Wolf Children - Stories of Survivors

Stories of Survivors

None of these events were reported in the press, and they only became known to the public after 1990, because the official Communist Party line in Russia and Poland was that there were no Germans in these areas. This had been their official position as early as the Potsdam Agreement in August 1945. Historian Ruth Leiserowitz, who lived in Lithuania researched, and published books about the Wolfkinder of East Prussia under her maiden name Ruth Kibelka and her married name.

Some historical records given by children from East Prussia survived, about how their families were overtaken by advancing Soviet Forces as they tried to flee. They were sent back to their old homes in East Prussia, found them destroyed, were expelled from their homes and then died from starvation, cold and typhoid fever. The orphans had to find a way of surviving and became Wolf children.

Another five orphans, born in the years 1930-1939, told Ruth Leiserowitz how they managed to survive. In the end, these Wolf children were transferred to a children's home in the GDR. In an obituary notice for an East Prussian woman, born in 1939 and deceased in 2009, it was revealed that she had lived under terrible conditions as an orphan without home and shelter in East Prussia and Lithuania.

The story of one survivor can be read in “ABANDONED AND FORGOTTEN: An Orphan Girl's Tale of Survival in World War II by Evelyne Tannehill,” in which Evelyne and her family fell victim to the Russians who invaded her parents' farm by the Baltic Sea in East Prussia. Her family was separated. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was she able to return back to East Prussia to revisit her childhood homeland.

One outstanding story is that of Liesabeth Otto, born in 1937, who, after her mother had died from starvation, went with her brothers and sisters to her homeplace Wehlau, where she managed to survive until 1953 by working and begging. In 1953, because of stealing food and clothes she was sent in a detention camp for children. After an odyssey through many detention camps, later on looking for work in the USSR, she located her father and brother in West Germany in the 1970s.