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Tracks Behind the Fence
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Ernst Korn:

Tracks Behind the Fence

Post-War Prisoners of War 1945-1949

Our personal recommendation!! No-one who has read this devastating first-person account will never be able to forget it again.

On April 13, 1945 a young man must say farewell to his parents and sister in Neumarkt, his West Bohemian home town. Not yet eighteen years old, he has been called to arms, and the barely four weeks he must spend with the Wehrmacht until the war's end carry a heavy price afterwards: nearly four years of captivity of almost unspeakable horror.

Ernst Korn's autobiographical reminiscences are written in an objective and precise style, the result of painstaking recollection and conscientious research, and he has good reason to divide them into sections patterned after the nine circles of hell of Dante's "Inferno". This book is a document humain which in its personal authenticity bears witness to the fate of the eleven million German prisoners-of-war, especially those in the countries of Eastern Europe.

Swept along by disintegrating troop formations, young Ernst Korn - unarmed and making his way home after the German surrender in mid-May 1945 - witnesses indescribable atrocities committed by Czech "revolutionaries", only to be arrested in Melnik along with thousands of other Germans. He is imprisoned by the Soviets and then sent for a seemingly endless time into Polish captivity. His description of the forced march of haggard German "plenni" through depopulated Lower Silesia in autumn of 1945 is haunting. Anyone who collapses is mercilessly shot, and of the 6,000 men departing from east of the River Neisse early in the morning, some 400 to 600 do not make it to Lauban late that night. Lodz, Siedlec, Lentschütz, Babie Doly, Elbing and Warsaw are further stations along their way. Aside from abuse and degradation, tormenting hunger remains their constant companion to the bitter end.

Ernst Korn is permitted to cross the new German border at Forst in February 1949, but while he is "released", there is no homecoming for him. He meets up with his father in the Allgäu, but his mother rests in now-foreign soil at home in the Egerland...

Even the many horrors he suffered do not provoke the author to words of hatred. But half a century later he wants to tell, with unrelenting truthfulness, what happened - so that these facts of German history do not fall into oblivion for the younger generations.

The first-person narrator of this deeply moving account stands as biographical essence for the many young people on whom the course of history forced exactly the same fate.

(Scriptorium's translation of the review of the original German edition.)

(258 pages, 15 x 23 cm, softcover.)