Searching for my Father

(DE) ‘I have mourned my whole life, just as I do now,’ I said spontaneously to a friend who asked me how I was doing after the death of a loved one.  Grief was deeply rooted in my childhood soul. ‘You children never lacked anything,’ my aunt once replied when I talked to her about it. It wasn't something that was missing, but someone – my father. He had died on the Russian front three days before I was born in 1941.

The search for my father accompanied me throughout my life.

My greatest wish was to find his grave. For a long time, this seemed impossible until we were able to travel to Russia in 2017.      

I missed my absent father, especially during my childhood; his loss is the dominant issue of my biography.

My 'forester' father, whom I have never seen.

We never saw each other.  When he left for the war, my mother was four months pregnant with me. According to my mother, my father said that he would probably never get to meet me.

He never came back.

At the start of the Russian offensive, he was drafted and sent to the front lines on the Russian Front.  The day before he left, a photo was taken of an early summer meadow. My unhappy mother sits in front of bed sheets fluttering on a clothesline, holding my three-year-old older sister on her lap, next to her, my handsome father. It was early summer 1941, and ominous signs of bad things to come were already evident.

Close to my father in a fantasy world

About two years later, a photographer took a picture of our reduced family when I was about 18 months old.  My mother sits on a chair, dressed in black and looking pale. She holds a crumpled handkerchief in her closed hand. I am sitting on her lap, without being held, as my sister leans against her knees. All three of us look lost.

My father had been a forester. Before he left, he had entrusted his hunting dog to the care of his sister-in-law, my mother's sister. She knew more about dogs and still lived in her parents' house, which had a large, dog-friendly garden.

Father's dog lived with us after his death.

Since my mother returned to her family of origin with us children after my father's death, the dog can be seen in all my early childhood photos—a living link to my father, the forester. Once, I held up my sandwich so that the dog couldn't take it from me. I was about three years old.

I learned little about my father. No one spoke about him. The war years were too eventful. In addition, the head of the family, my maternal grandfather, died in 1944 at not even sixty years of age, presumably of a heart attack.

My father was not forgotten. But after my mother remarried when I was five years old, he was rarely mentioned. Therefore, much was left to my imagination.

My lack of knowledge about him and my uncertainty are evident in the following incident:

Shortly after I started school, we were asked to name our fathers' professions. I probably said hunter. The teacher explained that such a profession did not exist and that I should ask my mother again. I was humiliated; it felt as if I had fallen into an abyss. Had my father never existed? The little I knew about him was that he came from a place called Herzogswalde, a place I imagined to be forested and romantic, partly because his family had sent pheasants they had shot there during the war.

Early stories mentioned that my father's family had been generous, well-read, and not overly interested in material things. During my early school days, I fantasised myself into a world of my own that corresponded to my idea of my father's world. It was situated in a remote, isolated forest ranger's lodge.

 In the mornings, especially in winter, I would dress my dolls warmly, place them outside the window, and accompany them in my thoughts on their long, lonely way to school. I would bring them back in after my own school day was over. I loved their smell of fresh, cold winter air. Well into my teenage years, I lived a fantasised double life full of sadness.

My play became more sophisticated as I grew older. I built tiny, lifelike forest lodges in the woods and in the garden. A pantry was a must, as the forest lodge was so far away from other people.

I couldn't and didn't talk about it; it was my own lonely world, locked away inside me, my comfort that I didn't want to share with anyone.

Today, I think I had found a clever way of psychologically processing my father's absence.

My father's real home in present-day in Poland (1995)

However, as an adult woman, I wanted to get to know the reality, so I travelled to Poland with my husband, Fritjof, in 1995.

There was no longer a place called Herzogswalde in Poland. All the maps were written in Polish. That was a challenge. Since we knew that the place must be near Opole, we asked the priests of the surrounding parishes about a place that had been called Herzogswalde before the war. Fritjof communicated with the priests in the purest Latin.

They found what they were looking for in their church books. This is how we reached our destination – the place where my father had grown up and where his family had lived. 

However, the village of Herzogswalde, now known as Wierzbnik in Polish, was a disappointment compared to the romantic ideas I had had as a child.  It was a long, narrow street village with a small, overgrown duck pond. There were no woods nearby, only a desolate plain.

Feeling a little lost, we stood in the village and asked passers-by in broken Polish for more precise locations. They directed us to a German woman who had been married to a Pole and was therefore allowed to stay in Poland; of course, she spoke German, Mrs Dzura. She served us our first Eckes Edelkirsch and took us to visit all the families who had known my father's family. Although we came from Germany, all the Polish families were very friendly. Everywhere we went, we learned that the country made a clear distinction between Nazi Germany and our current country, for example, on memorial plaques.

With the help of the families we visited, we found my grandfather's grave. It was the first one in a cemetery created from a former football field after the war. My grandfather had refused to leave his house when the Red Army marched in, stayed behind alone in the village and starved to death. He did not want to leave his home, possibly felt too old, and, after the death of his son, was too depressed to find the strength to flee.  I imagine him to be very warm-hearted, especially after reading the letter he wrote to my mother after his son's death. Overcome with tears, I had to stop reading halfway through the letter the first time I read it.

Mrs Djura also took us to my father's family home. It stood large and abandoned in the middle of the village. Nothing had been destroyed, and we visited the large inn kitchen and the dance hall. My grandfather had been an innkeeper and village schoolteacher. Old festive banners still hung in the dance hall, as if time had stood still. However, I couldn't imagine my young father in this lively atmosphere. 

This trip to Poland had made my image of my father a little more complete. Although our visit had disillusioned me about the village of his origins, it had nevertheless brought me a little closer to my father.

My father's death and my birth – an eternal burden on my soul

Another aspect of my search for my father, my search for closeness to him, was my feelings of guilt about his death. They weighed on me like lead weights. My mother had linked the two events together; for her, my birth was inextricably linked to his death. An old superstition says: when a child comes, one must go! Both events were too close together. 

As a child, I suffered greatly from the question of whether he was in purgatory or in heaven, and whether I could do anything for him. I tried for hours with prayers of indulgence to bring my father from purgatory to heaven, if so, his death and my birth were connected. During a short period in the church year, there was the opportunity to pray for indulgences. Praying for indulgences meant going to church and praying a certain number of ‘Hail Marys’ and the ‘Lord’s Prayer’, then leaving the church and re-entering it to pray again, and so on.

Chalk marks on the church wall helped me keep track. In my zeal, I often reached twenty rounds. My evening prayer always included the request: Make my father go to heaven!

I was, I believe, quiet and obedient, and I prayed a great deal; I would never have consciously done anything wrong, quite unlike my older sister. She seemed to fear nothing, dared to do considerably stupid things and seemed much freer than I was. She had no guilt on her conscience and was lucky enough to be blonde like our father. It seemed to me that this brought her closer to him. The evening song, ‘Sleep, little child, sleep, two sheep are standing outside, one black and one white, and if the white one is naughty, the black one will come and bite it,’ saddened me greatly. I believed that I was the black and evil one.

I would have liked to know if I had any similarities with my father. Unfortunately, my mother refused to answer my question. I laboriously looked at a photo of my father, compared it with earlier photos of myself, and gave myself the somewhat vague answer that my eyes and mouth might resemble his facial features. I had to grow up first to realise this.

I was always preoccupied with the question of how I could get closer to him. Would it help me if I found his grave?

Visiting my father's grave – disappointment and arrival

My father's grave during the war.

I was interested in everything related to his death.

During the Cold War, it was impossible to locate the grave in the Soviet Union.

The place of his death and his grave are about 80 km from Moscow. After his death, his comrades sent my mother a photo of his grave, with a simple birch cross bearing his name.

After the war, one of my father's comrades wrote a detailed report about his pioneer battalion. Their mission as pioneers was to clear the way for the advancing troops. My father's death is also mentioned in this report.

The Pioneer Batallion 742.

Quote and excerpt: "… Explosive charges with time fuses were placed within Nelidowa, repeatedly halting the advance and supply lines and causing losses in terms of human lives and material. On 14 October (1941, author's note), parts of the battalion were deployed to locate and dismantle these charges. When one of these charges detonated, Private …….. was killed, and when a second charge detonated, OGfr.   ……… and Private ………. (my father, author's note) from the 2nd Company were killed"

(Friedrich Noblé, ’Das  Pionierbataillon 742 (Army Troops)" [Engineer Battalion 742 (Army Troops)], p. 18).

My husband and I travelled to Moscow with one of our nephews in 2017. Representatives of the German War Graves Commission attended to our request. They organised the trip and our stay in Russia.

As an introduction to the work of the War Graves Commission, we were given an explanation and demonstration of how the remains of fallen soldiers are recovered. We were invited to attend an exhumation. The location had been determined using old aerial photographs taken during the war of the fresh graves. It was on an industrial site whose owner had given permission for the graves to be opened.

I could hardly believe that such thorough and accurate records had been possible and had actually been made in the midst of war. So much death and suffering, and yet, this bureaucratic mapping!

In preparation for the exhumation, the hard asphalt surface, similar to a road, had been drilled open days before. We then looked into an earth pit measuring approximately 2 x 6 metres. The soil at the bottom of the pit was carefully dug out with shovels. Then four bodies became visible. They lay side by side as skeletons, only their eight boots still intact on their foot and leg bones. A harrowing sign of their lives before their death. Even today, as I write this, it still takes my breath away!

The remains of the deceased were placed in marked plastic bags for later burial in a dignified cemetery. Before that, the personal belongings of the fallen soldiers had been recovered from their uniform pockets, marked and secured for their families. Suddenly, the lives of the dead were before our eyes. There were photos, small animal replicas and a pocket knife.

Thoughts ran through my head: Shouldn't the dead remain in their previous resting place, even if it was undignified? Was there such a thing as the commandment of undisturbed rest for the dead? The use of plastic bags also appalled me. On the other hand, there were thousands of dead soldiers to be moved and the strong desire of their relatives to have a place where they could commemorate the dead.

For me, a grave for my father would have been a blessing.

Thousands of fallen German and Russian Soldiers. Their names can be read on marble slabs.

Later, we visited huge burial grounds with thousands of dead Germans and Russians. The burial grounds were large lawns with steles and marble slabs bearing the names of those buried there. All had been born within a decade and a half and died between the ages of twenty and thirty. A Christian and an Orthodox cross for the German and Russian fallen stood on a small hill. A small memorial service was held under the Christian cross.

The names of the fallen from the greater Moscow region were read out, and I heard my father's full name publicly for the first time. My heart could hardly bear the excitement and pain.

A jeep, chartered especially for us, then drove us to the remote place of his death in Nelidowa. We went for hours along a gravel road through uninhabited moorland with blue lupins and stunted birch trees.

The grave I had seen in the photograph as a child had long since disappeared. It had been built over with a garage during the Cold War.

There was a Russian cemetery nearby with special grave shapes. Small squares were fenced in, enclosing the grave site and a table with a bench. Would people eat with the dead when they visited them in remembrance? A beautiful thought!

Even though we didn't find my father's grave, I now knew what he had seen shortly before his death: vast moorlands with stunted birch trees, sparsely populated and poor. There was a sawmill in the village, and I could smell the fresh wood, feeling close to my father even without finding his grave. I had wanted this for as long as I could remember.

I had the feeling that I had arrived.  My search for my father brought me closer to him. In a photo of him, I can now see similarities with him.

The longing remains, but my search for clues has brought me a little closer to him. However, the subject of my father remains a dominant figure in my biography. In everything I do, I want to be a good daughter to him. (MoWi)