The Bolsheviks were coming! The news was enough to make the blood of the people of the village of Suessenbergrun run cold. The Bolsheviks were atheists. They had no human decency, no respect for human lives. In this atmosphere I tried to settle into my normal parochial duties. But these very duties were colored with the threat of invasion at every step.

My Thirty-Third Year, by Gerhard A. Fittkau (282 pages, Cluny Media)

The beginning of January 1945 brought a mounting sense of fear, even of panic, to the village of Suessenberg. Up till now the people had retained their stolid peasant acceptance of the inevitable. They had long become inured to living under arbitrary regulations that filtered down to them from some mysterious authority which, being authority, was beyond question. They had learned to live with a war that swallowed up their husbands and sons on some distant battlefield and sent in return prisoners or evacuees to work their farms. They had even become familiar with, without ceasing to be frightened by, the sight of a captured Russian parachutist being brought into the village at the end of a steeplejack’s broomstick. But this was different. The Bolsheviks were coming!

The very word Bolshevik was enough to make the blood of these people run cold. From the days of the Russian Revolution they had filled their minds with horrible pictures of Bolshevik atrocities. The Bolsheviks were atheists. They had no human decency, no respect for human lives. They had let millions of their own people starve for cold-blooded political reasons; they had slaughtered thousands of others and sent millions more to die in the slave camps of Siberia. Their soldiers robbed and raped and slaughtered everywhere they went. The thought of falling into the hands of the Bolsheviks was worse, much worse, than death.

And now the fear, the certainty, that the Bolsheviks would soon be hammering down our doors was strengthened by the increasing flow of refugees from towns closer to the Russian lines. These refugees knew what Soviet occupation was like. They had been engulfed in the first Russian advance and liberated when the German army pushed them back, and they did not intend to be caught again. The villagers’ fear was increased when the remaining men were ordered out to dig trenches and build tank obstacles in the surrounding woods and countryside.

In this atmosphere I tried to settle into my normal parochial duties. But these very duties were colored with the threat of invasion at every step. The Volkssturm, for instance, had to go out to the woods on Sundays as on other days. Their leader came to ask me if they could have a Mass at four o’clock in the morning before their day’s digging. I was gratified when not one of them missed the opportunity for the sacraments.

I announced the date of the regular First Communion class and revived an old parish custom in order to round up all the children. After the feast of the Epiphany, January 6, the pastor, accompanied by three boys dressed as the three kings, goes from home to home in the parish. He blesses every house, every barn, and all the other buildings. Then he watches the father of each family place the initials of the three wise men, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar along with three crosses and the current year on the lintel of the door, in this form, 19 C—M—B 45. Then the whole household gathers for a prayer, all sing the Magnificat and the pastor leads the singing procession through the house blessing each room and sprinkling it with holy water. The house-to-house visitation served several purposes in addition to finding what children were ready for First Communion. During the fourteen days it occupied, I met all my people in their own homes; consequently, when the Russians came I was familiar with the location of each farm. I also found out about any non-Catholic evacuees or prisoners people had been hiding from me for fear I would discover how poorly they were being provided for.

Some of my good Catholics made last-minute efforts to prevent me from seeing the embarrassing quarters of their guests. “Don’t bless this room, Father; there are Protestants in it!” But they did not stop me from seeing all the rooms when I replied, smiling, “Then I’m sure you think they need three times as much holy water as I use on you!”

The texts we needed most to meditate in those days were again put into our mouths by the liturgical cycle of the Church year. On the third Sunday after the Epiphany the Epistle of the Mass was St. Paul’s message to the Romans: “If it be possible, as far as in you lies, be at peace with all men…if thy enemy is hungry, give him food; if he is thirsty, give him drink… Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

The Gospel of the same Mass was the story of the good centurion with Christ’s warning words: “Amen, I say to you, I have not found so great a faith in Israel. And I tell you that many will come from the east and from the west, and will feast with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, but the children of the kingdom will be put forth into the darkness outside; there will be weeping and the gnashing of teeth.”

In the middle of my sermon I saw the church door slowly open. A group of men shuffled awkwardly in with more than the ordinary self-consciousness of latecomers interrupting a sermon. Their appearance was ominous. They were Volkssturm, the last dregs of our manpower who had been rounded up and sent off to the northern front just a week before.

After Mass everyone gathered around them, welcoming their own and learning the reason for their unexpected reappearance. The whole northern front had been routed. The German army was in disorderly retreat. The Russians were pushing swiftly west toward Königsberg. These old men had found themselves with only rusty Italian rifles and five rounds of ammunition to oppose heavily armored Russian tanks. They had run for their lives back to their homes where they might still be of some protection to their families.

This first-hand evidence outweighed all the propaganda from the German radio and public authorities. It shook us out of believing the voices that had told us there was no immediate danger, that a new German push was being prepared and that new secret weapons were ready to destroy all threat of Soviet invasion.

This word carried by our own men from the north also brought dull certainty that similar reports we had heard from the south were equally true. The German front had broken down there too and the Russians were heading for Allenstein, Elbing, and Danzig. Our little village was caught in the huge pincers of a twin Soviet drive for the Baltic coast. The pincers were closing. It was no longer a matter of “if the Russians come.” It was only a question of when.…

Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.

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The featured image is “Christ in Emmaus” (1897) by Jacek Malczewski, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.