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  Ancient Furies

  Ancient Furies

  A Young Girl’s Struggles in the Crossfire of World War II

  ANASTASIA V. SAPORITO

  WITH DONALD L. SAPORITO

  © 2014 by Donald L. Saporito

  Four lines from “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment” From Collected Poems 1930–1986 by Richard Eberhart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 90. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. Copyright 1960, 1976, 1987 Oxford Univ. Press, and by the Richard Eberhart Estate. All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Saporito, Anastasia V., 1928–2007. Ancient furies: a young girl’s struggles in the crossfire of World War ii / Anastasia V. Saporito with Donald L. Saporito.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-61234-633-5 (cloth: alkaline paper)—isbn 978-1-61234-634-2 (ebook) 1. Saporito, Anastasia V., 1928–2007—Childhood and youth. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Personal narratives, Yugoslav. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Personal narratives, Russian.

  4. World War, 1939–1945—Serbia—Belgrade. 5. Russians—Serbia—Belgrade—Biography. 6. Belgrade (Serbia)—Biography.

  7. Blankenburg am Harz (Concentration camp)—Biography. I. Saporito, Donald L.

  II. Title.

  D811.5.s259 2014

  940.54'81497—dc23

  2013031943

  Set in Lyon Text by Laura Wellington.

  Designed by J. Vadnais.

  This book is dedicated to my children, who have a right to know more of their mother, her background, and therefore their heritage than time, or circumstance, or the pain of remembering ever permitted me to tell them; to my parents, who gave me both life and the “foundation” needed to prosper; to Kristina, who has lived always in my heart, and whose memory so often guides me in my own kitchen; to my husband, whose constant love, urging, and editing finally brought this memoir to completion; and finally to the millions who lie in unmarked and/or forgotten graves throughout the world, victims of armed conflicts they neither sought nor understood.

  Anastasia Popova Saporito

  You would feel that after so many centuries

  God would give man to repent; yet he can kill

  As Cain could, but with multitudinous will,

  No farther advanced than in his ancient furies.

  Richard Eberhart, “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment”

  Contents

  Foreword

  Acknowledgments

  1. The Early Years

  2. School Days

  3. War Clouds

  4. Childhood Ends

  5. The Move to Dedinye

  6. Life in Dedinye

  7. Adolescence Ends

  8. War Comes to Belgrade

  9. The Destruction of Belgrade

  10. Invasion

  11. Occupation

  12. Jovan

  13. Kolya

  14. Roach Manor

  15. Farewell, My Belgrade

  16. Maria and Rosa

  17. Hans von Staate

  18. The Labor Camps

  19. Brutality and Murder

  20. The Price of Liberation

  21. Blankenburg am Harz

  22. Hamburg

  23. Frankfurt

  24. The End of the Beginning

  Foreword

  This memoir had its beginning in 1967, when I was enrolled in graduate school at the University of Denver. Our children were enrolled in the first and second grades of grammar school, and Anastasia (Asya), without a teaching assignment at my new graduate school, found herself at home with time on her hands. The Vietnam War was raging, and several of our friends, drafted or enlisting, left for Vietnam, while others left for Canada to escape the draft.

  Asya had spent most of her sixteenth year as a prisoner in a Nazi forced labor camp in Blankenburg am Harz, in eastern Germany. With antiwar sentiment enflaming most campuses, Asya, deeply antiwar because of her own experiences, thought, perhaps naively, that if others could understand the things which had overtaken her and her family during World War ii, it might help to put a stop to what so many of us at the time found to be the insanity and senseless killing taking place in Southeast Asia.

  Asya did not mention her efforts to me at the time, and it was only when we were packing to move to my first job after graduate school that I came across the manuscript. Astounded at the level of detail and honesty with which she had written, I told her that I would help her to edit it as soon as we were settled in the Chicago area. However, my new position at Argonne National Laboratories was followed within eighteen months by our move to Dartmouth College, where a new teaching position for Asya, and raising our children, kept delaying the editing process.

  Following Asya’s graduation from Dartmouth College (a graduate degree in June 1978), we moved to Lafayette, Louisiana, where I held the position of director of university libraries at the University of Louisiana. Asya taught for only two semesters because it became clear that student interest in the Russian language was lacking. The university called on her, however, to ask if she would be willing to serve as interpreter for a trade delegation from Ukraine, a group of Soviet agricultural experts interested in agricultural developments in Louisiana.

  For several days she accompanied the group throughout the area, and during one dinner conversation she mentioned her grandparents, Kuliabko-Koretskii, and the family estate, Kotchubeyevka. The family name didn’t seem to ring any bells, but eyebrows went up at the mention of Kotchubeyevka. Kotchubeyevka, the Soviets told her, had become the largest collective farm in all of Ukraine. The group’s recognition of the name of the family estate reignited her determination to complete her book.

  In 1997 Asya and I visited Vienna and found the house on Mariahilferstrasse where Asya was reunited with her parents a few weeks before they were forced into the Klosterwerk forced labor camp in Blankenburg am Harz, Germany, in October 1944. Her mother, Maria Petrovna Popova, was killed by an American bomb April 20, 1945, during the liberation of the camps and is buried in the city cemetery in Blankenburg. Her father, Vasilii Mitrofanovitch Popov, died of a broken heart December 13, 1947, and is buried in Munich.

  In 1999 we visited Blankenburg. The city archivist, Ingrid Glogowskii, gave most generously of her time and expertise, providing Asya with a copy of her mother’s death certificate and leading us to her mother’s grave, to the Klosterwerk tunnel, and to the site of the forced and slave labor camps. Asya learned from Ms. Glogowskii that Herr Mueller, who befriended Asya in the camp, had survived to become a well-known radio commentator in East Germany. Sadly, his wife had been sent to a Nazi death camp and did not survive. Asya also learned that a consignment of slave laborers from Belgium were held in the Klosterwerk, confirming her memory of the boy to whom she had given her scarf, who she thought was from Belgium.

  Asya died December 6, 2007. At the time of her death, she left an original, double-spaced, typed manuscript of 321 pages which she had completed in 1968, plus six spiral-bound subject notebooks, several exam booklets, and a number of loose pages gathered together in groups, but unbound, all in longhand. Her original manuscript, written without chapter divisions, begins with the German invasion of Yugoslavia, just after the three-day bombing that terrorized Belgrade beginning on Palm Sunday, April 6, 1941, and ends when she is notified of the death of her father just two months after they were reunited in August 1947. That manuscript forms the last half of chapter 10 and continues through chapter 22.

  The timeline in that original manuscript sometimes incorrectly juxtaposed wartime events with events from her adolescence. These have been rearranged, almost a
lways with her knowledge and agreement, but there are some instances in which the changes were made after her death, based on our prior discussions. If there are errors in the timeline, they are mine. I insisted that she write about her parents and her early childhood experiences to provide background contrasting the trauma that had followed and because I felt it would be of special interest to our children and grandchildren. That material, also completed without chapter divisions, fills much of the spiral-bound notebooks and has been sharply reduced to form chapters 1 through 10 of this published memoir.

  Asya had never written about the final arrangements and funeral of her father. Those two days of her life were still so emotionally heavy for her to bear. But she had told me about it in detail, and I felt it essential that she try to put it into writing with the same honesty I saw in everything she did. I reminded her several times over the years about that, and she always agreed—“but a little later.” Obviously, the memory was still painful for her. After her death, while finally trying to edit all she had left into this final format, and faced with trying to write what she had told me of those two days surrounding her father’s death and burial, I went again to the notebooks that she had completed, looking for any notes she might have made that would help.

  Only then did I find her manuscript, folded and tucked into the back of an unused notebook—thirty handwritten pages covering the death and funeral of her father. The paper she used leads me to believe she wrote them in the early 1990s, perhaps following our return from Vienna when we found the place where she and her parents were reunited in 1944, just before they were taken to the forced labor camp. They were written without any significant corrections, probably done in a single afternoon, while I was working on a different part of her manuscript. She had not mentioned them to me. I believe they were too painful for her and that she had quietly put them aside intending to tell me about them when we reached that point in our editing. That material forms chapter 24.

  The names Makharov, von Holzen, and von Stoiber are fictitious. The characters are real, but in spite of an extraordinary memory, Asya was unable to recall the correct names. Of course, they appeared in her life in minor roles at a most difficult emotional time. Although every effort has been made to ensure historical accuracy, the book is first and foremost a memoir.

  For years Asya and I tried to identify the U.S. Army unit that had liberated the Klosterwerk camp where she and her parents were held in Blankenburg. We requested copies of military After Action Reports that seemed to be promising, always to be disappointed. Then when my final editing of this memoir was complete, I decided to try another internet search. I had no idea what, if anything, I did differently that time, but with my first press of the return key, there it was:

  After Action Report, G2 Section, 8th Armored Division, 1–30 April 1945. Section 2: Enemy Operations during Period.

  . . .

  Subsection B. 12–30 April 1945: Between the 12th and 22nd of April 1945, the 11 Pz Army, defending the Harz Mountains, was completely smashed . . .

  “On 20 April 1945, CCA and CCB attacked south. Due to the state of general confusion in the pocket, resistance was sporadic and unpredictable. Blankenberg [sic] fell to CCB by nightfall on 20 April. . . .

  “PW’s during the period: 10,295; PW’s to date: 25881

  Enemy tanks destroyed: 1

  AT guns destroyed: 4

  Motor Transport destroyed: 30.

  It was the U.S. 8th Armored Division, the “Thundering Herd,” that pushed into Blankenburg on April 20, 1945, smashing the German 11th Panzer Army by nightfall in the process, the battle which surrounded the terrified sixteen-year-old girl who would one day become my beloved wife. The name of the town had been misspelled Blankenberg in the After Action Report, and I must have inadvertently made the same mistake in typing my last search.

  Asya and I met, quite by accident, one warm summer evening in 1958. We seemed to hit it off well, and when I took her home that evening, I asked for a date for the following week. The night we met happened to be my twenty-sixth birthday, which allowed me to forever claim her as the best birthday present anyone ever received. Throughout my early years, many people entered my life, most briefly, some lingering, all adding to my own life experience. I marvel at the wisdom I evidently had which allowed me to so quickly recognize the one among all who would always mean so much to me.

  We were married about two weeks after that first following date. We would, in fact, be married three times: two weeks after our first date, when we sought a judge at the courthouse in Golden, Colorado, on August 22, 1958, to perform the ceremony; a second time, almost a year later, on July 4, 1959, when we were expecting a child and wanted a ceremony in a Catholic church; and a third time, just over forty-nine years later, when we began to fear that Asya might not make it to our fiftieth anniversary, and our parish priest visited our home to perform the ceremony August 30, 2007. We remained happily married for forty-nine years, three months, two weeks, and one day. Asya passed away in our bed, holding my hand, squeezing it very hard with her last breath, in a final farewell.

  Asya was the most considerate, thoughtful, generous person I have ever met, always concerned with the feelings and well-being of others, always placing the welfare of others first. She had, of course, been tested in ways most of us cannot imagine and tempered by experiences none of us would ever seek. Those experiences had taught her, before her sixteenth birthday, those truths that most of us finally learn much later in life, sometimes too late, and that some of us never learn—that life itself is the most precious gift; that family background, advantages, wealth, and privilege count for very little in the end; that what is centrally important is our faith in God, what we do with the talents we have and the moral foundations we were provided, and the way we interact with and treat our fellows.

  While editing Asya’s work, Father Gregórii has intruded often in my thoughts. He withheld from Asya the touchstones of the cherished memories of her family and her childhood. Asya forgave him, of course, back in 1947. There was no room for rancor in her heart. His failure to understand also withheld from our children and grandchildren the touchstones of their heritage. I’m sure that I too will soon forgive him.

  Asya taught me something every day of our life together, something about love and commitment, about honesty and values, about generosity and helping others, about respect for other people’s views, about simple humility. I have not always been a good student, and one of her oft-repeated lessons—“If something needs to be done, do it, don’t put it off”—was one of those lessons I seemed to have trouble with. As a result, this memoir languished for forty years, but I know she has forgiven me. There has not been one single moment since her death that I have not thought of her, have not consciously missed her, whether alone or with friends, whether reading or listening to music, whether watching television or, of course, editing this, her memoir. She is always in my thoughts . . . always gently on my mind.

  On the night we were married in 1958, we sat together in front of a massive picture window in my small studio apartment in Golden, Colorado, the room flooded with light from a full moon. We were listening to records I had placed on the phonograph—the opera La Boehme and a collection of Italian folk songs, which included the beautiful Neapolitan song “Torna Piccina.” I had no knowledge of her history then nor of the part that song had played in it. I left the room for just a moment as the song began and returned to find her crying softly. When I asked what was troubling her, she replied simply that she well knew how short life was, and that it saddened her that we had not met years before. Her father, she said, used to sing “Torna Piccina” to her when she was a little girl. I comforted her then, as we promised each other at least fifty years together.

  I made two other promises to her that night. Although I then knew nothing of her wartime experiences, she had mentioned that she had always been afraid of dying alone—almost certainly the result of her mother’s lonely death. I promised her first t
hat I would be by her side to hold her hand as she drew her last breath on earth and second that I would follow her within fifteen minutes. God did not permit me to keep that second promise, but I am eternally grateful for having been able to keep the first.

  One day in 1972, I returned from my office at the Dartmouth College Library and went to our bedroom, where I found a surprise gift on my pillow waiting for me—not an unusual event. The gift, however, was unusual. Asya had found a piece of bark that had fallen from a birch tree in our yard, the same tree so important throughout Russian literature, and had used it to write me a love note. Written in Russian, in the careful, clear Cyrillic script that she maintained all her life, the note, now framed, hangs in our bedroom. The translation that follows is mine. Although I would no longer claim extensive knowledge of Russian, I believe it is accurate:

  8 December 1972

  My Dearest Love,

  I am so happy with you. I love you so, and am just so sorry that everything has a beginning and an end, and that life passes so quickly. But I am certain that love cannot simply end—and that somewhere, beyond this world, our love will be endless.

  Asya

  When our children were teenagers, we had adopted a phrase in our family, “Mom’s always right,” which reflected the fact that whenever she announced a decision, answered a question to settle a disagreement, or rendered an opinion, she was invariably proven correct. I look forward eagerly to being able to say, “Mom’s always right” to her when we are reunited.

  D. L. S.

  Acknowledgments

  This is the story, honestly told, of Asya’s early years and the terrible trauma of World War ii that ended her childhood and destroyed everything and everyone she held dear. My main work on the manuscript really began in the very trying months following Asya’s death. Most of the friends who were so supportive remain unnamed, and I apologize to them. Organizing and editing the work, particularly shortening the initial manuscript for publication, proved far more difficult than I had anticipated, and there are several people who must be recognized for the great help they were to me.