Silent No More: Personal Narratives of German Women Who Survived WWII Expulsion and Deportation

This book reveals the living history of thirty ethnic German women who recount their heartbreaking experiences of forced deportation, expulsion, and flight during World War II and its aftermath. They were deported from their homes in Romania and Yugoslavia, expelled from their homes in Czechoslovakia, and had to flee from their homes in Poland and the Eastern provinces of Germany. In this volume, these ethnic German survivors tell of their weeks-long treacherous over-crowded cattle-train transports, back-breaking work in forced labor camps, and starvation and homelessness during bitter cold winters, witnessing mass rapes and beatings to death. They are among the fifteen million Germans who were expelled from their homes in East-Central Europe during the largest forced mass migration of the twentieth century.