More than two years ago I discovered among our father’s papers several typewritten copies of a two-page document he had never mentioned, the original in German and translated into English.
Dated 23 March 1949, at the jurisdiction of the Geislingen District Court at Geislingen Steige, in the American Zone of Germany post-WWII, grandma testified along with two witnesses that my grandfather, Johannes Napp, died in a gulag in Chelyabinsk at the gateway to Siberia in 1943.
Erika Napp's 1949 testimony of Johannes Napp's death in a Siberian gulag
This was a shock. The family folklore had always been that Johannes, a military man, had been conscripted into the Red Army when the Soviets invaded Tallinn in 1941. I talked to dad shortly before he passed away about what happened. Tears came as he spoke of his father lifting him off the ground and giving him a quick hug after Russian soldiers burst into their flat and took him away.
Our family story tells us that Johannes arrived - along with 8,000 other Estonian conscripts – at a city and strategic railway hub called Velikiye Luki west of Moscow where a terrible battle unfolded, starting in 1942 and extending through the bitter Russian winter into January 1943. Casualties on both sides were heavy, and while the Soviets carried the day, Johannes did not survive the ordeal.
Grandma could not have known of her husband’s fate during her exile in war-torn Germany; she had had no contact with Estonia until much later, in the early 1950s.
Juhan Kriisa (born 1897) and Julius Ohsolin (born 1912) stated before notary Dr Otto Fischer, “We have known the appeared person No. 1 [Erika Napp] since many years from our native country Estonia. We have received the obituary notice through the tracing office of the Estonian Red Cross existing at that time and we transmitted this information to the appeared person No. 1. Therefore, we can confirm the statements of the appeared person No. 1 according to our best knowledge.”
No original or copy of the obituary notice was included in dad’s papers. I wrote to the Estonian Red Cross, and received an enthusiastic initial response, and thereafter no information.
I then took the document to visit Aino Krumins née Lukkats, an Estonian who had been a family friend since dad arrived in New Zealand in 1949. She was 85, sharp as a tack, and with her I had my first basic conversation in Estonian. We switched to English to discuss Dr Fischer’s “dispatch”.
It’s a forgery, Aino said. “It was a crazy time. People were desperate to get out of Europe.” The UN refugee organisation needed evidence of the husband’s and father’s death before refugee mothers with children could emigrate.
A dull sensation; I could only agree. The whole thing didn’t read true from beginning to end.
Overleaf, a legal counsellor for the International Refuge Organisation, Juhan Õunapuu (apple-tree), had written and stamped on 3 May 1949, “This translation is for IRO use and resettlements purposes only.”
Grandma had stated under oath, “My husband was deported by the Russians [later struck out with x’s, and replaced with ‘Bolshevists’] on 7 June 1941 to Russia and died in 1943 in prisoners’ camp in Tscheljabinsk in Russia.”
By any account, Chelyabinsk was a horror of a gulag. The life expectancy of anyone incarcerated there was measured in weeks, not months. If exhaustion and over work or assault didn’t kill the prisoners, dysentery or malnutrition did.
In my mind, mystery surrounds the death of our grandfather, Johannes Napp. Dad once spoke to me of meeting an Estonian veteran of the battle of Velikiye Luki, in Auckland, when a teenager. The veteran laughed at dad’s description of Johannes as an army captain. He told dad his father was a supply officer. Offended, dad walked off.
Years later dad said he had come across correspondence between my grandparents – which I have been unable to find - implying that Johannes had been sent to Moscow at some point in his Red Army career, reason unknown. Had he been disgraced? Demoted?
Dad later tracked down the battle veteran to restart the conversation; however, by this time he was very old, and could not recall anything of interest.
I decided that if Greg and I ever visited Estonia, we would try to find out more about our grandfather. A soldier during the 1918 war for Estonia’s independence, it is a tragedy that he lived only to die at 42 years of age, fighting for one enemy, at the hands of another. His name should be chiselled among more than 22,000 names of Estonians who had died from Soviet wartime and post-war coercion on the Pirita war memorial in Tallinn.
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