The Biography of Gertrud Jakumeit

Gertrud Jakumeit was born into the Germany of late 19th and early 20th century expansion. Some forty years before, Bismarck had unified all Germans into one state, under the King of Prussia. Germany had a number of colonies in Africa and other places, and was a power to be reckoned with. Gertrud was born just prior to the outbreak of World War I, and grew up in the Germany of the Versailles Treaty, economically crippled, first by war reparations, and then by the worldwide Great Depression, which in Germany was particularly dire. In addition, her homeland, Memel, had been removed from German administration and became increasingly dominated by Lithuania, leading to the oppression of the ethnic German majority in Memel.

Gertrud met and fell in love with Otto Baltutt when she was about 20 years old. She looked towards this relationship as her escape from the household of her domineering father, Adam Jakumeit, and they were married in October 1934; not long thereafter, Otto and Gertrud left Lithuanaian-dominated Memel for Germany, where Otto joined the Army and served out a two year hitch. While serving in the Army, Otto and Gertrud moved to Gilgenburg, East Prussia, where Otto was posted. Here their first two daughters were born. After completing active service, Otto took a job as a machinist in an ammunition plant in Koenigsburg (the East Prussian capital), while moving his family to the city of Osterode, where their two youngest daughters were born.

After the German defensive lines were broken through at the town of Tannenberg on January 21, 1945, 20 km south of Osterode, a general evacuation order was issued, and Gertrud prepared her girls and herself for flight. Otto managed to show up on an evacuation train from Königsberg just in time to enable him to flee northwards with his family on a refugee train. They had only made it to the town of Preußisch Holland (Prussian Holland in English), about 40 km from Osterode, when the Russian caught up. They took shelter in this mostly empty town as Soviet combat forces blew through in their mad dash to the Baltic Sea.

Three weeks after their arrival in Preußisch Holland, the Soviet occupation forces began posting placards in German, instructing Germans to report to the commandant of the town to be registered; death was the punishment for failure to obey. Accordingly, Otto and Gertrud left their four little daughters, ages 4 through 10, alone in the house they had been sheltering in, and reported to the commandant's office. They never returned.

Gertrud was immediately shipped to the Soviet Union, and worked as a slave laborer, logging in the forests of the Ural Mountains for over three years before being returned to now Eastern (Communist) Germany -- where she was reunited with her daughters, who had meanwhile managed to survive parentless in the bombed-out city for close to nine months, before being shipped to Berlin by the Soviets. Otto was likewise taken for slave labor by the Soviets, and was sighted one time after his disappearance by his two oldest daughters, but was never seen again, his ultimate fate unknown.

Upon being reunited with her daughters in East Berlin, Gertrud eventually realized the disadvantages of living on the Communist East side of Berlin, and like many others voted with her feet, moving to the free West side of Berlin. Again taking on the status of refugees, they remained in West Berlin throughout the Berlin Airlift and the construction of the Berlin Wall. By the time the family was moved from Berlin to the area of southern Germany, the eldest girls had either gotten married or were living on their own, and Gertrud, with her youngest daughter, Waltraut, finally settled in the city of Ulm (on the Danube river).

Gertrud lived quietly in Ulm for the rest of her life until succumbing to the infirmities of old age on 26 December 2004, having lived 91 years.

---Michael L. Clark