Was all of this really that long ago? Here's a man who has seen plenty, and certainly has a story to tell.
IM ORIGINAL
http://www.welt.de/kultur/history/article109642851/Vier-Mal-Haft-unter-Hitler-Stalin-und-Ulbricht.html
Translated by Military Fotos. net
Cured - or so you could call the state of mind of Erwin Jöris.
Cured of
any totalitarian idea, every temptation of the extremes.
The resident of Cologne, who has lived in the same apartment for 57
years, has survived everything you could survive in the 20th century.
Jöris fought in the political riots of the crumbling Weimar Republic, he
was sent to a Gestapo jail, deported to a concentration camp and made
it through the infamous Moscow "Hotel Lux" and NKVD imprisonment.
Having
been deported to Germany, he was again imprisoned by the Gestapo,
released on "probation" to endure five years of war including four years
on the Eastern Front. During the "Battle of Berlin" he was captured and
released into the Soviet occupation zone in 1946, only to catch the eye
of the new rulers, being arrested again and sentenced to 25 years of
forced labor in Siberia. In 1956 he could finally return home along
with the last German prisoners of war.
There are few stories like that of Erwin Jöris - people who would have
fought the two worst tyrannies to ever gain hold in Europe, and lived to
tell the tale. Margarete Buber was one of them, who was also a prisoner
of both Stalin and Hitler, though she died in 1989 at the age of 88.
Another one is that of Jöris, who celebrates his 100th birthday today.
Both hung in their youth-time communist ideals, and both realized too
late that behind the promises of a better world in the sense of Marx,
Engels and Lenin there only hid a power-hungry self-proclaimed
avant garde. Both were declared enemies of the inhumane Nazi regime and
paid for their views with time in concentration camps, the very symbol
of the Hitler regime. Both found home in a certainly imperfect Federal
Republic of Germany after the war.
The life of Erwin Jöris seemed mapped out early. Born into a working
class family, he grew up in a leftist family similar to Erich Honecker
(who was a bit older; and ultimately served East Germany as its last significant president)- in Berlin-Lichtenberg though (not in the
Saarland). At the age of 16 he joined the Young Communists League and
made a name for himself. But in 1931 he already refused to follow the
party's every change of course when the Communists supported a Nazi
attempt to oust the democratic government of the state of Prussia. Being
a young KPD member, he caught the Gestapo's attention soon after the
takeover in 1933. He was arrested and imprisoned in the early Sonnenburg
concentration camp. Here he experienced the "particularly painful" lack
of solidarity of former "comrades" who had joined with the Nazis.
For
his pledge to refrain from any political activity, Jöris was set free in
March 1934.
The now illegal Communist Party sent him to Moscow to undergo
ideological training there. Upon arrival Jöris already got to know the
darker side of the purported "workers' paradise." He was harassed by a
control commission, saw the misery on the streets and the megalomaniac
projects that were hardly different from the Third Reich, as was the
personality cult surrounding Stalin. Jöris voiced protest and as a
consequence was forced to work in a heavy machinery factory in
Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg). With the beginning of the "Great Terror"
- the series of show trials and mass executions in Stalin's empire -
Jöris finally began to lose his faith in Communism. His change of mind
did not escape the eyes of his Soviet hosts: the unruly 25-year-old was
labelled a "Trotskyist", arrested and taken to the Lubljanka, the
headquarters of the NKVD.
From here the Soviets eventually deported him back to his native
Germany. Jöris, now back in the clutches of the Gestapo as an alleged
"traitor", survived the torture. But his former comrades, who had formed
a resistance movement against Hitler, also saw him as a traitor. It was
getting lonely for him. Then came the year 1940's general mobilization
and Jöris, who was not considered "unworthy to serve", was drafted into
the military on probation. He fought during the entire campaign in the
East and to the very bitter end in Berlin in April 1945. There he had
some luck after all: he was quickly released from Soviet captivity,
perhaps because he had kept silence about his former life.
Hoping he could build on the ideals of his youth, he joined the newly
formed SED which had arisen from a forced merger of the SPD and KPD in
1946. But soon after Jöris would become a pain in the back of the
powerful once more. Instead of submitting to the instructions of the
Stalinist returnees among Walter Ulbricht, he would praise the pre-war
Communists of Germany for spite.
As the inevitable consequence he was
arrested by the NKVD and sentenced to 25 years of forced labor in the
gulag.
During the trial the judge hurled at him: "Your damn yap will freeze up
in Siberia!" Not intimated at all, Erwin Jöris replied: "And so will
yours!"
In 1956, he was able to return to East Germany after many years
of mining in Vorkuta, from where he left to West Germany as quickly as
possible.
Since then he has lived in Cologne.
In recent years he often
made appearances to tell of the events he witnessed at public events and
in schools. He has become unable to do that now.
All things considered
he is still quite fit, though. He has described his experiences in
several documentaries and his memoirs called "A life as a prisoner of
Hitler and Stalin". Akin to Margarete Buber-Neumann's much better-known
"The prisoner of Stalin and Hitler," the out-of-print book is very disturbing.
