WWII: Fleeing the Russians in 1945

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Ruth Adul (right) with her sister, Inge-Lore, and brother, Karl-Georg, in 1943

Ruth Adul's family outside their home in Ritsow, Germany, in 1942 before the Russians arrived

Ruth and her sisters just before the Russian invasion, L-R: Ursula, Ruth, Emmi (a friend), Daniela and Inge-Lore

Ruth Adul’s brother, Horst, in 1943. He fought the Russians

WHEN Russian forces occupied her German homeland after the Second World War, Ruth Adul proved to be a formidable young woman.

As one of nine children, and the eldest daughter, she ended up helping her mother steer the family to safety.

Just 17 at the time, she travelled alone across a dangerous Germany to discover if members of her family were still alive.

She foraged for food and took low-paid jobs to help feed her family until they eventually managed to escape across the border from Russian-occupied East to West Germany.

Ruth, now 78, and living in Beckitt Close, Derby, has written an account of her post-war experiences in a booklet entitled Under Darkened Skies.

She tells of how on March 15, 1945, Russian soldiers entered her German village on the Baltic Sea – an area which is now part of Poland. It was a day that changed her life and those of her family forever.

While Europe was recovering from the war, Germany was in crisis. The occupying Russians sent many civilian Germans to Siberian labour camps, while others were put to work on the railway lines.

Ruth’s father went missing on the day the Russians marched into their village. The family did not know whether he had been killed or captured. They were also parted from her sister, Inge-Lore, who was living in the next village.

Ruth writes: “On the day the first Russians walked into the village, nothing belonged to you any more. All rights were taken away from us. If they entered your house, there was nothing you could do about it. Anything they fancied they just took. Watches and any jewellery were the first things to be taken.”

The women were next. The occupying Russian forces rapidly gained a reputation for raping whoever took their fancy.

Ruth, herself, had a narrow escape when a drunken Russian soldier tried to grab her. At the time, she was working away from home as a secretary at a large farm estate in Wobesde, in Stolp. Extricating herself, she ran and hid in a cemetery behind a gravestone, adorned with ivy.

On another occasion, she was upstairs in her room when a soldier entered her landlady’s house.

“He had an Alsatian dog with him. I am glad to say that it was on a leash. While he searched the downstairs rooms, I slipped out of my room to hide in the space between the sidewall of the room and the sloping roof.

“I crawled as far back as was possible and from there I could make out the silhouette of the dog.

“Looking back today, I am still wondering why the dog did not pick up my scent.”

Another time, after she and her landlady heard artillery explosions, they decided to hide in the woods. Ruth tells how they used pine needles as a mattress and got water from a nearby farm.

Walking along one day, a Russian soldier pulled a gun on Ruth and ordered her to report at the soldiers’ barracks the following day to do some cleaning. Her payment for the day’s work was a loaf of bread which, she says, was “thankfully accepted.

“Just imagine,” she writes, “from one day to the next, there are no shops in existence because they had all been plundered, no telephones, no transport of any kind.

“We had no way of communicating either by letter, telephone or other means. This meant I had no knowledge of what had happened to my parents and sisters or their whereabouts.”

On Mothering Sunday in 1945, Ruth made up her mind that she had to make the dangerous journey home. It took her a day to walk back to her family home in Schmolsin, avoiding soldiers as she went.

There was a joyful reunion between Ruth and her mother and sisters, but her father was still missing. While at home, Ruth turned her hand to felling trees for firewood and trying to find food.

Months later, Ruth and her family heard that trains of German refugees were being shipped out from Stolp to East Germany.

“We realised that, if this was the truth, we were losing our homeland for good to Poland,” she said.

On December 13, 1946, the family was ordered out of their home and marched to houses near the railway station which served as an assembly point.

People were put into wagons and sent on a 10-day train journey.

“We made some stops to use toilet facilities and I can vaguely remember getting some soup on three occasions; otherwise, we only got some drinking water and a loaf of bread,” says Ruth.

On December 24, they arrived at their provisional destination where they stayed in a camp for a few weeks.

“Eventually, we were found a flat in bombed out Magdeburg. The Red Cross organisation had issued long lists of missing persons and, through them, we discovered my father was still alive and made contact with him,” says Ruth.

“It was not long before he joined us. Life was not ideal. Dad and I would forage around the bombed buildings for usable wood for our cooker.”

There were no job prospects and, while the family tried to settle, they hatched plans to get across the border into West Germany.

“It was depressing to see one’s land being divided into East and West,” says Ruth.

The Berlin Wall had not yet been built but the border fencing between East and West was already in place, controlled by Russian guards.

The family paid a guide to get them to the nearest western railway station which was Helmstedt. Ruth’s father was the first to go with three of her sisters.

It was June 1947. In the previous six months, the family had accumulated various household goods which they didn’t want to leave behind, so they filled a larger laundry wicker basket which they carried as well as rucksacks on their backs.

“One has to bear in mind that Dietlinde, the youngest sister, was still only seven years old,” says Ruth.

“If you have seen the film The Sound of Music, you can picture us instead of them – the only difference being that we did not have to struggle over the mountains.”

Ruth and the family were also eventually reunited with her sister Inge-Lore and it was through Inge-Lore that Ruth found out that a British major and his wife, living in Germany, were looking for an au-pair.

Ruth, by then 21, worked for the couple for two-and-a-half months and when the major was posted back to England, he took her with them to Knaresborough, in Yorkshire, to au-pair for a year.

Ruth’s feet touched British soil on March 16, 1949. She never looked back.

Within months she met her husband, Gerhard Adul, in a cinema in Harrogate. She was talking in German and Gerhard, an Estonian, who was a German speaker, overheard her.

“He jumped over the seats and came and sat next to me,” she laughed.

Four months later, they were married and it was not long before they moved to Derby.

“We had a very hard time at first,” recalls Ruth.

Gerhard – or “Gerry” – was working at Courtaulds in the labs. Ruth, who had no papers or certificates but plenty of confidence, applied for a typist’s job at Courtaulds and got the job.

Later, she became the assistant typing pool manager. In 1950, Ruth gave birth to a daughter, who now lives in Kirk Langley and in 1963, a son, who lives in Shardlow.

The couple managed to buy a house but had little money for anything else.

“We had orange boxes for bedside tables,” says Ruth. “I remember that if I didn’t have enough money for my bus fare, I would travel as far as I could and walk the rest of the way. We didn’t get any support from anyone at that time. Sometimes, we would be called ‘bloody foreigners’.

“We had to work for everything. We applied for a mortgage and had to scrape the deposit together.”

Sadly, Gerry died three-and-a-half years ago and Ruth moved to her present home in Beckitt Close.

She is still a formidable, determined lady – something she, no doubt, learned from those days in Russian-occupied Germany.

She still does all her own decorating – she even laid her own floor tiles in the kitchen recently – and can still do the splits.

“I am very supple. I keep fit by doing a lot of gardening and looking after my three grandchildren. Living through those hard times in Germany made me appreciate life. I like to make the most of it.”

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