Speaker: Josef Tuchscherer

Colelia Film Commentary by Josef Tuchscherer

This film was made in about 27 December 1940, just within two to three weeks after the population of Colelia was transported from Colelia, Dobrudscha, Romania, to Germany and settled in two camps. The camps were at Wipfeld which is in Unterfranken, northern Bavaria in Saint Ludwig Convent that used to serve as a home economics training center for girls. It was this camp which accommodated the people we see in this film. The number of families in each camp was about 35 or so; there were only about 70 families in Colelia at the time.

Our people had arrived in Germany within the previous two weeks. All of the clothing, etc., that you see is still the original clothing that people brought from Colelia, the way they were dressed at home. Basically, there hadn’t been any chance yet to acclimate to German customs. I’m not sure whether it is appropriate to say but it is obvious that this is a Third Reich film. The primary motivation behind making the film must have been to demonstrate in a newsreel that the Third Reich brought back ethnic Germans from other countries, back into the Fatherland, and that they were being treated very well. Furthermore, they were given good accommodations, food, medical help, etc. I think that was the motivation for making the film but I am not sure.

Our family lived in Saint Ludwig camp from after Christmas 1940 to December 1942. Mom never said anything bad about the way people were treated, especially in Saint Ludwig. It was better than in Lülsfeld. People were friendly to the staff. They tried to accommodate these folks from out of the country who had some peculiar habits. There were no boundaries to anywhere you wanted to go because there were none at home in Colelia. Generally, we were treated well.

We had to make some allowances for life in the camp. We had a different diet. We came to Bavaria into a big kitchen situation. People complained. Food was strange in the way it was prepared. There were no seconds. You were dished out food and that was it. They weren’t used to that at home. Probably the biggest single life style problem, which is not shown in this film, is that the families were accommodated in huge rooms with bunk beds about three feet apart. There was no living space. You can imagine putting twelve to fifteen families into a single room, side by side, with little babies. There wasn’t a night where it was totally quiet. It was just constant commotion. It seemed like somebody was always crying. That was the single most prominent aspect of life in the camp, lack of privacy and lack of a restful night.

(5:13 into the film)
Different villages had different experiences. The Karamuraters apparently were a stubborn lot. They didn’t want to take an oath to the Third Reich. During the processing, the government wanted proof of loyalty. If you did not take the oath, you were not to be trusted to settle on a farm in Poland. Every farm in Poland was given a quota. You had to deliver so many eggs, so many liters of milk, so many tons of grain to the government. They had to have people who abided by the German regulations. The Karamuraters, as a village, objected to that. They were then kept in Austria. I forget the name of the camp. In confinement it was like a concentration camp. These people could be not integrated into the German population. Therefore, it meant that they were not to be trusted.

(6:54 into the film)
This is what is typical of the dances some of the folks had done at home, even during weddings. I think it might be an influence from the east, like Ukrainian dances where they have a lot of group dancing. This was the kind of dancing you would see at a Colelia wedding. Yes, they did dance with each other but group dancing was also popular. Colelia had no dance hall or public assembly building. Weddings were usually held in the groom’s house. Dances were thus confined. The accordion player was in a corner of the room on a chair which was on a table. Colelia was an amalgam of cultures, a multicultural society. It had to deal with Turks, Tatars, Macedonians, Bulgarians and Gypsies. The largest farmer in Colelia, Emanuel Kosolowski [son of Johannes and Elisabetha (Gedak) Kosolowski, both originally from Krasna] hired itinerant workers, some of them Russians. Colelia was a German community but there was contact with many nationalities.

(9:35 into the film)
This is Vetter Jakob Janer, mother’s brother, who was a shoemaker. He learned the trade at home in Colelia. He made custom-made shoes from scratch. In Colelia there were no stores. You could buy no clothes, shoes, etc. in Colelia. My uncle had a small grocery store, the only commercial outlet in this village of about 300 people. Colelia was founded about 1880 and dissolved in 1940. It was only sixty years old at the time of the Resettlement. I was five when we left Colelia. In the fall of 1941, I started grade one in Lülsfeld. We attended school with local people and integrated with them. Mom, dad, Marie, my sister and I lived with a lady in Lülsfeld from 1941 to 1942. We went to the Lülsfeld church. Local people got to know people from the camps this way.

(11:40 into the film)
Within a month or so after we arrived in Germany, the young men began working in factories. They would take a bus from Lülsfeld to Schweinfurt. Women worked at home at the convent. They did laundry, floor cleaning, took care of cows and pigs, etc., and picked bug from potato plants. During 1940 to 1942, Germany needed all the help it could get.

(12:56 into the film)
In the culture of Colelia, affection was not commonly displayed. Mom said that with men working, they might not see their wives and children for ten days or more. The resident priest, Father Heinrich, at the convent said to a man one day, “Oh! You will give your wife a hug and kiss when you come back from work! I will be watching!” So, one day when Uncle Josef Tuchscherer comes off the bus, his wife, aunt Martha, rushed up to him and hugged and kissed him. That was a private joke between the priest and Uncle Josef.

Separation was not natural. In Colelia we lived together three hundred sixty-five days a year. We did not take holidays. We did not travel. People were bound to home except for trading. Men would take their grain by horse-drawn carts to Kotschalak / Cogealac. That was about the extent of leaving Colelia.

(14:53 into the film)
The story behind how I obtained the film is this. I was visiting with my mother about 15 years after we had moved to Canada. I told her that I had vague recollections that a film was made of life in the Saint Ludwig camp. She confirmed that a film was indeed made. I asked her if she had any idea who the camp commander had been and where he lived. She said that a cousin of mine, Brigitte Ternes, living in Würzburg, Germany, might be able to find out. Brigitte was able to do so and I wrote to him.

(15:31 into the film)
Alfred Engwald, the former camp commander, was very courteous. He was living in Marbach, Germany, at the time and was in his early 70’s. He said he was glad that somebody was asking about the film. He wrote, “I am getting old and I don’t know what to do with it. My brother made the film.” I offered to get it from him. He agreed. I sent him some money. He mailed the film to me in its original canister on 31 August 1970. It still had the title “Film vom VIIIb, Aufgenommen 27.12.1940, Benediktiner-Missions-Seminar, St. Ludwig am Main, Post Hirschfeld (Unterfranken)” on the top of the canister. I had the film transposed onto a VHS tape. The rest is history. Here it is on a DVD. I’m surprised I was given access to the film. Later Marie and I visited Germany and took the film with us. We felt that the film belonged in a German archive. I gave it to Donauschwäbisches Zentralmuseum in Ulm and suggest that if they made a DVD of it to send me a copy. I have not heard from them since.

(17:25 into the film)
Within two years of the making of this film, the people from Colelia were distributed to Poland and after that they dispersed worldwide. This film is the last grouping of the village in one place. I recognize faces but not names. As I said, I was only five years old when we lived in the camp.