Refugee in search of a homeland

"You're a smart-arse." Maybe Heinz and I were not going to get on too well, I thought. What could be the matter with him? I just stood there and said nothing.

Eventually, the girls and Frau Kothe appeared, and when we were all sitting on top of the cart, Heinz got the oxen going. They seemed to know the way. Up a fairly steep road and along a field with sugar beet. After that our slow moving cart arrived at the potato field. Each man grabbed a three-pronged hoe and started to attack one row at a time. The women collected the potatoes into bags. Once a bag was full, the top was tied up and left for the men to load on the ox cart. It was back-breaking work, and my poor body did not know how it would last until lunch time, let alone until the end of the day.

But there came a pleasant surprise. "Breakfast!" Martha shouted. We all dropped our tools and crowded around the ox cart. The girls had cut some sandwiches earlier. Everyone received four slices of bread with real meat inside, like salami, liverwurst, or brawn, sometimes also home made cheese. These sandwiches were most sustaining and after about half an hour's break I felt refreshed and ready for some more potato digging. I was much slower than the others, but I felt with some practice I would be able to do the work as the others did. Nobody seemed to be too worried about the 'new chum', but nobody tried to make friends with me either. They more or less ignored me in a kind of wait-and-see attitude. They knew that I had my leaving certificate, that I wanted to go on to university after my two years were up, and perhaps they sensed that we didn't have much in common.

What worried me most was their language. It was not 'bad language', although that was common too, but the dialect they were speaking. It was a type of German I had never heard before. They called it Platt-Deutsch, a form of Lower Saxony dialect peculiar to Göttingen and its surrounding. Most words were pronounced completely differently from what I was used to. I sometimes wished they would speak Polish, for I would have had a better chance to understand than their dialect. However, slowly I also got used to that.

At lunch time we had a break of about one hour. There was a hot stew with some meat in it, and again a couple of slices of bread and cheese.

"Come on, don't be tired, we still have a lot of work to do," said Martha, and work began again as in the morning. By the time it was five o'clock and after a short break for afternoon tea, I was thoroughly tired, had a back ache, and did not think I could dig one more potato. The others were tired too, and we all enjoyed the rest on top of the ox cart, as Heinz was driving us slowly back home.

At the farm everybody seemed to be going to their assigned jobs. I was not too sure what I was supposed to be doing. I ached and was longing to sit down and rest, but it was obviously not the time yet for resting. The girls were getting the cows in, while Heinz and I filled their troughs with

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