Surviving the Gulag: A German Woman's Memoir

By Ilse Johansen and Heather Marshall

One woman’s story of her struggle to survive while imprisoned in a Soviet gulag following World War II.

“The terrified yell of my comrades makes me stop. I drop the potatoes into the grass and turn around. He has pulled out the pistol and is taking aim. Slowly I come back.”

Surviving the Gulag is the first-person account of a resourceful woman who survived five grueling years in Russian prison camps: starved, traumatized, and worked nearly to death. A story like Ilse Johansen’s is rarely told—of a woman caught in the web of fascism and communism at the end of the Second World War and beginning of the Cold War. The candid story of her time as a prisoner, written soon after her release, provides startling insight into the ordeal of a German female prisoner under Soviet rule. Readers of memoir and history, and students of feminism and war studies, will learn more about women’s experience of the Soviet gulag through the eyes of Ilse Johansen.

“Surviving the Gulag is an unflinching story of being a German woman in the very places that have been written about by so many men.” —Lolita Lark, RALPH Magazine

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781772122909

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The University of Alberta Press

Ring House 2

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E1

www.uap.ualberta.ca

Copyright © 2016 Karin and Rex Marshall

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Johansen, Ilse, 1916–1995, author

Surviving the gulag : a German woman’s memoir / Ilse Johansen ; Heather Marshall, editor ; Hans Rudolf Gahler, translator.

Includes index.

Translated from the German.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978–1–77212–038–7 (paperback).— ISBN 978–1–77212–290–9 (EPUB).— ISBN 978–1–77212–291–6 (kindle).— ISBN 978–1–77212–292–3 (PDF)

1. Johansen, Ilse, 1916–1995. 2. Women political prisoners—Soviet Union—Biography. 3. Women prisoners—Soviet Union—Biography. 4. Germans—Soviet Union—Biography. 5. Political persecution—Soviet Union. 6. Concentration camps—Soviet Union. 7. Forced labor—Soviet Union. I. Marshall, Heather, 1956–, editor II. Gahler, Hans Rudolf, 1928–, translator III. Title.

First edition, first printing, 2016.

First electronic edition, 2016.

Digital conversion by Transforma Pvt. Ltd.

Copyediting and proofreading by Maya Fowler-Sutherland.

Map by Wendy Johnson.

Scanning by Dave Vasicek.

Indexing by Judy Dunlop.

Cover design by Alan Brownoff.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written consent. Contact the University of Alberta Press for further details.

The University of Alberta Press supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with the copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing University of Alberta Press to continue to publish books for every reader.

The University of Alberta Press gratefully acknowledges the support received for its publishing program from the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Media Fund.

We dedicate this book to all those who have endured the Russian labour camps and especially those who survived. We also remember the many, from a worldwide perspective, who have endured, and are enduring, the atrocities of an oppressive government. To those who, today, press our world leaders to never let those in power oppress their populations.

Contents

Translator’s Preface

HANS RUDOLF GAHLER

Acknowledgements

KARIN AND REX MARSHALL

Editor’s Introduction

HEATHER MARSHALL

Introduction

MICHAEL SEADLE

Surviving the Gulag

Notes

Index

Translator’s Preface

TRANSLATING ILSE’S STORY was not just a job; it wasn’t merely historical research. The act of translating this memoir brought to the fore deep-seated feelings that began when I was eleven and Germany invaded Poland.

As far back as my family can determine, our ancestors had lived in the Swiss-German part of Switzerland—except for one great-grandfather, who was a minister in Thuringia. High German was the official language in our region, and although we spoke the Swiss-German dialect at home, we were taught in High German in school. We admired German literature and culture. Then Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, starting the Second World War. He repeatedly amassed troops along the Swiss border, a day’s walk from where I lived, and threatened to attack us. The Swiss turned their country into a fortress, but fortunately other events prevented the attack. These threats made our blood boil, but it wasn’t until Allied troops liberated concentration camps that we learned the full extent of the diabolical cruelty of Hitler and his SS troops. The more I learned about the genocide, the more I began to detest everything German and to admire instead the English-speaking winners of the war. After medical school I therefore decided to enter a residency program in the United States, where I have lived ever since.

Then, one day I was asked by Ilse Johansen’s descendants to translate a typescript that they had found when going through family records. And so I became acquainted with the life and feelings of two German women—Ilse Johansen and her sister, Lisalotta—who had tried to be good patriots.

Translation is always somewhat of a challenge, and translating Ilse’s memoir was no different. My task was made a little easier by the fact that Ilse used only German, rather than a mix of all the languages she spoke. Occasionally, I encountered military expressions, ranks or commands that I had not heard since those war years.

Many times I came across sentence structures that made me chuckle because they reminded me of what my German acquaintances might have said sixty or seventy years ago, but would be poor English if translated literally. The question I faced was one that besets translators around the world: should I make her sound like a German who grew up early in the twentieth century, or more like a twenty-first-century American? I tried to stay as close as I could to the words and context the writer had used.

Working with Ilse’s manuscript was as much a personal journey into my own past as it was an undertaking to move words and ideas from one language, time and culture to another. Through Ilse and Lisalotta’s story, I had to confront my antipathy toward those we had always considered our enemies. The translation became a form of catharsis.

HANS RUDOLF GAHLER

Anacortes, Washington, May 2016

Acknowledgements

THE JOURNEY to publishing this memoir started in the 1980s when a keen interest in family history motivated Karin and Rex Marshall to research and document their own histories. With the collaboration of Karin Garrison (sister of Ilse Johansen), Urte Devery, Kathy Marshall and Karin Marshall, the first rough draft of The Johansen Family History was produced in 1995. It wasn’t until 2010 that family members Dr. Bill and Anne Testerman enthusiastically encouraged the translation of two biographic German stories composed by the Johansen sisters Lisalotta and Ilse during and after the Second World War. It was then that Dr. Rudy Gahler stepped forward to do this momentous task. Dr. Gahler also provided strong encouragement to pursue publication; he felt these are stories that should be known not just from the historic point of view but because they show how humans respond under certain conditions when given power over others, an ever-present problem, just as relevant today. We extend many heartfelt thanks, and our appreciation to Dr. Gahler for his substantial contribution of translating the original German manuscript to English.

Heather and Debbie Marshall provided their experienced guidance, firstly to seek out the University of Alberta Press, and then to provide expert editorial assistance to fashion the final published book. Our sincere thanks to Heather and Debbie for the many hours devoted to bringing this memoir to press. Fred Bohm (Acquisitions Editor), Peter Midgley (Senior Editor), and Linda Cameron (Director) of the University of Alberta Press all provided patient understanding and guidance. We greatly appreciate their assistance.

We are grateful to Daniela Tolzmann, Louise Tolzmann, and Dr. Gerry Garrison who provided details of Ilse’s later years in Canada. Jurgen Seipel and Norbert Tolzmann searched out information in Germany, including some remarkable old photographs that provide insight into Ilse’s childhood years in Russia, Latvia and Germany. Rob Marshall assisted with interpretation of Russian documents in the possession of Helga Andersen (sister of Ilse).

Had it not been for the care Helga and Erich Andersen had taken of Ilse’s original manuscript, the memoir likely would never have come to being. Helga’s children, Chris Andersen, Urte Devery, and Erika Von Bank provided unending support, enthusiasm and encouragement throughout the process of preparing and publishing the final memoir.

KARIN AND REX MARSHALL

Osoyoos, British Columbia, December 2015

Editor’s Introduction

BURIED AMONG THE BELONGINGS of my aunt Karin Marshall’s elderly mother, somewhere between the flannel nightgowns and the yellowed documents that hold the memories of a life, lay an aging brown stack of onionskin paper held together neatly in a grey folder. In a Russian Prison, by Ilse Johansen the cover declared in German. Karin had heard rumours in the family that aunt Ilse had written a book, but everyone assumed it was fiction, and that it had been lost to the decades of housecleaning. No one ever imagined that it was a truelife account of five years of hell. Nor did they imagine that the story would be told in a profoundly moving and compelling way. No one had had a whisper of a clue that Ilse was a writer.

Unknown to most of the nieces and nephews, their aunt Ilse had not only survived five years in the Russian gulag, but she had also written a memoir of that experience. Karin’s mother, Helga, and Helga’s sister Karin, like so many people who had survived the hardships of war, put Ilse’s story among the things we never talked about. They too had lived through the Second World War, immigrated to Canada, and moved on with their lives. And so for forty plus years the memoir was hidden away in drawers of lingerie and mementos.

When Ilse’s manuscript came to light, Karin asked translator, medical doctor and family friend Rudy Gahler to translate it for her. What emerged is an amazing story of survival through extreme hardship, and a clear-eyed account of what it was like for a German woman to be held in a Russian prison for five years after the end of the Second World War. Ilse’s story begins with her arrest in Bucharest, Romania in 1944 and rolls out before us like a well-crafted movie script. The images and details draw us so fully into her world that we can feel the cold of -35°C on feet covered only by thin canvas shoes, and the hard labour of cutting and hauling trees for miles through deep snow.

Ilse in Germany, 1953.

To understand what happened to Ilse Johansen on that fateful day in March 1944, we need to understand how she got there. Born on April 16, 1916 to a Danish father, Johan, and a German Latvian mother, Margot, Ilse grew up in a milieu of ethnic and cultural diversity. Her father had a degree in agriculture and at the time of Ilse’s birth was managing the summer estate of Prince Heinrich Sayn-Wittgenstein near Kamenka, Russia. The prince’s wife was Elizaveta Nabokov, aunt of the writer Vladimir Nabokov.

Clockwise from top left: Left to right: Ilse’s step-grandfather, Otto Boenke; Ilse’s mother, Margot Dorster (b. March 1885); Ilse’s grandmother, Mathilda Boenke, circa 1905. Ilse’s father, Johan Johansen in Riga, 1909. Ilse’s mother, Margot Johansen (née Dorster), with her daughter Lisalotta, Ilse’s eldest sister, 1910.

The Johansen family had moved from Riga, in current-day Latvia to Kamenka in 1910. The Russians had previously encouraged many Germans to settle in the area as an émigré community or as colonizers, and culturally it was considered German, much like Riga from where they had moved. Ilse and her four older siblings—three of whom were also born at Kamenka—lived in a big house on the estate, and often played with the son and daughter of the prince. From the servants and her family, Ilse would learn to speak Russian, in addition to German and Latvian. Her knowledge of languages would be a lifesaver in the coming years.

According to Ilse’s sisters, the Kamenka estate was surrounded by groomed parks and stables housing many horses. There were two guards and two St. Bernard dogs (Kunterbund and Nixie) to guard the children. A vineyard, corn, grain and cattle were all under Johan’s care. According to some records, the vineyard—developed by Heinrich’s ancestor, Peter Sayn-Wittgenstein—was large and very beautiful. It was in this tranquil landscape that Ilse would begin her life.

Though the landscape may have been idyllic, the social and political scenery was not. The First World War broke out in 1914, and with it began the upheaval in Russian society. By the fall of 1917, Lenin and his followers had succeeded in taking power, moving Russia away from that earlier authoritarian monarchy toward communism. According to Anne Applebaum in her book Gulag: A History, it is against this background of improvisation and violence, [that] the first Soviet labor camps were born. Like so many other Bolshevik institutions, they were created ad hoc, in a hurry, as an emergency measure in the heat of civil war.¹ Though Ilse was a mere infant, what was set in place at this time would profoundly affect her fate some twenty-seven years in the future.

Once the Bolsheviks had taken power, it was no longer safe for anyone associated with the aristocracy. Heinrich Sayn-Wittgenstein fled from the Bolsheviks, but would eventually be captured. He would die in a Vinnytsia prison on January 18, 1919. His wife, Elizaveta, would survive the revolution and die in Bucharest in 1942.² Ironically, Bucharest would be the city where Ilse’s journey into the gulag was to begin in 1944.

Top: Ilse’s older siblings Christian, Ruth, Helga, and Lisalotta at Kamenka, Russia, in 1916. Bottom: Ilse’s grandmother, Mathilda Boenke, with Ilse’s four older siblings on the estate in Kamenka, Russia, circa 1915. This is where Ilse was born.

Left to right: Ilse’s father, Johan Johansen; sisters Helga and Ruth; and mother Margot. Ilse’s sister, Karin, is standing behind. Ilse is holding her youngest brother, Edgar, while her brother Christian is seated in front. Both boys later died in war. Photo taken in Riga, Latvia, 1928, on the occasion of Ruth’s confirmation.

Ilse’s father was encouraged to leave Kamenka, but he was reluctant to do so. He sent his family to a small village called Olgopol, Russia. They would later move again, this time to Riga in Margot’s homeland Latvia. There they would remain until 1939. Johan, loyal to the Kamenka estate, continued to work there until the early 1920s. Finally convinced that nothing was going to improve under Lenin’s rule, he joined his family in Riga.

Meanwhile, Ilse and her siblings were being raised and educated to be proud of their German heritage. Latvia had been inhabited by Germans for several centuries. They were the political, social, commercial and cultural elite, and often held high positions in the military and in civilian life. Roughly six per cent of Latvia’s population was German, yet they controlled most of the power and wealth until 1918. Ilse’s great-grandfather, a wealthy merchant in Riga, was one of these elite Baltic Germans.

With the Bolshevik Revolution, all of these privileges came to an end and like so many other German families, Ilse’s grandparents and parents had to face hard times. Personal belongings, art objects, and fabric paintings were all sold and art lessons were discontinued as the family struggled to survive. Johan got a job as a streetcar operator, but life was still difficult. Ilse and her siblings would have experienced the financial turmoil of the times first-hand; in addition, the ethnic and social turmoil undoubtedly strained at the fabric of family cohesion. In 1919, many German Latvians left for Germany, which to them would have been a foreign country, while others, including Ilse’s family, remained in Latvia.

In 1939, the Johansens’ life in Riga was again turned upside down by war. Hitler and Stalin agreed to resettle Baltic Germans to Hitler’s newly acquired Poland. On annexing much of Poland, Hitler had expelled Polish citizens eastward, and the resettled Baltic Germans were given the property and homes evacuated by the Poles.³ Not much is known about how Ilse’s family managed in Poland, but according to family stories, they settled in Posen in a rented apartment. Ilse’s father Johan went to Włocławek (Leslau) to manage a small estate in Odessa along the Dniester River. He did his best to oversee the property, but other Baltic Germans tried to claim the land, making his job both difficult and frightening.

Ilse in Germany, between 1950 and 1953.

All the while, Ilse was growing into young adulthood. She was educated in German schools, but was treated as a charity case by the wealthier families. However, her parents were able to put together enough money to send their children to schools in Germany. Ilse’s older sister Helga went to college in Riga, but Ilse and Karin were sent to Stuttgart to attend school. Little is known about their time there, but we do know that Ilse trained to be a secretary and Karin a physiotherapist. Both would put their knowledge and skills to work in military roles.

Did the young Ilse listen to jazz on the radio as she was growing up? Did she go to the opera? Would she have heard the music of the avantgarde or modernist movement? Was she familiar with the paintings of Picasso or Georg Grosz? And did she read Freud, Heidegger, Cassirer or Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Kafka’s The Trial or watch films by Leni Riefenstahl? To say yes would be speculation; to say probably would be to recognize the pervasive popular culture in which she grew up.

| Helga, who was four years older than Ilse (and who would later immigrate to Canada to escape the war), attended the university in Riga. In 1935 she studied in Germany and worked in a dental office. Her descriptions of the times before the start of the war in 1939 reveal much about being a young person during Hitler’s rise to power:

Germany was in a bad way post–World War I. It seemed the world was trying to keep Germany down—keep it small so it wouldn’t survive. There was much poverty; all high positions were filled by Jews. I was very idealistic, very much for the people, the new way. At times I participated in the summer camps—the youth movement of the early Hitler days. Some good things were being done such as the volunteer summer programs for students to serve their country by helping farmers, housewives—whoever needed help to get the economy going. Students lived in barracks; people pulled together for the economy, for the people.⁴

There is no documented evidence that Ilse was a member of the Nazi party, but it is probably safe to conclude that she was. Not only did she have a sister who talked about her involvement, another sister who joined the German Air Force and two brothers who joined the German army, but she herself wore the uniform of the Nazi Party for her civilian duties as a secretary in Bucharest. All of this suggests, whether our twenty-first-century sensibilities can bear it or not, that Ilse participated in the Nazi military campaign. In her memoir she is not clear about this, but we must remember that it was written after the Second World War was over, and the truth of Hitler’s atrocities was well known. Furthermore, she did not want to be known as German, let alone a military sympathizer, while she was imprisoned.

Ilse (far right) with her sister Helga and family in the Badhart district of Peace River Country, Alberta, 1953.

Ilse and Prinze in Wembley, Alberta, where Ilse first came to Canada from Germany in 1953 to be with her sister, Helga Andersen.

In 1949 Ilse was released from prison. No one seems to know why, although there were many letters written by her sisters to plead her case. No documents exist to indicate what charges she faced, nor do we have any documentation to suggest the reason she was freed. Nevertheless, she was able to find her way to Frankfurt, where she managed to be reunited with some of her family. After spending four years there, she emigrated to Canada, where she joined her sister Helga and her husband in Grande Prairie, Alberta. After a brief time on the farm she went to Vancouver, British Columbia, where she took a job as a stewardess on a cruise ship.

Ilse met and married a lumberjack, Olaf Heistad, in 1955 and spent the rest of her life on the west coast of Canada. Like so many women who inhabit our memories and our pasts, Ilse Johansen seems to have lived a relatively ordinary life, with a husband and daughter, friends, a job. She is remembered as having a ready smile, and she was always up for an adventure, especially if it involved travel. She worked as a school janitor, and would often arrive home with leftovers. Her nieces and nephew describe her as frugal to a fault, and certainly her tendency to hoarding and wasting nothing can be attributed to her gulag experience. Like so many survivors of trauma, what we see on the surface is but a faint reflection of the interior life and experience.

There are many memoirs written by survivors of the Russian gulag, frequently men, largely Russian, and few of book length. What makes Ilse’s story different is that it tells of a German woman’s experiences. As in any memoir, there are inconsistencies and contradictions born of hindsight and fading memory, but this makes the telling more deeply human.

Top, from left: Ilse’s mother Margot, visiting from Germany, in Wembley, Alberta in 1955. Sister Helga Andersen, Ilse. Bottom, left to right: Ilse, sisters Helga and Lisalotta, 1966, travelling in British Columbia.

Ilse in Badhart, Alberta, 1953.

Ilse’s experiences of hunger, cold, fear, lice and ill-treatment are repeated in other writings from the gulag, but it is in the telling that Ilse’s story is unique. In spite of everything, she can still see the beauty in a sunset or landscape. During times of deep depression and despair Ilse can still find ways to see the good in other prisoners. Like others, she does sink to every person for themselves—hunger deprives us all of more than food—but at the end of the day, she still recognizes the need to show some compassion for fellow sufferers.

More has been written in recent years about the Soviet gulag in an attempt to bring to light the kinds of atrocities that took place in Russia in the twentieth century. Ilse Johansen, and others like her, allow us to see into the human heart when it is pressed beyond what most of us would find bearable. She raises questions for us: How would we respond under similar circumstances? How would we feel if we went to work one day and were arrested and taken to prison? Where would we find our hope, our faith? Could we share that last crumb of bread with a child if we ourselves were starved beyond recognition?

Mostly though, Ilse tells us her experience in the plain language of storytelling. She doesn’t tell us what to think or make moral pronouncements, but lets her story speak for itself. It is up to the reader to decide what to do with it. The fact that she has written it at all, suggests that Ilse would never want to see history repeat itself. And neither should we.

HEATHER MARSHALL

Edmonton, January 2016

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Applebaum, Anne. 2003. Gulag: A History. New York: Doubleday.

Garrison, Karin, and Andersen, Helga. 1995. The Johansen Family History. Grande Prairie, Alberta, 1993 and 1994.

Nabokov Family Web. DeZimmer.net. Last modified February 2015. http://dezimmer.net/NabokovFamilyWeb/nfw_toc.htm.

Occupation of the Baltic States by Nazi Germany. Wikipedia. Accessed May 2, 2016. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Baltic_states_by_Nazi_Germany.

Introduction

THE PURPOSE OF THIS INTRODUCTION is to give the reader enough information about Ilse Johansen’s historical context to understand her account of the Soviet prisoner-of-war camps. From the military perspective, she was a totally unimportant part of the support structure of the German army in a war over which she had no control, and for the Soviet authorities she was mostly an awkward anomaly rather than a prisoner whose labour was valuable or whose politics they opposed. In a very real sense, her time in the camps was a mistake, because no one knew what else to do with her and she did not know how to get away to safety. Through her account, readers can enter into a world they should hope never to experience personally—a world of hunger, cold, bodily vermin, active harassment, illness, and physical danger; a world in which Ilse Johansen’s only hope was the hope that the Soviet government would eventually release her and send her back to a Germany that was itself almost a foreign country. She lived and returned, and that was her triumph.

Europe in 1944: The Eastern Front

Ilse Johansen arrived in Romania in March 1944 at a time when the German army’s defences in Ukraine were collapsing. Hitler’s long-standing military orders were to not retreat, but after the 91,000 remaining soldiers of the German Sixth Army surrendered in February 1943, the military situation along the Eastern Front had become increasingly untenable. Just how untenable it was in the summer that followed remained unclear to most civilians, since the Nazi government suppressed bad news as long as possible.

Romania had sided with Germany earlier in the war partly out of self-interest, because the Soviet Union had long claimed parts of Romania. At the time, joining the winning side had seemed like a reasonable decision, but by the summer of 1944 the alliance had obviously become a mistake. People in Bucharest knew the Soviet army would enter the city soon, but could only speculate about when, and no one knew what would happen afterwards. At that point Bucharest was among the first non-Russian cities taken by Soviet forces. A coup against the pro-German government meant that the Romanian army abruptly changed sides, so that the city would not become a battle site in the continuing war. German soldiers in the city had to surrender and Ilse Johansen, as someone attached to the German army, had to surrender with them. She could quietly have slipped away, but she chose not to. She worked in a hospital, where there was some sense of quiet, even while the heavy artillery remained audible. There was no bloodbath and none of the mass rapes that later characterized the occupation of Berlin.

Ilse Johansen had the advantage that she spoke Russian and that the Soviet troops needed her as a translator. It gave her a privileged position in which she could try to help others, and it gave her options that those lacking the ability to communicate did not have, as is clear throughout the pages of her narrative. Linguistically Russian, Latvian, and German were far apart. Later on, she learned some Romanian. This language, too, is far removed from the others, being more closely related to Italian than to Russian or other Slavic languages, thanks to settlers in the Roman Empire who brought and retained a form of Latin. The fact that she could speak three quite distinct European languages was far from common. It set her aside as an educated person.

Ilse Johansen was a person of her time and culture. She had no reason to think positively of the Soviet troops, whom she routinely describes as Russian rather than Soviet. In one sense the more traditional term Russian denied the importance of communist ideology, but in a purely practical sense the language of the Soviet army was clearly Russian, regardless of whether the soldiers spoke Georgian or Ukrainian or any other language at home. Russia had been a poor country before the First World War, except for a few members of the elite. It was generally poorer than Romania and certainly much poorer than Germany. Many of the implicit attitudes in the memoir come from well-established cultural convictions that the ordinary Russians were primitive—and her experiences mostly reinforced this, since the Russians detailed to guard prisoners were generally those who were fit for little else. Her other advantage was being a woman attached to the German army. The Nazi regime did not encourage women to take even supporting roles in the military, and this made her an anomaly, and often helped her to escape harsher treatment.

She focuses much of her hope as a prisoner on the Geneva Convention and the requirement that the Soviet Union should return her to Germany. In principle both Germany and its western opponents respected the principles of the Geneva Convention and the guidelines about the treatment of prisoners, even if the reality left much to be desired. There was a degree of mutual respect between Germany and the Anglo-American forces in the west that had little or no analogue in the east. Nazi propaganda reviled the Soviet Union and treated the Slavs as nearly subhuman, even