov region – Mama as well as Papa, but from different villages. My father died a long time ago, even before the war in 1940. The first two children, twins, were born – here in Konstantinovka – but they died nearly immediately, before I was born. Then my older brother was born – he is already 15 years dead – and then I was born.

Do you remember how the war started?

Very well, as if it were now. And when I watch television, and they show e.g. the war in Georgia, I think, “why”? War is so horrible.

I had finished 7th form and then, in the morning, it was June, 22nd 1941, I had gone to the shop for bread. And then next to Krasnaja Street, near the post office, and there was a radio. And I saw people listening, taking each other in their arms, crying, and I don’t understand, until somebody said: War has started. It was horrible to watch. That’s how war had started. And in September the Germans already came. They had such… And before they had come in, they had bombed the town. We hlived near the trampark…. , in front of the трампарк, a bit further down the road was a small silicate factory and there were a lot of our soldiers. And as the Germans bombed, a lot of ours died, and many were wounded. Fedja Ilchenko died.

And so first the Germans only dropped bombs, and then they appeared. First they went on the Red [Street] from Kondratovki to Artemovsk. And the horses they had, they were so healthy, not like ours – such massive ones with big hooves.

Well, they arrived within two days. We had three houses in our courtyard. My mother’s brothers lived there and also Grandpa and Grandma; that is, they built a house, but lived on the railway themselves, Grandpa was a railway craftsman. The house was big and grey. They occupied half of the house, and the other half was a hostel. And we had three houses. And then the uncles went to the front and nobody was there.  And we did have three houses. And as the Germans started to come they were billeted in our house every day. The order was to give accommodation to the soldiers. And so they put up three kitchens in our courtyard, painted a kind of numbers on all the walls, probably to show which is our part or which is theirs.

On the very first day they brought us a bucket of soup: soup half made of meat. Then they brought us a whole mutton cut up into pieces, and a small barrel of pickled cabbage. And on the second day my brother sat in the courtyard and painted something, and one of the German officers came to him and said: ‘Oh, you paint very well!’ But then he noticed that his jacket was stained with green paint and he got angry, grabbed his pistol and held it to my brother’s head. And Mama heard it and was horrified; she did not understand a word of German and started to beg: ‘Mister, Mister, don’t touch him, that is my little son.’ And she fell down. Well, they did not leave him alone. And on the third day they tore all the numbered papers from the fence, and took the dinner set from us. What for? Mama had saved it for when her daughter would marry. There is a set for twenty-four people, blankets, tablecloths, and a bronze basin. They gathered it all and left. And that’s how it was with us – every three days, as soon as one group had left, the next was billeted in our house – well, we had a big house. They come to us and then again a new group will come for one or two days and then leave.

How were you forced to go to Germany?

In March 1942, they started to gather people for Germany. That was the first party to be sent. They caught the boys who were walking beside the silicate factory by the armful and herded them to Donetsk. My older brother was among them. They marched them on foot, with guards. But by some chance, my brother managed to escape. And so they started to come to our house every day after that for an inspection in order to find out if he had appeared at home. So he did not get to Germany. And so in the summer of 1942 there were four children left at home and we had nothing to eat. Grandpa brought Grandma from the village and soon he fell ill and died. We were still four children, Mama was the fifth person and Grandma the sixth. And in order to somehow feed themselves, people exchanged a lot of things for food. But we had nothing to exchange apart from furniture that was burnt by the bombing. There were some people in the village where my mother came from in the Kharkov region and they passed on the message that her relatives were asking how Sonechka [Mama Sofya] and her children are getting on. ‘If only she came here, we could help her and give her something.’ And so we went. Mama, Lusya – with whom I was later taken away to Germany – and myself. Grandpa made a wheelbarrow and off we went. And the relatives gave us everything; Mama had second and third cousins and uncles. And we had gone only 10 kilometres from the village on the Alexandrovki side when our wheelbarrow broke. And a woman comes out and says, ‘Leave your goods and your daughter with me, I live alone, my husband is on the front, it will not be so boring for me, and you yourselves go to the village for help.’ And Mama went to call Grandpa, so that they could repair the wheelbarrow and collect the goods. And so two or three days pass, and nobody comes. Then my younger brother comes, looking for me in the village and says: ‘Mama is sick, Grandpa has not made the wheelbarrow, let’s go home.’ We took the bundle of products and went home on foot, across the field from Barvenki. And we go across the field and the whole field is covered with our soldiers, because that is where the front is. There were no Germans as they had obviously gathered the bodies of their soldiers straight away – and not ours. And so there lie the killed, spread out in a sort of pose. And the ravens are pecking at them. A horrible sight. And all my life I remember those ravens as something terrible.

And I had only just got home when two policemen came for me. Your brother is not there you will go instead. And my younger brother was still with me – three and a half he was then – and he cries, ‘Galochka, my dear sister, do not leave me.’ But they: ‘No.’ And they took me away to the labour exchange where the Frunsenski Cinema and DK Metallurgi had been before. They held us overnight and the next morning Grandma came looking for me and she brought me a piece of bread and one German Mark tied in a knot. We sat there and they did not let us go.

On 24 July 1942 they sent us – 660 people von Konstantinovka and also 300 people from Slavyanska – they sent us in goods trains with 70 to 80 people per carriage guarded by soldiers. Did not let us out anywhere. We went all over the Ukraine, did not stop, they did not let us out. The first stop was only in Brest because that was where they changed the train – further on, the rails were narrow; in our country they were wide. We stopped in Brest for two days. We went out freely there but we were not allowed to go anywhere – it was waste ground in Brest, everything was broken. While they transported us around the Ukraine they gave us a loaf of bread, but after Brest they did not give us anything. Those who still had bread ate it.

Tell us, to which town did they take you? Where did you work? How was your life in the camp?

They sent us to the town of Hemmer [Hamm?] – it is in Westfalia. And when they had sent us there, we were driven across the whole town to the side of the barracks. They marched us – 960 people – like cattle, and beside us children ran, shouting ‘Russische Scheisse’ [Russian shit] at us and ‘Russische Schweine’ (Russian pigs), and ‘Russischer Fajuk Mensch’ [?]. They threw something at us.  A terrible sight. And then they lead us into those barracks – and on all walls there was already written: ‘Who is from Dnepropetrovsk?’ ‘Who is from some other place?’ Then this committee arrived there: they led us all, girls and boys all naked, checked literally everything – fingers, eyes – they led us from one barrack to another. If you tried to hide, a soldier would hit you on the back. And we stayed there for two days, and the buyers started to come from all the nearby towns, apparently from all of Westfalia and collected us. And apparently in the town of Hagen, in which I was, there was a very developed industry, as in our Donbass region. And there was the Schmidt factory where a lot of ours ended up. They produced some kind of metal products, but I do not know exactly what. We were there only once, because after a year they were bombed and many people died there. And in the factory where I ended up, there were 4 from Konstantinovka and 16 from Slavyanska. The head of the camp, Nikolaus, collected us. He was a very good man and he called us not by surname but ‘meine Kinder’ [my children].

His wife – Frau Metzner, worked in the kitchen, handing out the bread. The factory was called Stahl Frauben Fabrik [perhaps ‘Schrauben’ , meaning screws]. Funke Guk [was the factory owner; perhaps Huck]. All the factories around there were metal and steel factories.

So when they started to select people, they took me but not Lusya, with whom I had been taken away and who lived next to me at home. And then we said that she is my sister and they took her as well. And so they thought that she was my sister. And so we arrived at the camp. There were already 120 people. They put us up in one room – we were 76 people in one room. The beds were bunk beds, a very narrow passage between them. Workers, the factory labourers, lived at the forest. Our barracks was at a river – the river Ruhr. And we always saw many aeroplanes flying above us in formation. There were so many that it was as if the earth was trembling. And they said ‘Hagen Dortmund – nach Berlin, Hagen – Bochum – Dortmund – Berlin.’

They fed us very badly. They gave us 300 grams of bread. They put salt on it so that it seemed as if you had enough to eat. Then some sort of coffee and a piece of margarine. For lunch: gruel. First they gave us gruel made with spinach, and it could be seen that they did not wash it and had boiled it straight with the worms who had got there because of the damp weather. Or made from turnips. First they gave us some sort of money. Not much, 2 to 4 Marks. But we did not know how much money that was. A woman came to us who sold postcards and knickknacks. Sometimes we managed to buy some beetroot or even bread if you had a good master. Because they did not allow [the masters] to sell products to us.

Tell us what sort of contact did you have with the German citizens?

We did not really have special contact, only with the people that worked beside us in the factory. For example, the woman Irma, whose sister’s husband was a farmer, worked with us. And in summer, when there were apples, she brought one of us an apple, wrapped in a rag. She gave it in such a way that the others did not see it. She came and said that I should go to the toilet and she would give me something and brought it from her locker. Another German woman that worked with us brought me a dress because after the bombing I had nothing to wear. I think one should judge not by nationality but by the individual person. In every nation you have very many mean and very many good people.

Once, a woman who lived on the land of factory labourers asked us to help with the cleaning up after the bombing. We cleaned a great deal and were very tired, but they did not give us anything they had promised us. And then another woman asked us to clean up. We already did not believe that they would give us anything but we agreed. There was not much to clean in the room. And then this woman dressed in black because her brother and her son had died on the front asked us into the dining room where she not only fed us with enough bread, margarine and apples as we wanted, but she also gave us some to take with us so that we could feed the other girls in the barracks. They also offered clothing to us, which they also suggested to hide in a secret place.

Tell us about your work? What did it consist of exactly?

They led us to work every day; work from 6 in the morning until 6pm. 12 hours per day. They dropped bombs every day. I was working on bolts. In one workshop they cut rods. We received half-finished products. And there you sit at the lathe and you start to get it going between the tank and cut the rod.

And a German man came there and collected all the finished bolts. They gave us  coupons, which we had to tear off according to the time – when you go to work tear it off; you go for breakfast, tear it off. Fifteen minutes for breakfast, so that nobody was late. On our days off they did not let us go anywhere. They only allowed ten people – the tenth was responsible for everyone. Only on Sundays. They did not let us into town; they only allowed us sort of walk around the town.

The air raid sirens came constantly. It was apparent that they had prepared for war because everywhere they had built bomb shelters. In the centre of the town there was a large bomb shelter, in which the inhabitants of that town hid.

And so on 15 March 1945 there was bombing and one bomb landed in that bomb  shelter and exploded. Many people died; they did not let anybody through to that place and surrounded it all with barbed wire. After that bombing, when our barracks and factory were finally bombed, they started to take us to work in Dortmund. Dortmund was totally destroyed and they took us to clear the city after the bombing. And it was necessary that they made a note that you went to work because if they did not record it you got neither bread nor soup.

And when we cleared the obstructions we saw the exploding bridges flying into the air. We were afraid that the shells would fall on the bridge where we were working. But they did not give any of us the record so that we could get gruel. Therefore, we simply decided to leave and started to run across the field. And nobody followed us, as the shells immediately fell on our bridge, on which there were still a lot of people. That was 13 April 1945. And on 15 April the Americans came and liberated us.

How did you return home and what did you do after liberation?

After the liberation on 17 April 1945 they took all the men to the town of Farhalle [Halle?] and us 18 women to Magdeburg. They sent us there, and we were very happy to see our Red Army soldiers, but nobody looked after us or paid any attention on us. They distributed us to a small army town. They informed us all to go to register in alphabetical order. They registered me and I begged to go home, and in the end I left for Konstantinovka. The town was in disarray, the relatives lived in one room in the building where other people also lived.

They took me to work as a cashier in the tram station. But on the next day after my return, they called me to the police station to check on me. The manager of the bottle factory sat at the reception, and they ordered me to work in the bottle factory. They said that the factory needed reconstruction. As early as the third day of my return, I went to work as a general labourer. So I started to work in the factory. And I went up the whole ladder – worked as a time keeper, as a wage accountant, as an engineer.