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Gisela's Stories

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but I'm waiting for the next episode.............not yet the conclusion? I think
 
:D blubber over all of them:devil:
 
The blissful month of June floated by. A soft warm season of happiness shared. Of searching and discovery, made delightfully intense by the known but hidden sense of an ending. That this was somehow an interlude that would not last. That every moment, every second was somehow borrowed time.

They could almost hear in their minds the exhausts of the T34 tanks massing along the border. Smell the sweat of the troops, starved of food, of happiness, of release. Sense the tidal wave that had built on the Dneiper, grown on the Vistula, swelled to a flood on the Oder ready to pour over the dam and flood into Thuringia’s woods and meadows. They were living under the volcano. Drowning in the intensity of life, never sure whether they would resurface.

July 3rd. They rolled into town. Roaring exhausts. Tired, exhausted soldiers. They had fought from Stalingrad and Kursk. Sunken eyes. Grey half-shaven cheeks. Eyes that had seen too much too young and carried a glazed, dulled, disembodied sense of self. Childlike yet with all innocence long since lost.
 
Gisela woke. Stared at Edith as the morning light flooded the attic room. How could she have ever doubted that this was right? She lifted her body slightly, her back like the curve of a bow. And looked down through a mask of tangled red tresses over the slender, sleeping body below her. Let her breath move so very softly the hair over Edith’s face. Staring deeply, absorbing. The line of her lips, the precise way her nose met her face, the shape of her ears, the touch of her flesh. Gisela’s nose almost - not quite - touching. Feeling an unearthly magnetism. Feeling a sense of joy and fear. Happiness like this could not last, was never meant to last.
 
Dr. Prüfer leant in the doorway to his office, looking down on the desks where the two girls worked. Gisela turned to him, laying down the papers she was working on, sensing his mood of expectation and nervousness.

“Sir, when are they coming?”

“Soon. This morning. We shouldn’t be nervous. They will need us just as much as the Americans did. Don’t worry girls”.

He lifted his arm, pushing back the sleeve, glancing at his watch; stepped across the room, parting the pale green blinds and staring across to the rail tracks, straining to see the flash of a windshield crossing the rail-tracks. The clock ticked slowly, the minute hand seemed not to want to to make its long journey back to the twelve. The room stiflingly hot, not a breath of air moving through the opened windows.

“They’re here! Get ready! We must make a good impression. Edith, clear those cups away, come on!”
 
pkindenhaag said:
Dr. Prüfer leant in the doorway to his office, looking down on the desks where the two girls worked. Gisela turned to him, laying down the papers she was working on, sensing his mood of expectation and nervousness.

“Sir, when are they coming?”

“Soon. This morning. We shouldn’t be nervous. They will need us just as much as the Americans did. Don’t worry girls”.

He lifted his arm, pushing back the sleeve, glancing at his watch; stepped across the room, parting the pale green blinds and staring across to the rail tracks, straining to see the flash of a windshield crossing the rail-tracks. The clock ticked slowly, the minute hand seemed not to want to to make its long journey back to the twelve. The room stiflingly hot, not a breath of air moving through the opened windows.

“They’re here! Get ready! We must make a good impression. Edith, clear those cups away, come on!”
Click to expand...

Suspense!!!!
 
The sky was a shimmering white, the leaves on the lindens translucent green as they flickered and twitched in the airless heat. The cats in the streets sought out the shade to hide away, dreaming their silent dreams. Alone in this mid-summer torpor the forges and hammers of Topf & Söhne maintained their monotonous beat. The factory girls wiping the sweat from their brows, weary faces longing for break time and a glass of cooling water. In the office the steady click click of the typewriters as new orders replaced old. The aroma of coffee mingling with cigar smoke drifting from the Directors’ rooms. Gisela and Edith had grown accustomed to the new voices, to the laughter of the Russian soldiers and the officers, sometimes rough, sometimes sweetly charming. So much had changed, but so much remained just the same. The cafes in the Fischmarkt were still thronged, Mississippi drawl exchanged for the songs of the Dneiper. They were prisoners yet somehow enjoying a new and charming freedom. Learning new words, discovering new possibilities. Some nights Gisela would skip over the cobbles to Edith’s tiny flat, watching the sun setting as they lay together in quiet contentment. Some nights she would drink and dance with the officers and, if they charmed her, would with wide eyes, slip from her tight dress and slide gently between soft sheets, listening to tales of the golden domes of Kiev or the wild battles in front of Moscow and Leningrad, then lying back and sharing a cigarette, would watch the smoke turn ochre as the last tired light of the day settled behind the city spires.

Another dull day in the midst of that shimmering summer. An unanticipated roar as a line of trucks clattered over the rail tracks and pulled in to the parking lot in front of the office block, the billowing dust floating in clouds around the drab green of the convoy.

Shouts and crashing boots. Soldiers banging rifles, red faced. Rushing into the factory. Two officers, ones they knew - ones Gisela knew well - clicking heels as they entered. Asking for lists. Personnel. Numbers of women workers. Laying them on the table, marking them up and passing them to a young captain with a baby-fresh face. Dr. Prüfer questioning, being waved away back to his room. More orders shouted. A cup of coffee lying half-drunk on the table.

Three lines of girls from the factory. Confused looks, hands holding oily rags, wiping dirt away. Sweat-stained from the heat of the foundry. Thirty, maybe forty. Mostly the young ones. Looking back towards the open roller-door, staring back at their work-mates. Wondering why they had been pulled from the job into the broiling sun. Standing silent on the concrete parking area. Looking up at the trucks, at the soldiers as they pulled back the canvas covers and dropped the back hatches. Glancing again to the factory. To women shielding their eyes from the sun, or were they wiping silent tears?

The orders came and they shuffled towards the trucks, the soldiers roughly pushing them in, shoving them down onto the benches on each side, slamming the backs shut.

A staff car, red flags on each wing, pulled up outside the office door. The Dr., Gisela and Edith ushered politely inside.

And then the convoy set off. Over the rail tracks. Headed east away from the city. Along the new road to Weimar. A long, bouncing, hot drive. In the car, the officer passing a small bottle of vodka to his passengers, a strange oriental smile on his face.

Just before the Weimar junction the convoy ground to a halt. A road block. More shouted instructions. Engines gunned back into life, thick black smoke blending with the heat haze from the tarred road surface. Bomb damage everywhere. Broken and blasted buildings, shattered rail lines. Trees still clad in their summer green growing at crazy angles. The road inclining gently upwards, clouds of yellow dust driven up by the heavy trucks. A line of poplars, and ahead a gateway between two grey brick towers. A sign overhead. Jedem das Seine - “to each his own”.... “you get what you deserve”...The Dr. knew exactly where they were.
 
Chapter 6​

Interview printed in the Deutschland Journal, March 7th 1965. Present at the writing of this report:

Benhard Wassberg, born on May 15 1901
Reiner Halhmmannm, born of Feb 3 1910
Manfre Howerm, born on April 9 1929
Kyrill Wortilla, born on March 2 1918

The witnesses confirm that the aforementioned Gisela Geier, made this report without any coercion threats or other outside influence, motivated solely by the need to make the terrible events of the time of the Reich’s collapse known to posterity.

This report was drawn up on October 7, 1955 and discusses events of July 23, 24 and 25 1945, which are already partially known. At that time the witness was employed as a secretary at the company Topf & Söhne, and was by virtue of her privileged role considered by the Russian Army to have the status of “ally”.

These prerogatives were attested to by a document which she presented here and which bears the rubber stamp of the First Russian White Army. Since the report disregards existing moral standards and sexual taboos, it must under no circumstances be made available to underage persons.

“On the morning of July 23 a Russian detachment of the occupying forces in Thuringia attended the factory of Topf & Söhne where I worked as secretary to the Board of Directors. The Commissar, who spoke German well, informed me that we would be taken, along with a number of factory workers, to the labour camp at Buchenwald, near to Weimar.

Since I was the company secretary, I and my colleague Edith Meissner were on friendly terms with the Allies and were treated kindly. At the factory, there were some five hundred workers, most of whom, because of the war, were women.

The Commissar was very polite to us and sent us first of all to a room in the administration block.It seemed a temporary arrangement and was not uncomfortable. On the second day, July 24, we were asked to view the main buildings of the camp and especially the crematoria facilities, where we saw a number of furnaces that had the manufacturing stamps from our factory. We were also shown remains which sometimes included very obvious human bones and this was of course very disturbing for us.

On the next day, the 25th July, we awoke to hearing terrible screaming from a near-by building. We also were woken and urged to dress quickly. We were then led to what I believe was a catering building. I say this because there were several steel tables in the tiled room that looked as if they were intended for food preparation. The room had been completely cleared out except for these few tables and had a window on one side. Although the day was hot, I remember the room being terribly cold. There were a number of Russian soldiers on one side and they were making very obscene remarks and were laughing.

The Commissar told me and Edith to watch and learn how the Russians would turn the master race into “whimpering bits of misery”. We did not really know what he meant.

Next two soldiers, they could have been Poles or Belorussians from their language, came into the room, dragging with them several of the factory girls who we knew.

They had been stripped naked and were crying. I think they were probably aged around eighteen or twenty. The soldiers had left the older workers back at the factory. Anyway, the soldiers spoke very loudly and I think obscenely, judging that everything they said drew gales of laughter from the other Russians present.

Anyway, the two soldiers grabbed the first girl and bent her backwards over the edge of one of the metal tables until her joints cracked. I felt I was close to passing out as one of them took his knife and in front of the other girl, cut of her right breast. He paused for a moment and then he cut of the other side.

I have never heard anyone scream as desperately as that girl. After this operation he drove his knife into her abdomen several times, which again was accompanied by cheers from the watching Russians.

The girl cried for mercy, but in vain. It seemed that the gruesome deed was done particularly slowly because she was exceptionally pretty. The other girls cried for their mothers and begged for a quick death, but the same fate awaited them as well.

The last of them was almost a child. Maybe eighteen years old but still with barely developed breasts. They literally tore the flesh off her until the white bones showed.

Then another five girls were brought in. They had all been carefully selected this time. All of them were well developed and pretty. When they saw the bodies of their predecessors they began to cry and scream. Weakly, they tried to defend themselves, but it did no good as the Russians became even more cruel.

They sliced the body of one of them open lengthwise and poured in a can of machine oil which they tried to light, A soldier shot one of the girls through the genitals before they cut of her breasts.

Loud howls of approval began when someone brought a saw from a tool chest. This was used to tear off the breasts from the other girls, which soon caused the floor to be awash in blood. The Russians were in a blood frenzy.

More girls were brought in continually. I saw these grisly proceedings as through a red haze. Over and over again I heard the terrible screams when the breasts were tortured, and the loud groans at the mutilation of the genitals.

When my knees buckled, I was forced onto a chair..The Commissar always made sure that I was watching, and when I had to throw up they even paused in their tortures.

One girl had not undressed completely and may also have been a little older than the others, maybe twenty or twenty one years old, They soaked her bra with oil and set it on fire, and while she screamed, a thin iron rod was shoved into her vagina until it came out through her navel.

It was a horrible fact that not one of the girls mutilated here ever fainted. Each of them suffered mutilation fully conscious. In their terror all of them were alike in their pleading; it was always the same, the begging for mercy, the high-pitched scream when the breasts were cut and the groans when the genitals were mutilated.

The slaughter was interrupted several times to sweep the blood out of the room and to clear away the bodies. That evening, when we were returned to the city, I succumbed to a severe case of nervous fever. I do not remember anything from that point until I came to back in the factory office. That is where I learned that my friend, Edith Meissner, had killed herself.”



Signed: Miss Gisela Geier.



THE END OF GISELA'S SECOND STORY​
 
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hard reading, very powerful - I'm shivering​
 
The final chapter is based on a true deposition, published in Der Friewillige, June 1995, under the title "In Their Terror All Were Alike" and edited by Hans Koppe. I have changed some of the names and the setting. The original was based on the report of a German-Brazilian citizen, Leonora Geier, and discusses events in February 1945 at the camp "Vilmsee", near Neustettin in Pomerania (now Szczecinek in modern Poland) , at which she was employed as a typist in the Women's Labour Service.
 
I think it's a brilliant move - it's not easy writing a scene like that,
I think the shift from the uneasy sense of foreboding in the previous episode
and that 'cctv footage' objectivity is, like I said, a very powerful way of handling it,
no need for emotive words, the facts speak for themselves.​
 
:eek::( I've put a "like", but I dont like ... what it is told in the text ...
Dont be angry or annoyed by what I say, Pkin : I've difficulties to read this kind of story, knowing it's a real story ...

It's not possible that human beeing could have such a cruelty, and why ? To do pay these girls who were not at all answerable of what it happened during the Nazy time !

I'm collapsed !
... and if it was finished !!! It continue yet and yet, women are the main victims of the wars ... always...always...always ....:(
 
messaline said:
:eek::( I've put a "like", but I dont like ... what it is told in the text ...
Dont be angry or annoyed by what I say, Pkin : I've difficulties to read this kind of story, knowing it's a real story ...

It's not possible that human beeing could have such a cruelty, and why ? To do pay these girls who were not at all answerable of what it happened during the Nazy time !

I'm collapsed !
... and if it was finished !!! It continue yet and yet, women are the main victims of the wars ... always...always...always ....:(
Click to expand...
What you say is totally true. Women are always the true victims of wars. And evil times still continue....
 
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