Humanity in war: Open letter from the former young Soviet forced laborer Vladimir Prichodko to the citizens of Stuttgart in 1973 (Published on 16/02/2024)
Just as surely as war gives birth to death and suffering, it also brings about the emergence of people on all sides who have retained their humanity and who provide help and assistance to others in need, even if they have been declared an “enemy” whose support means danger to their own lives.
In an open letter to the citizens of Stuttgart in June 1973, Russian citizen Vladimir Prichodko reported on his experiences as a juvenile prisoner of war in that region from 1942 onwards. He wrote (source: Stuttgarter Zeitung of 30/06/1973, p. 59, translated from German language):
“Well over thirty years have passed since that time when the Nazis brought me, then a fifteen-year-old boy, together with other young girls and boys, to your beautiful city with its magnificent parks and orangeries. But I only realized the full splendour of the city (before the bombing in November 1942 and later) decades later. I didn’t feel like it at the time. Like all those deported from the East, I had the rights of a slave and thought only of a piece of bread and of doing something useful for my bleeding homeland. It’s hard to believe that I endured the terrible beatings of the camp leaders and the fascist foremen: it’s hard to believe that you could live for almost three years on nothing but boiled turnips and spinach and a piece of bread mixed with sawdust and stay alive.
Perhaps death would have been inevitable if there had not been true Germans among the women, workers, peasants and intelligentsia, who did not allow themselves to be influenced by the moral depravity of fascism with its man-hating theory, who were not afraid of the orders of the fascist administration, which had forbidden any contact with the Russians.
And how many good, clever, kind-hearted Germans there have been! Are you still alive, dear women of the ball bearing factory ‘Norma’? With all my heart I offer you a Russian thank you for not being afraid of being sent to a concentration camp and for inconspicuously slipping a piece of bread with margarine or sausage into the hands of Russian children exhausted by work and hunger. Can I, a Soviet man, forget the kind-heartedness of the German woman? Never!
Are you still alive, you workers of the ‘Norma’ factory, you who gave the Russian slave bread, sausage and margarine from your last food stamps? Who were you and are you still alive, unknown German friends, who threw leaflets written in broken Russian over the fence of our camp, in which you informed us about the course of the fighting on all fronts and about the political bankruptcy of the Hitler regime, thus strengthening our faith in the victory over fascism even more? It was only thanks to you that we, together with other foreign workers, were able to put the machine tools and electrical installations in the factory out of action, render the ball bearings ready for transportation unusable and pour sand into the bombs instead of explosives.
Thank you for everything, German friends, anti-fascists of the factories Robert Bosch, Witzemann, Eckhard, Daimler-Benz, Fortuna.
Thank you, dear citizens of Bad Cannstatt, Feuerbach, Zuffenhausen, Stuttgart-Nord, for your help and efforts to preserve the lives of the Soviet civilian displaced persons and prisoners of war.
I often think of the heroic deed of a lathe operator at the ‘Norma’ plant with the first name Kurt (I can’t remember his name). He worked with us in the 2nd building block, on the second floor. Kurt suggested to my comrade Georgi Pashkov and me that we shut down the whole factory for a few days. It took our breath away. How can you shut down such a colossus? It’s not the same as breaking a workbench or throwing a few hundred ball bearings into the sewage system! But everything was much easier. After a lot of effort, Kurt and we managed to damage the plant’s cooling system. Two days later, the machines in the factory came to a standstill.
And how can you not remember the good-heartedness of German farmers?
When the US Air Force destroyed our ‘Rosenstein’ camp and the residential areas of Bad Cannstatt in 1944, we, the survivors, were relocated to the village of Neckartenzlingen. We worked in a factory. Apart from rotten potatoes and a kind of broth made from turnips, we had nothing to eat. We were very hungry. We were forced to flee the camp over the fence and ask for bread in the villages. Anyone caught by the gendarmes was given a terrible beating with a whip. The farmers hid us from the gendarmes. We returned to our camp with bags full of bread, potatoes and apples and shared everything with our comrades.
Many thanks to you, farmers of Neckartenzlingen, Walddorf, Gniebel (other names have slipped my mind). Hitler tried by all means to poison the German people with the venom of Nazism. But he did not succeed. And is it even possible to fool a nation that has given mankind great philosophers, brilliant poets, scientists and composers? Never!
(…)
Dear people of Stuttgart! Fight for peace and friendship so that our children and grandchildren will never again experience the horror of destructive wars.
Vladimir Prikhodko
Voroshilovgrad region
Kremennoe district
Settlement Krasnoretsekensk
Translated by: A. Karapetian (Editorial office of Stuttgarter Zeitung)“
The final sentence remains as relevant as ever. Each human being has the choice to follow his/her heart at any given time.
(Head picture: Memorial stones at the Russian war cemetery
in Simmerath-Rurberg, July 2023)
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