After the war ended
The Gulag camps
By Leila Medina
Three horses were dragging their carriage in a hurry. They were trying to escape from the Soviets, unaware that these would be their last moments of freedom. Bruno, then 12 years old, still remembers that day at the age of 88. He and his family were Germans and lived in the fields, but when the war ended, the Allied occupation forced them to leave everything behind and escape.
In 1945 the Nazi troops were defeated, the few remaining members of the Nazi state escaped, and the German people were left to face their fate. Thus, despite the end of the war, a humanitarian crisis began of which not much is known today. We are talking about the special camps, created as an Allied initiative, where it was intended to incarcerate officials of the Third Reich system, members of the SS and Gestapo police. However, along with them, German civilians who were not directly related to the regime, even children, were detained. One of them was Bruno.
Bruno is German, born in 1934 into a family that worked in agriculture. He was born in Poland at the time, a place which is now Ukraine. He then relocated to what is now Germany. He had 3 siblings, his mother took care of the children, his father was drafted in 1943 as a soldier in the German army. He went to the battlefield despite not being a Nazi supporter, soon after he would be a prisoner of war in the United States.
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Bruno, like almost every German boy, at the age of 10, joined the Hitler Youth, a mandatory step at the time that seemed harmless. Bruno describes it like the Boy Scouts, or at least that's what he remembers from the short time he was in the group.
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They had activities like going camping, hiking and spending time with their friends. But he also remembers that the boys were indoctrinated little by little, they were taught how to march, they were taught hymns, and many boys who belonged to this group grew up to become soldiers. A subtle way of indoctrinating the youth.
The end of the war: The beginning of their terror
When the war ended, his father was a prisoner in the United States. Seeing that the Soviets were invading Germany, Bruno's mother decided to leave with her sons for the West. Unfortunately, they were arrested and, like many other German civilians, taken to labor camps where they had to perform forced labor. Abuse, hunger and misery were the order of the day.
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Leaving it all behind
In 1953 Bruno left Germany in search of a better future and arrived in Canada, then married and moved to the United States, where he lives to this day.
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Almost 76 years have passed since the end of the war and Bruno prefers to forget those days, which he describes as the worst of his life. When they left that camp he preferred to leave it behind and not talk about it.
When I ask Bruno about the danger of something like that happening again or a dictatorial government rising again like in Germany in 1939, he answers me worried: “Hitler was elected by the people because we had democracy at that time in Germany, and he used the same tricks that, I hope I don't get in trouble, but Trump was on his way to do the same thing: Overthrow the democratic government and become a dictator.”
With the memory still fresh of those days where he didn't know if he would be free and many years of experience under his belt, Bruno ends with reminding me that there will always be people who seek to have control over others and stresses that war only leaves ruins, recalling the state of his country in 1953 when he decided to leave.
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Although Bruno's hell ended almost 74 years ago, his testimony and experience are just as current, in a world where extremist governments are on the rise and remembering the past is good for us to avoid mistakes that could lead us to repeat it.