Every year in the 1990s I would spend a "white week" skiing in the Dolomites. Every year, same people from the same German ski club and the same ski resort. I noticed Klaus because he would often stand still and appear to contemplate the terrain. He would half-close his eyes and swivel his head while sniffing at the air with his aquiline nose. I wondered if he looked at the terrain with the eyes of a soldier - a good defensive position here, good terrain for a flanking manoeuvre there. Klaus was around 70 in 1995 and I my imagination told me he had fought in the western desert in WW2. He would have looked rather like the man below - in my imagination.
One day Klaus told us his story. It was his misfortune to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time. In 1945, aged 15, he was given a few hours training and sent off with his schoolmates to face the Russians. It was just a few weeks before the war's end but the Red Army showed no mercy to any German soldier, especially if he was wearing SS uniform. Klaus was taken prisoner but the rest of his schoolmates were killed.
Klaus was sentenced to a long stint in a Russian labour camp. Like many other prisoners he did not get back to Germany until 1950. He was lucky he survived. But he was fortunate because he was befriended by the man on the bunk bed above him. One day, this man was showing Klaus a picture of his family - rather like the second picture below. Klaus said he immediately fell in love with the image of the man's eldest sister. It was almost certainly this love that kept him alive in what must have been horrendous conditions.
Klaus was released in the early 50s. As soon as he could he went to visit his friend from the camp. He married the man's sister and, in 2002, when I last saw Klaus, they were still together. Perhaps, when I had watched him sniffing at the air with his aquiline nose, he was not thinking of defensive positions or flanking manoeuvres but of the woman who had kept him alive and who was still his wife.
I can identify with this, though one generation later, as my lady is the daughter of a Latvian who fought with German forces on the Eastern front. After training in Germany, he served first in the Ukraine with the international Viking division, then, when that unit was shattered after holding the Russian offensive post-Stalingrad in spring 1943, transferred as a cadre to a new unit in the Latvian Legion, then at Leningrad, Staraya Russa and finally in the 'Kurland Kessel', where in late summer 1944 his unit took part in an attempted breakout to link up with a German relief attempt from the south. When that failed, his unit found itself isolated, surrounded, low on supplies and with numbers of wounded, so they surrendered. As he himself put it, he was 'lucky to be taken early', as many of those who fought on were killed. During his impromptu extended holiday in Siberia, he gave up smoking ('It was either cigarettes or bread') he was released in the early 1950s on terms that he was 'never to mention his experiences to anyone'. And so it was that Rasma only learned of her father's wartime activities when she became an adult. Hence I rather think of her as "not the French lieutenant's woman but the Latvian obersturmfuehrer's daughter" :)
Posted by: Christopher Goddard | 02/10/2018 at 07:07 AM