From Immigrant To U.S. Marine

CHAPTER 1 –

ESCAPE FROM COMMUNISM

SURVIVORS OF DRESDEN

At about 10:15 pm on Wednesday, 13 of February in 1945, three incendiary gravity bombs hit the roof of our townhouse, on Praeger Street. We were living not far from the central railroad station in the city of Dresden. Although I was only a child, some details about what happened at the time are unforgettable and remain etched vividly in my memory.

For as long as I will live, I think I will remember the howling sirens and the increasing sound of the engines of many aircraft. As the sounds of the aircraft came closer and their engines became louder, there was suddenly a deafening crash on the top of the three-story townhouse in which we were staying, followed soon by two more loud crashes.

Somehow our family survived through a nightmare of air raids in a city of thousands of refugees fleeing from the Soviet Army and communism. During three days of bombing, according to U.S. Air Force historians, about 25,000 persons were killed and 35,000 were wounded. Reportedly one British writer has estimated that about 60,000 people were killed in Dresden. Since there were many uncounted refugees, displaced persons, prisoners of war and residents in Dresden, some observers have estimated that the real count of persons killed was higher, about 135,000. After the bombing, with incendiary, high explosive, and some 8,000 pound “block-buster” bombs, it took eight days, we were later told, before the fires in the city burned themselves out.

BACKGROUND

Our family consisted of five persons. In addition to my mother and father, there was the wife of my cousin, Eugenia, and her two-year old son, Erikas, with us. We were displaced persons and refugees from Lithuania fleeing from communism. The Soviet Army first invaded our country in 1940, as part of an agreement and alliance between Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. In 1941, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, the Soviet Army retreated from Lithuania. Then Lithuania was occupied by Nazi Germany until early 1945. The Soviet Army was coming back with vengeance in 1945, during the last days of the war, to install tyranny and communist enslavement in Lithuania. My father, as a prominent lawyer until the war, knew he would not survive if we remained in Soviet-occupied Lithuania. He believed that he would be arrested and that we would be sent to a death camp in Siberia.

We fled from Vilnius in early January 1945, just ahead of the invading Soviet Army, through Poland to Berlin. My father waited until the last minute to leave Lithuania, because he wanted to make the statement that we were Lithuanians fleeing from communism and not people who were repatriating to Germany. In Berlin we lived through several air raids. During one, I was told years later, the shell-shocked animals broke out of the Berlin Zoo. Some animals had to be shot by the police in the streets because it was not possible to capture them.