Alte Leute, kleine Kinder, ach, wie war Jammer grob!
Ja, was haben wir verbrochen, dass uns traf solch hartes Los?

   Old people, small children, oh, how great was the misery!
  Yes, what crime have we committed, that we have met such a  hard lot?
        Wolhynierlied  (Volhynian Song)¹

       The words of this song have a particular meaning for me, being the descendent of German Volhynians who endured great hardships and sacrifices, being deported and relocated from Poland and to Russia, escaping to Germany and ultimately coming to freedom in the United States.  In this paper I will trace my personal family history, that of my paternal grandmother, the Schöenefeld family while also describing the history and heritage of the German-Russians.   The index figure in this genealogy is my great-grandfather, Wilhelm Schöenefeld, who was born in Ryswianka on October 27, 1908.   Towards this end, I have interviewed both my grandmother and her brother at length.  The interview with the latter was videotaped and transcribed to a six-page document.
     On July 22, 1763, after the end of the Seven Years War, Catherine II, a German princess married to Czar Peter III followed an old Russian custom of inviting foreigners to settle in her adopted land.  Catherine especially targeted Germans who had dislocated by the war, hoping to bring Western culture and industrious farmers to Russia.  Her manifesto became the cornerstone of Russia’s colonization policy.  It promised immigrants many things, including free transportation to Russia, the freedom to settle wherever they wanted and to choose any occupation, free land for farmers, freedom of religion, freedom from military service, interest-free loans for ten years, and the ability to leave if they changed their minds.  For German peasants of the time, who were facing local heavy taxation, repeated wars, and religious persecution, this was a dream come true ².  Between 1764 and 1767 more than 7,000 families left Germany for Russia with most of the estimated 25,000 people coming from Hesse and southwest Germany.  The numbers so alarmed the German government that in 1768 Emperor Joseph II forbade any further emigration ³.
     In reality, the colonists faced a long, difficult journey and conditions far less than what they had been promised.  Instead of having a choice about where and how to live, they were taken to the Volga River region, which was a wild frontier and forced to go into farming.  The housing and building materials they had been promised were not available, and there were shortages of clothing, seed, and domestic animals.  They were not permitted to leave and were always in danger of being raided by bandits and Mongol tribes.  Despite a significant death rate, 104 villages were founded in the Saratov area on both sides of the Volga River in 4 years ⁴.  In 1772, Catherine II and Frederick of Prussia invaded and then divided Poland, resulting in Russia expanding to include territory in Volhynia and Podolia ⁵.  This provided further areas for colonization and in years to come, Czar Alexander I imitated his grandmother’s aggressive immigration policy by settling thousands more Germans in the “New Russia”⁶. 
      The western province of Volhynia, where my paternal grandmother, Friedl Schoenefeld was born in 1940, was acquired as a Russian province in the Second Partition of Poland in 1793.  A part of the western Ukraine near the headwaters of the Western Bug and Pripyat Rivers, it was divided between Poland and the Soviet Ukraine in the Treaty of Riga in 1921⁷.  Many of the Germans who settled there were actually originally invited to do so by Polish landowners of the region.  Many undeveloped areas were leased to German farmers with the first permanent settlement being made at Annette-Josephine in 1816.  Several additional agricultural villages developed in the Rovno region as well.  The main immigration of Germans into this area started in the 1830’s with many Russians of German descent fleeing from areas of Polish insurrection.  These settlers received no help from the Russian government but were likewise free of any restrictions from them.  By 1860 there were 35 small German villages in the area with a population of about 5,000 people ⁸.  In 1861, Czar Alexander II freed the serfs, which caused many Volhynian landowners to seek Russian peasants to farm their land.  In 1863 additional Polish insurrection spurred many Germans living in Poland to move further east.  Germans from Silesia, from where my ancestors came, as well as East Prussia and Galacia came looking for land at this time.  By 1871, 28,000 Germans were living in Volhynia in 139 villages.  They lived in small groups and held long-term leases on land, some eventually being able to buy it outright ⁹. 
      In the Rovno region, where my grandmother was born, the main villages were Tutchen, Alexandria, Sophieka, Freidrichsdorf, and Chotenka.  Because they lived on a western border province, they were the first the feel the effects of anti-German feeling under Alexander III’s government.  The Pan-Slavic Movement at the time said that the Russian Germans were using the Kaiser’s money to buy up Russian land.  Russians were no longer able to buy land, and saw their leases taken away and given to non-German Russians.  Many suffered violence and death at the hands of their own tenants in the 1905 Revolution and the period from 1890 to 1914 actually saw heavy German immigration out of Volhynia .  In July 1915 some 150,000 Volyhnian Germans were deported¹⁰.  These included my great-grandparents, Wilhelm and Henrietta Ehlert Schöenefeld who were deported as children.  My great-uncle, Dr. Wilhelm Walter Schöenefeld spoke about how his grandfather, Gottfried Schoenefeld (my great, great-grandfather) was drafted into the Russian army and how his family, including Dr. Schoenefeld’s father, were deported:
     The Russian czar looked upon the German people as very valuable people and he didn’t want to lose them.  He was afraid that the German armies would take the German population back to Germany.  He was terrified of this, so he deported them before the German armies could reach many areas of Russia, putting them into trains and forcibly deporting them as far as the train would go.  Our parents frequently told us about these deportations. Before that, Gottfried was drafted into the Russian army when he was 34.  He said that he had to go about 50 miles to get his Russian uniform. He [Opa, his father] was 6 years old when his father was sent to Turkey to fight.  Opa was born in 1908.  …Orenburg, that’s how far the train would go; it’s close to Kazakhstan, you see, just a few miles away?  All right, and Mom, my mother, who was five and one-half or six years older than Dad was deported as a child to Kuybyshev; they called it Samara.  Now the Soviets…now you see at that point there was no Kuybyshev because 1914 there was the czar; 1917 was the Russian Revolution, and then when they gave…they called instead of Leningrad was St. Petersburg and now it’s again St. Petersburg.  Kuybyshev was Samara and then it became Kuybyshev and now it’s Samara again, a huge city.  That’s true Russia.  It’s still before the Urals.  It was still west of the Urals but this is how far the train would go.  It didn’t go beyond Kuybyshev or it didn’t go beyond Orenburg, at least at that time.  Here is Saratov; it’s actually closer.  This is where the German Republic was.  Here is Stalingrad; where the Germans lost the war, that is the turning point, Now Saratov is maybe the size of New Jersey; here was a German colony.  They actually said the Germans wanted to come back from…there are Germans still alive, maybe up to two million, mainly in Kazakhstan, an Asian republic, the biggest Asian republic, just south of Orenburg, …some are still alive in Siberia¹¹.
     In 1917, the czar abdicated and a provisional government took over, suspending application of many of the deportation and dispossession orders.  Although the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk technically ended the war in 1918, civil wars continued¹².  For the deported Volhynians, the goal was to go home.  My great-uncle describes the efforts of his father and others:
     What happened was, everyone was starving for years.  The Germans tried to go back to the Ukraine.  They built themselves a train.  Let’s say around 1918, or something…1919; and then the Russians took the train away.  You see, the problem was, because of the war and everything being disrupted the tracks had to be built as you went along.  So finally in about 1921 I think or 1922 they built another train and they started to go and this time they made it all the way.  The Germans did, all the way back to the Ukraine.  They must have gotten some kind of special permission from the government that they wouldn’t be bothered.   But as far as I know they did have to stop along the way, repair tracks sometimes, so this journey would take weeks really which normally should take a couple of days.  Then when you were in a place, a village or a town where the track had to be repaired, then there was no food and again Oma [his grandmother] would send the children begging, go and beg for some food.  And she said when you knock at the door of a village person, because these people are poor, but do the sign of the cross, and these people will give you whatever little they have.  I almost have to cry when I hear this story because, because that’s what Opa did.  They were starving and he would make the sign of the cross.  And these Russian people were good people.  If they had two potatoes, they would give you one.  So, the thing was, all the years of Communism couldn’t eradicate belief in God, so…for some people, it became even stronger.  So they finally made it all the way back to the Ukraine and then the thing was, I think all the houses they had, had been destroyed. . They went back, I think to the same place.  For the past hundred years they worked with the hands.  They literally would eliminate tree stumps all by hand…axes…dig around and make land farmable.  But the land was there and they…some in the family were good craftsmen.  There was this Freidrich from Mother’s side.  I know a little bit less about the craftsmanship of Father’s side.  But Mother’s side, she had many brothers and they were good builders.  We have pictures of the houses that they built.  They would build these and very soon get established¹².
     The Volhynians who survived and returned had a brief respite until World War II would bring the final dissolution of the German colonies.   My great-grandparents, who had both been born in the same village and then deported, courted and were married on April 13, 1933.   They settled down to farm for a family of Jewish landowners.  The family provided well for them, and there was a strong bond of affection between them.  My great-grandparents’ family grew with the arrival of three daughters:  Angela, Herme and Friedl.  Hitler’s anti-communist beliefs and plans to expand threatened Russia, however, and from 1935, the German-Russians were increasingly cut off from the outside world¹³.  Despite a public non-aggression treaty between Hitler and Stalin signed on August 2, 1939, there was a secret plan to divide Poland and effect a large-scale population exchange between the Soviet Union and Germany.  In September 1939, Hitler annexed Poland and ordered that all Germans be brought closer to the Reich¹⁴.   This was to further Hitler’s dream of expanding the Aryan Reich throughout central Europe.  My grandmother and great-uncle recounted their father’s story about how they were ordered to Berlin and there assigned to their new homes and duties.  My great-grandfather, and some 60,000 other Volhynian farmers were resettled, in his case, about 70 kilometers east of Lodz in Poland.  My great-grandfather actually became the mayor of the small village, Wygelzow, where they lived and where my great-uncle and his sister Hildegard were born. They, like many German repatriates felt badly about occupying what was, in effect, stolen Polish land, but they feared Hitler’s reprisals if they did not obey. They were made to produce a strict quota of eggs, and milk for the German army¹⁵. One of my grandmother’s cousins, Ida Fitz, who was fluent in several languages, was pressed into service as a translator in Berlin.
     The turning point in the war came on February 2, 1943 when the Germans surrendered to the Russians at Stalingrad¹⁶.  My great-grandparents’ uneasy existence continued until 1944 when:
      … they conscripted Dad into the German army, not to fight but simply to go to southern France as an occupational soldier.  Opa never fired a shot against anybody.  Then in 1945 General de Gaulle of France brought in Moroccans and Algerians in the front lines and he gave them many weapons and the Germans had just a couple of rifles.  So they had to become prisoners of war.  The German officers would say either you become captured or you let yourself be killed or you run away or whatever you want to do you can do.  It’s total turmoil right now, and so he decided to let himself be captured.  In the beginning it was very, very difficult.  There was a fortress that he was put into and everybody was starving; there was no food¹⁷.
     My great-grandmother and her five children remained in Poland, not allowed to leave because of their role in feeding the German army.  By January 1945, however, Warsaw had fallen and hundreds of thousands of German repatriates fled west before the advancing Russian troops.  Perhaps as few as 100,000 escaped; most were killed or deported to Soviet Asia¹⁸.   Finally, in early 1945 my family left Wygelzow with other Germans in a hay wagon.  Before my great-grandmother left she buried the Nazi flag, which they had been forced to fly, in the ground. They got to the river separating Poland from Germany and decided to spend the night and cross in the morning.  Overnight, the bridge was blown up and they were forced to return to the town.  The Poles had reclaimed the farm so they were forced to live in one room in what had been a youth hostel.  The Poles forced the German adults to work at menial tasks; my great-grandmother had to leave her three youngest children (ages 6,4,1) alone in the unheated room while she cleaned the local school each day.  She was given only a single slice of bread each day to eat.  She would gather blueberries, mushrooms and other plants and roots to eat or to barter for food for her family.   The two older daughters were forced to live and work at local farms in exchange for food.  In desperate need of clothing, she dug up the Nazi, flag, she had buried months before, cut out the swastika, and used the remaining red cloth to hand-sew a dress and bloomers for her daughter, my grandmother.
     Towards the end of that year they hatched an escape plan.  The two oldest daughters came for a visit and, without packing anything, they set off as if for a walk.  They got a ride in a Russian troop truck by soldiers who mistook them for local peasants because they spoke Polish as well as Russian.  They met up with other German refugees and made their way stealthily towards the border.  They were always in fear of Poles and Russians who would retaliate against German refugees.  Once, Russian soldiers took their birth certificates, bankbook and family photos and threw them into the mud and stomped on them.  A Russian soldier once raped my great-grandmother.  They sometimes had to seek shelter at night or in storms in abandoned buildings.  They finally crossed the border into what was then East Germany on June 25, 1947¹⁹. 
     Meanwhile, my great-grandfather was still a prisoner in France.  My great-uncle describes his eventual release:
     They wanted to keep them until 1950 for five years because French prisoners had been prisoners in Germany for five years.  Then it was Pope Pius who interceded; he said:  “You can’t do that.” He spoke up for the Germans and they let them go in 1947. Then the French said: “Where do you want to go?  You can go to Poland.”  Dad had a wife there but he heard that the Poles were murdering all the Germans who were returning to Poland.  They did murder one of the uncles brutally. They murdered Uncle Edward.  Mom had many brothers.  The only one I know well was Uncle Hermann whom I visited in communist Germany many times.  Then there was Wilhelm that I saw who was injured in the war and died in 1956.  Friedrich was the smartest.  Friedl has lots of documents from him.  He was becoming an air force engineer.  He was killed in 1945 and I just found out from Helga that his grave is outside Berlin.  Hermann died when he was 82, some years ago.  No one got to be as old as Mom or Dad; they all died.   So there were these brothers.  Edward had married a Polish woman and he had children with her and he was warned:  “Don’t go back, they’re going to kill you.”  But he wanted to see his family and sure enough, simply because he was German, he didn’t do anything wrong, they grabbed him. They put a board here [points to his chest] and a board in the back and then they took clubs and they beat on these two boards so outside you could not see any blue marks or black marks.  Inside all the organs were damaged.  Then they threw him into a shed and it took three months for him to die.  They did not want him to die quickly; they wanted to torture him…well that’s the hatred, how big it was. [Opa] was smart enough to say he wanted to go to his mom in Nuremburg, so they released him to Nuremburg, which is here [points at the map].  It’s very interesting, there are documents and I have them at home which shows his going … over Switzerland, and I have the border stamp the very day that he crossed the border into Germany, which was a very pretty part of Germany around here…not far from the Black Forest…south   Then everybody was starving and there was no food and there was no place to stay so we were here in East Germany ²⁰.
     They lived in refugee camps where hundreds of people lived in one hall and entire families shared a single mattress. In 1947, with help from the Red Cross, my great-grandfather learned of his family’s whereabouts.  As my great-grandmother and the children had no papers and were in the Russian sector, they could not leave freely. As a matter of fact, the rest of the Allies were cooperating with the Russians in rounding up refugee Germans²¹.  My grandmother’s cousin, the translator, disappeared at this time, leaving her baby daughter, Monika behind.  In the fall of 1948, with the help of border smugglers, they sneaked across the border into Bavaria, and then returned to Nuremburg²².   Like many refugees, they faced the dilemma of being unable to get a place to stay without work, but unable to work without a place to live.   During this time they stayed in a village outside Nuremburg.  My great-grandfather was able to convince the local vice-mayor that they had a place to stay, and my great-grandparents moved into a bombed-out building in Nuremburg which they rebuilt with help from Opa’s brother, Ludwig, in exchange for reduced rent from the landlord.  It was a difficult life with their small apartment offering little privacy and heat only from a coal stove.  The children helped out by collecting scrap metal from ruins, which they were able to sell.  When schools opened again, there were so many refugee students that they had to attend in shifts. 
      Meanwhile, one of my great-grandmother’s aunts, who lived in New York, had been urging them to send one of their daughters to live with her in America.  By this time, two of the older daughters were grown and had no interested in immigrating;  Herme had passed away at the age of 22 from a heart condition.  My great-grandfather, unwilling to be separated from his remaining daughter, made the decision to move the entire family to the United States, under the aunt’s sponsorship.  My great-uncle described his view at that time of the United States as a Schlaraffenland, a utopia where no one had to work and food and material goods were available in abundance.   Although that illusion was quickly dispelled,  America did prove to be a safe haven where he, the youngest child of peasant farmers would grow up and eventually earn a doctoral degree in German literature.   As historian Dr. Karl Stumpp described the flourishing of Catherine The Great’s original German immigrants:  they quickly progressed from Tot to Not to Brot….from death, to necessity, to plenty²³.