“My fatherland is my love; abandon it I shan’t,” sing the words of poetess Lydia Koidula. In 1944 our grandma did leave Estonia, dad in tow, knowing of her husband only that he was a Red Army conscript, if still alive. A story shared by many, then and today, including in Ukraine. This is our family’s story.
News of Stalingrad’s fall in 1943 arrived in Tallinn while Erika Napp was typing for the German railways, working to survive. Then followed Stalin’s forces, gradually peeling back Hitler’s invasion. Her employers knew they would soon evacuate, took their workers aside, and said, “We’re losing this war. We offer you free passes on our trains to anywhere you want to go, while we still can.”
Grandma was strong and determined at that time, at 35, and pictured the Soviets rolling back into Tallinn and targeting her as a Nazi collaborator. Understanding and translating orders given in German, Erika knew that Graz in Austria was a quiet place, out of harm’s way. She corralled other Estonians in her situation, and busily packed furniture and other belongings into wagons. Far to the west and south they travelled, clutching train tickets as their safe-conduct to a new life.
On a fine morning under a cornflower-blue sky, Erika’s train arrived in a clean city, gleaming in the sun, and she made a decision: to disembark and unload, find work at the railways and a place to live, and put dad into school. The city’s name, Dresden.
Dad told us of a bomb hitting their apartment as B52 warplanes roared overhead. His memories were snapshots of terrifying days and nights. A man in the basement covered in blood and missing half his face. Dad wondering at his dirty and stained teeth. Sitting on a suitcase of linen and waiting. Grandma marching dad over dead bodies out of broken windows. Sheltering under a bridge from the rain. The only thing to eat, animal fat in a cracked glass jar.
Between 13 and 15 February 1945 the Allies converted the “Florence of the Elbe” into a smoking ruin, and left as many as 25,000 civilians dead. So began a desperate journey for dad and grandma, cajoling the German railways to keep travelling, dad lying in a luggage rack, chewing on a sausage, a hungry 12-year-old. His dreams were of eating food, to wake each new day to hunger, insensible of their direction of travel. Grandma had an aim - to reach neutral Switzerland. We still have rail tickets among her memorabilia. We know they left Dresden on 15 February, and arrived at the frontier town of Konstanz on or before 23 February, a week-long trip. The border closed; the end of that particular road.
Rail ticket out of Konstanz to Ravensburg, southern Germany, issued 23 February 1945
Grandma said very little to us of the experience. Clearly, she and dad could not stay in Konstanz, hoping for some change. And so, they joined the weary flotsam and jetsam of Europe, eking out an existence from one refugee camp to another in southern Germany, in what became the American Zone after the war ended. Places like Ulm, Neuburg an den Donau, Memmingen, Aschaffenburg, Geislingen.
For dad and grandma and countless others, the war did not end on 8 May 1945. Displaced persons’ camps, subsisting on rations, exile in a foreign country, speaking a foreign language. This was their truth, knowing home was now a Soviet socialist republic, having no nationality and afraid to return, cut off from news of family, eternally hungry but alive.
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