“During all these years I have become convinced of one thing—the most important thing in life is people, people of no matter what nationality, whether Russians, French, Germans, or Americans.”—
Elena Skrjabina, New York Harbor, May 30, 1950
Thus ended the odyssey of Elena Skrjabina, Leningrader, refugee, German labor camp worker, and exile. An odyssey that had begun September 8, 1941,with the German blockade of Leningrad. In this final volume of her wartime diaries she describes the coming of the Allies into the Rhineland, the repatriation of foreign laborers in Germany, the gradual recovery of Germany and the transformation of the German economy from one of barter in a destroyed land to a sound money economy.
Even the arrival of the liberating American forces in Bendorf was not a benign experience. It brought its own special dangers, as she recounts in her diary. The early arrivals behaved more in the manner of marauders than an army and did not provide orderly military government. Indeed in one incident it was only the timely appearance of several French former prisoners which prevented an American soldier from raping Mrs. Skrjabina’s niece Tanya. Factories and offices were plundered, and the populace found it necessary to hide from their liberators.
Because she had hidden ten French prisoners from the Germans in the final period before the arrival of the Allies, she was well received by the French. Only the chance circumstance of her being within the French occupation zone saved her life. Because the French were not bound by the Yalta agreement, she escaped being sent with millions of her countrymen into the hands of the secret police of Lavrenti P. Beria.
