The little village church at Wiesenau near the river Oder offered no services yesterday, its doors barricaded with sand bags as the water lapped around its whitewashed walls, writes Denis Staunton in Frankfurt an der Oder.
Wiesenau was abandoned by the emergency services on Friday after a dyke collapsed. The village is a waterlogged ghost town, completely deserted except for a few policemen and rescue workers dozing in the sun and one or two stubborn residents who refuse to leave. The Timm family wept as they left home, fearful of what they will find when they return. Volker Timm was bitter about the way the village was abandoned to the elements.
"The soldiers left us to drown. Nobody told us anything. We only found out we had given up from the television," he said.
The Ehlert family is staying in a shed next to a drinks warehouse, where 10 horses, some pigs and 300 cows have also found shelter. Some 20 dogs are tied up outside but nobody knows who owns them.
"They took us out too early," complained Peter Ehlert. "Documents, clothes, furniture and insurance policies are still lying there." Some local people were already seeking to blame the authorities for the disaster. According to Diethard Klinnert, a local farmer, the river fortifications were much better maintained under the old communist regime before German reunification.
"No work has been done on the dyke for seven years. Now we're paying the price. The border guards wanted to move us out two days ago. We could have finished harvesting whole fields but they started panicking too early," he said.
"People deny the danger and often overestimate their own strength," says Lenelis Kruse, an environmental psychologist. "In rural districts the relationship to the village and to animals is particularly strong."
Helga Becker and her son Frank scrambled to pile their most valuable possessions into a rubber dinghy as the water rose inside their living room. "The water is only a metre away from the ceiling. While we were taking the things away it rose another 20 centimetres," Frank said. He, too, complained that the evacuation had taken place too early. "The police hammered on our doors like mad on Tuesday. They have enough people to throw you out but not enough to help," he said. The Beckers are staying with relations in a nearby village and as weather forecasters predict the floods will reach their peak on Wednesday, Frank is not expecting to go home very soon.