Colditz Page 2

  “Count Philip was therefore,” Priem said, “the first historically recorded escaper of Colditz; albeit that he escaped into Colditz rather than out of it! This kind of escape,” he added wryly, “is the only kind that will be permitted during the present hostilities!”

  During the fifteenth century the town and Castle became the property of the electors of Saxony. In 1430 the Castle was fired by Hussites and razed to the ground. It was rebuilt many years later, in the form of forward and rear castles, each consisting of several buildings. Priem discovered there had been another great fire in 1504—only a few buildings of the front castle survived. The town likewise was almost destroyed. Rebuilding began in 1506.

  Electors ruled in succession until the inheritance passed in 1553 to Duke August. August was especially attracted by the position of the Castle and the hunting grounds around; he showed a marked preference for Colditz and continued the beautifying of it in 1554. His wife was a Danish princess, and their coat of arms remains today over the main gateway. Also in this year (1554) the laying-out of the park began, the elector encircling an area with planks between the Castle and Hainberg. Colditz Castle now became a favored residence of the Saxon princes, and was occupied for much of the year by the princes and others of noble rank.

  In 1586, Christian I, August’s son, who was also fond of Colditz Castle, built a pleasure garden with pavilions. In 1589 a wall was begun around the park beneath the Castle, but in 1590 and 1591, by buying several properties in Zschadrass, Zollwitz, Terpitzsch and Colditz, the area was increased to 125 acres and became known as the Tiergarten (zoological gardens). A wall was built all around it, which exists to this day.

  In 1591, Christian I, now the elector, came to Colditz for the last time. He became ill on a stag hunt near Ebersback, was brought back to the Castle, and from there to Dresden, where he died. In 1603 his widow, the Duchess Sophie of Brandenburg, together with the court and government officials, moved into the Castle and remained there until 1622.

  Plague devastated Colditz at times over two centuries. In 1521 there were more than 800 deaths; in 1607–1608, 428 people died; in 1637 there were 350 victims and in 1680, it claimed the lives of 125 citizens.

  Jędrzej, though closely confined, had seen enough of the Castle to appreciate its points as a fortress. Most fortresses had secret passages, escape routes out of the Castle for use during sieges. He questioned Priem: “What sieges has this Castle undergone?” Priem came back with the surprising answer that from the end of the Thirty Years War (when it was occupied successively by troops of the emperor and of King Gustav Adolf of Sweden) in 1648, and more particularly since 1694, the Castle had seen little fighting and no sieges. “It became,” he explained, “the home of retirement for royal widows and dowagers. It was not even fortified, relying simply on its massive gates to keep unwelcome intruders out.”

  “But surely,” argued Jędrzej, “its strategic position commanding the river and the bridge at Colditz would have made it a natural strongpoint to guard and hold?”

  “No,” said Priem. “Duke Friedrich August [‘the Strong’], who was elector from 1694–1733, built many other castles for the defense of Saxony, and so reduced the strategic importance of Colditz.”

  “So the Castle, being undefended and peaceable, never had to withstand sieges or bombardments?”

  “Indeed,” Priem said. “Invading armies would know it was occupied or owned by dowagers and pass by.”

  But Priem had overlooked a point which became apparent as the nineteenth century unfolded.

  In 1800 the Castle became a poorhouse for the Leipzig district, with part of it set aside for use as a priory, and still, throughout the ensuing Napoleonic era, it remained aloof from the military activity taking place all around. Colditz was right in the path of advancing and retreating armies, and with remorseless regularity the town found itself supporting billeted troops. From time to time it even became a battlefield itself, as in March 1813 when French soldiers seized the bridge over the Mulde. In May of that year, after its defeat at Lutzen, the whole Prussian Army retreated through Colditz, Marshal Blücher setting up a temporary headquarters in the market place. The pursuing French troops were headed by Napoleon himself, and a few days later, after the Prussians had pulled out, he in turn stayed in the town, in Nicolaigate.

  From the end of the Thirty Years War until the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the town of Colditz paid the price of its position on a strategic high road, suffering poverty, starvation, pillage, press-gangs, rape and disease. It is ironic that the Castle, intact and unblemished throughout those years, had been built by Count Wiprecht “in order to protect the town.”

  In 1829 Colditz Castle was converted to an asylum and the criminals were moved to a prison in Zwickau. Until 1924 the Castle remained a mental, insane and psychiatric institution—a sanctuary for the most unfortunate of people. It also became the home of a family for several generations.

  How this ambivalent role came about is revealed by the following extract from the memoirs of Mrs. Elizabeth (Elsa) Schunemann Boveroux of San Francisco.

  My great grandfather Voppel was a member of the household of the King of Saxony. He expected his son to follow in his military career, but Grandpappa had other ideas. He wanted to study medicine, be a doctor, being especially interested in the mentally sick, who were confined and often kept in chains. His idea was to give them freedom to develop and gain confidence, directing them to follow their individual trends, and allowing them to work and play in the open. The King became interested and furthered these ideals. Eventually Grandpappa studied and finally graduated from the University of Jena.

  So Colditz Castle became an asylum. At the time Dr. Voppel was probably about twenty-nine. He was married in the Castle chapel and his twelve children were christened there, including Mrs. Elizabeth Schunemann Boveroux’s mother, and later were confirmed there in the Lutheran faith. There too Elizabeth’s mother was married and Elizabeth herself christened.

  Dr. Voppel had his offices on the ground floor in the old Castle (POW section), and there was a life-sized oil painting of him in his office which disappeared in Hitler’s day. His private apartments were on the first floor—drawing-room and living-rooms—reached by a circular stone staircase. These rooms were occupied by the British POW contingent in the Second World War from November 1940. Elizabeth often played there and Grandma’s work-table and comfortable chair stood in the deep, raised alcove of a window in her living-room, overlooking the park (Tiergarten).

  In those days there was usually a family gathering after the noon-day nap, in the courtyard if the weather was pleasant, in a secluded section to the left of the private entrance. A vivid description of her grandmother and daily life in the Castle at that time, written by Elizabeth, is given in her private memoirs.

  Elizabeth’s mother, Margret Voppel, went to school in Dresden, where she was taught to play the piano by Clara Schumann, wife of the composer. Her father, Max Schunemann, the youngest son of a wealthy Hamburg shipping merchant, voyaged as far as San Francisco at the age of nineteen, fell in love with the place and became an American citizen. Max returned to Germany to visit his father, who by then had retired to a villa beneath the walls of Colditz, and there he met Margret at a social gathering in the Castle. They were married in the chapel in 1873. Elizabeth says that the wedding festivities were gay and memorable—over 300 guests were entertained.

  Elizabeth spent her first five years in the Castle. In March 1879 she and her mother left Colditz to voyage across the Atlantic from Le Havre (Hamburg and Bremen were closed because of the plague), then across America by the Union (Western) Pacific railroad, which brought them to San Francisco. Max, who had travelled ahead of them, was waiting to greet them at the Oakland Mole; he had disliked Bismarck’s regime in Germany and had decided to emigrate for good.

  This unusual interlude of domesticity, combined with the fulfilment of that laudable human and Christian motivation—love of one’s neighbors—which was mani
fest in the care of the mentally sick, lasted for more than fifty years. For Jędrzej, the philosopher and historian, it contained a lesson of hope which did not fail to support him in those first black days and nights in his solitary cell. Castles are linked historically in the mind with war, siege, imprisonment and cruelty. Here was an exception. Castles, after all, are mute accomplices. Man can make good use of his accomplice as well as bad.

  There is no evidence that Colditz Castle became a prisoner-of-war camp in the 1914–1918 war, although the rumor was put about in 1940, probably by the German command, that it had been so used and had been found to be escape-proof. Indeed there were large numbers of psychiatric patients in the Castle during the First World War, of whom 912 are recorded as having died of malnutrition. Three wards were converted to a tuberculosis sanatorium, only to revert to psychiatric wards after the war. After the disastrous German inflation (1922–1923), shortage of funds forced the closure of the asylum in 1924. For two years the Castle stood empty; then in 1926 it became a remand home.

  For the history of the period 1921–1938 one has to rely on a book published by the communist-controlled Colditz town council in 1965. (Colditz became part of the DDR after the war.) From this we learn that as soon as Hitler came to power in 1933, the Castle was turned into a Nazi concentration camp, where members of the Communist party were incarcerated, ostensibly in “protective custody.” By May there were already 600 prisoners, many of whom were tortured. From 1935 to 1937 the Castle was a camp for Nazi brownshirts, and in 1938 it became an asylum once more.

  Jędrzej was curious about the cell in which he found himself, but Priem closed up like a clam whenever he broached the subject of the immediate pre-war incumbents of the cell. Eventually, through the Polish orderly and a few more surreptitious notes, he discovered to his severe discomfiture that he was almost certainly in a condemned cell where previous prisoners had been held before being tortured.

  Paul Priem was born in about 1893 in the region of Bromberg-Schneidemühl, which is now part of Poland but was then part of the German Reich of Kaiser Wilhelm II. It carried a mixed population of Germans and Poles. He had fought right through the First World War, and afterwards he had continued to fight as a volunteer in the Grenzschutz (frontier guards) to keep his home territory part of Germany instead of being incorporated in the new Poland. A Polish insurrection started on 27 December 1918 in Pznania, or Provinz Posen as it was called by the Prussians, to whom it had belonged from the end of the Napoleonic Wars until December 1918. The Polish insurgents seized power in almost the whole of the province, fighting victoriously against a powerful German Army and its Grenzschutz, in which Priem served. The victorious Poles were confirmed in their victory and were treated as part of the Western Allies when Marshal Foch negotiated at Trier on 16 February 1919 the renewal (with new terms) of the 11 November Armistice.

  Priem was the son of a German schoolteacher, and was himself a schoolteacher, in fact a headmaster, from Briesen, a town in this disputed territory. It was therefore little wonder that he was a belligerent (though never fanatical) supporter of Hitler, who had won back this land for Germany in 1939. Jędrzej found that despite this background, Priem felt no dislike for the Poles. In fact, he showed a grudging respect and sympathy for them.

  Jędrzej asked permission of Priem to go to Mass in the chapel with the other Polish prisoners. This was refused at first, but then the order was reversed. On the next Sunday, when all the other prisoners were inside the chapel, he was conducted by Priem through the empty courtyard—empty save for one Polish officer, whom Jędrzej recognized. He was a very left-wing socialist, in fact, a communist, also an atheist: a member of the City Council of Warsaw, of which Jędrzej was also a member. They exchanged salutes in silence. The atheist was embarrassed.

  What an arresting momentary picture of allegory and symbolism that untoward meeting evokes! The cobbled courtyard, the high gray walls—punctuated with barred windows—mounting to the sky; the muted sound of the chapel organ, and men’s voices intoning the opening “Introibo ad altare dei …” the two men, brought together by the bonds of prison, confront each other. The loyal Polish Christian patriot and the communist pro-Russian, atheistic Pole stand with the German victor between them, click their heels and salute…. Jędrzej was escorted up to the balcony of the Chapel, where he remained alone, save for his escort Priem, throughout the service.

  One evening, just as Jędrzej was wrapping his blankets around him on the hard board bed, Priem came to him: “Get up and dress. You are leaving Colditz in ten minutes.”

  A car was waiting. Priem and two sergeants composed the escort. They set off for a railway station some distance from Colditz; thence took a train to Leipzig, and then to Munich, travelling all night. On this long journey they had a compartment to themselves. Priem became very much at ease, and talked freely of the political situation without rancor. He gave Jędrzej a copy of the newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter. He recounted the story of the sinking of the great Polish liner, the Pilsudski, in the North Sea, and expressed his regret, asking Jędrzej if he had known anyone on it.

  “Yes,” Jędrzej said, “I knew the captain.”

  “I am so very sorry,” Priem said. “He went down with his ship—a true sailor.”

  Russia and Finland were at war, Jędrzej learned. The Finns were giving the Russians a good thrashing, which pleased Jędrzej enormously. Priem noticed this. “We can share our feelings on this subject,” he said. “This will make it easier for us to deal with Russia in due course.”

  Jędrzej did not react.

  From Munich, where they changed trains in the morning, they travelled on to Murnau in the Bavarian Alps. There, it transpired, was a large Oflag for Polish officers. Again, Jędrzej was at once placed in solitary confinement. There he spent a month.

  Priem, besides being friendly, had expressed condolences in a roundabout way for Jędrzej’s situation: being a prisoner—in solitary confinement—having lost the war—and having lost his country—his independence gone. At this stage, Jędrzej had brought him up sharply: “The war is not finished. Neither is Poland lost. It will be restored. The war will be won by the Allies—including Poland.”

  Priem had not pressed the point again, respecting his views. So they never quarrelled.

  For far too long the Allies had prevaricated, hoping that the bogeyman would just go away. Only at this point, with the Polish nation subjugated, with men like Jędrzej enduring the devastation of their country, did the Western leaders begin to face the harsh reality of war, forced before their reluctant gaze.

  2

  Poland Leads the Way

  1940

  JĘDRZEJ GIERTYCH WAS BORN in 1903 in Sosnowiec in central Poland. He was educated at home by a private tutor and he had two nannies in turn—one French, one German—so that from his earliest childhood he spoke these two languages. During 1913 and 1914 when Jędrzej was ten years old, he attended a private boarding secondary school in Kielce, his mother’s native town in Poland, at that time under Russian rule. There he was taught in Polish, which was allowed after the revolution of 1905, but he had to learn Russian as a subject. When war broke out he could no longer attend school in Kielce, because it was in the war zone. Instead he went to a German school, a Lutheran cathedral college, at Tallinn, in Estonia, where his father was deputy manager of the largest shipyard in the Russian empire. The school was closed by the Russians after a year and Jędrzej found himself finally in the Russian “Real Gymnasium,” being educated in Russian.

  In 1917 the family moved to the then capital of Russia, Petrograd, the old St. Petersburg and the present Leningrad.* Jędrzej attended a school run by the Polish School Society, whose organization exists to this day in some countries, including England. However, soon after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918 his parents decided it was time to escape from revolutionary Russia.

  During the First World War the Polish nation was divided into two camps, opposed to each other as violently as in
a civil war. The great majority of the Polish nation was on the Allied side. Overwhelmingly, this was the Polish right wing, patriotic, traditionalist, religious (Roman Catholic), conservative in social outlook. They believed that the most dangerous enemy of Poland was Prussia, and thence the whole German nation. The leader of this majority was Roman Damowski. The minority of the Polish nation, predominantly socialist and opposed to the church and to religion, was on the side of Germany and Austria, and was sympathetic to the Russian revolutionaries. Jędrzej was, from his earliest childhood, on the side of the right wing and, from the beginning of the war, on the Allied side. Later in life he became a personal follower and disciple of Damowski, who admitted him into his closest circle of collaborators. Damowski was later the Polish negotiator and signatory to the Versailles Treaty.

  In 1918 the Giertych family returned to Poland, then under German and Austrian occupation. Jędrzej went back to school in Kielce. On 30 October 1918 a substantial part of Poland, around the city of Cracow, liberated itself from Austrian rule. The next day the regions around Kielce, Lublin and Cieszyn followed suit. Troops of schoolboys were the main forces which secured Polish authority in the liberated territories (adults were mostly conscripts in the Austrian Army on the Italian front). Jędrzej was in such a force in Kielce. He was fifteen years old and served for the first time under arms. On 31 October 1918, twelve days before the end of the First World War, he stood as sentry in Kielce, with a very old Austrian rifle and bayonet on his shoulder and with only one cartridge up the barrel. This was his total participation in the First World War. A few weeks later he returned to school.

  His family finally settled in Warsaw in 1919, where Jędrzej attended the Mazowiecka school, with an interval for military service. In July 1920, an appeal was made to Polish civilians for volunteers to increase Polish military effectiveness against the invading army of Bolshevik Russia. Jędrzej volunteered immediately. He found himself in the 201st Infantry Regiment which was formed at the beginning of July in Warsaw. The regiment had one week of training and in the middle of July went to the front. A month later Jędrzej took part in the great battle of Warsaw, or of the Vistula, also called “the miracle of the Vistula,” in which the Russian Army was crushingly beaten. The Poles thus won not only the campaign but the war. Jędrzej’s company was led in this battle by a cadet. On the decisive day of the battle, 15 August, the Feast of Our Lady, his company and his battalion went over the river Ukra, an important tributary of the Vistula. They waded through the water breast-high, holding their rifles and ammunition over their heads. The Russians occupying the other bank fled, but opened up from a distance with machine-guns. Jędrzej was wounded a few minutes after having reached the bank of the river. He spent the rest of the campaign in hospital. He was demobilized in October 1920 and returned to school. He was seventeen years old.