‘Eva’s War’ Is First-Person Account of Surviving Horrors

“What should I do?”

That’s the question a worried Eva Krutein asked herself in January, 1945.

A native of Danzig, the former “free city” seized by Germany when Hitler invaded neighboring Poland in 1939, Krutein, then 20, anxiously paced her living room: Should she remain in Danzig and “face the Russian hordes” or flee and “go into the unknown” with her 14-month-old daughter, Lili?

Danzig, a historic port city on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea, marked by medieval towers and cathedrals, had so far escaped the bombing that had destroyed Dresden, Cologne and Berlin. But the battered German army was fleeing as the Russian army was advanced in the east.

It would only be a matter of time until the Russians reached Danzig, and Krutein had heard what had happened in the village of Nemmersdorf: Russian soldiers had raped every woman and girl, then murdered all 74 inhabitants.

Krutein’s husband, Manfred, could not help her. He was a lieutenant in the German navy and was directing submarine repairs in St. Nazaire on the French Atlantic coast. The German submarine pens were surrounded by the Americans, and she hadn’t received a letter from Manfred in six months.

Thousands of refugees, fearful of falling into Russian hands, were streaming into Danzig every day.

“What should I do?”

The answer is chronicled in “Eva’s War: A True Story of Survival” (Amador Publishers; $17 hardback, $9 paperback), and it is a compelling account of the hardships and horrors of war as seen through the youthful eyes of Krutein, now 68 and a retired music teacher who lives in Irvine with Manfred.

With the roads blocked and the trains at a standstill, Krutein decided to flee Danzig by the only available means. She boarded a ship bound for the west, reasoning that at least the British and Americans “aren’t beasts like the Russians.”

Carrying a coveted boarding permit that her parents’ housekeeper, a member of the underground, had given her, Krutein with her daughter was able to board a small freighter in the harbor. But after two days, it appeared that the refugee-packed ship would never pull anchor, so she and her daughter got off. With an extraordinary pluck born of fear, Krutein managed to get herself and Lili aboard another vessel--a 1,600-passenger ocean liner packed with 10,000 refugees.

After landing in Kiel in northwest Germany she learned that the freighter had been torpedoed at sea and sunk. Everyone aboard had perished.

With a novelist’s attention to detail, Krutein provides a moving account of the next 12 months--the times she and Lili would huddle with hundreds of strangers in shelters during bombings, fleeing to the relative safety of the countryside when women and children were ordered out of Kiel, an interrogation by the Gestapo after referring to a German officer as a “shark” in a letter to her father, the shortage of food, her reunion with Manfred, the new life she started at the end of the war.

In chronicling the story, Krutein serves up a litany of the horrors of war:

* The female friend who was raped 30 times by Russian soldiers. How, after a Russian soldier shot the woman’s infant daughter in the face, she strangled the baby to cut short its suffering.

* The civilians who, after the fall of Danzig, had to beg and rummage for food in garbage cans. How residents were forbidden to bury the bodies on the streets and how, after the stench became unbearable, the Russians poured vodka on the bodies and set them afire.

* The sight of buildings that had been bombed and burned out, the families “living like rats in holes” beneath the rubble of their former homes.

Through it all, “Eva’s War” remains an uplifting family odyssey, one leavened by Krutein’s humanity and her love of music, which provided a welcome counterpoint to the atrocities all around her.

Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, senior legal officer with the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, and a historian of Germany’s expulsion from the lost territories in the east, says in his foreword: “Sad revelations, painful memories, excruciating experiences are tempered by compassion, love and a powerful, contagious optimism. . . . An indomitable love of life and of her family makes her prevail.”

Krutein said she wrote the book “to let Americans know what happened” to the 14 million Germans who fled or were expelled from their homeland. More than 2 million Germans, according to historians, did not survive the experience.

For years, Krutein said, “all the news about Germany was repressed here, so nobody knew or believed (what had happened). But when the information came out and the (history) books were even in the libraries in the university, nobody checked them out.”

With the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the reforms sweeping through Eastern Europe, the publication of “Eva’s War” could not be more timely. A powerful anti-war statement, the book is, as Krutein says in the publisher’s preface, “a war cry against the glorification of war.”

After the war, Eva and her daughter reunited with Manfred in Germany in a town called Wilhelmshaven, where Manfred built a shipyard. But fearful of another war with the Soviet Union, the Kruteins immigrated to Santiago, Chile, in 1951. There, Manfred worked as a mining engineer and Eva as an opera coach and pianist, and newspaper reviewer of concerts and books.

“There was a lot of Germans there after the war--even before the war. Many Chileans were married to Germans,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons we went down there. We didn’t know a single soul here, and without sponsors we couldn’t come.”

In 1960, however, the Kruteins, who by then had five children, were able to come to the United States. Manfred, now a retired ocean-mining engineer, is writing a novel about the war. Eva retired as a music teacher three years ago.

Although Krutein said she wrote her first story when she was 8 and had always dreamed of writing a novel, “music was the greater calling, so I concentrated on music all the time.”

That changed in 1981, when she decided to take a grammar class to improve her English. But the “grammar class” she showed up for turned out to be an advanced course in novel writing. Finding it “fascinating,” she decided to stay in it.

Krutein said she spent four years on her 253-page book, originally written as a fact-based novel rather than a first-person memoir.

Blessed with “an unusual memory,” Krutein said she had no trouble remembering the events and conversations that occurred during the year chronicled in her book. Besides, she said, “traumatic experiences are something you don’t easily forget.”

For many years, Krutein said, she had repressed a lot of what had happened to her and her family during the war.

“It was because you can’t talk to somebody about it,” she said. “Nobody understands it. In Germany it’s different. Everybody has the same story.”

Still, writing about the events was difficult.

“It was painful, very painful,” she said, “That’s why I put humor in too--just to lighten it up.”

The most difficult part for Krutein was writing about the death of her mother, who, she said, was gang-raped by five Russian soldiers. As related to Krutein by her parents’ former housekeeper after the war, her mother was so consumed with shame and guilt that she killed herself with cyanide.

“It was terrible. I cried at first,” Krutein said. “I identified with her, and it was terrible because it happened not only to her but to millions of women.”

Krutein lost her father a few months after the war. He died of typhus.

But, like many who have published memoirs about wrenching experiences, Eva said that writing her book was therapeutic. “You write and rewrite and rewrite, and finally the whole thing is not that traumatic any more.”

When the book was finished, Krutein said, a literary agent tried for a year to interest publishers in New York, but they rejected it.

“They said: ‘The book is very interesting, but it requires sympathy for Germans. At this point, there isn’t any,’ ” Krutein said. Krutein kept her manuscript in her garage for the next few years, returning her focus to music and serving as a coordinator for SERVAS (from the Esperanto word for service), an international organization dedicated to promoting world peace and understanding. The organization enables international travelers to be housed in private homes, and the Kruteins have opened their home over the years to hundreds of travelers from all over the world.

In fact, their link with SERVAS turned out to be the key to getting “Eva’s War” published.

Last May, the Kruteins were staying in the Albuquerque, N.M., home of SERVAS member Harry Willson of Amador Publishers, a small press that usually publishes fiction.

Krutein told Willson about her manuscript, and he asked her to send him a copy.

“He loved it,” she said. Willson, however, advised her to change the book from a third-person novel to a first-person memoir. “The content is true,” she says of it in its present form, “but the structure is a novel. It’s a hybrid.”

Krutein recently did readings from her book to an overflow crowd at Upchurch-Brown Booksellers in Laguna Beach, and she has a dozen more readings lined up for churches and social clubs over the next few months. (“Eva’s War” can be bought directly from the publisher: Amador Publishers, P.O. Box 12335, Albuquerque, N.M. 87195.)

Her meeting with her publisher was, she concedes with a warm smile, a stroke of luck.

“Without luck, you can’t do anything,” she said. Despite her suffering through the horrors of war, she had her share of good fortune during that year.

“Yes,” she said. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.”