As I've mentioned in previous blog posts, Hardy, my husband who passed away recently, kept everything. I did not want to burden others with having to go through all that some day, so I tackled it. I sorted, threw out, and packed boxes for the thrift store. I went through the boxes in the garage first, as I didn't want to work in there during the cold winter days. Then I turned my attention to the store room in the basement.
There was evidence of a mouse invasion and grandson Ivan set the traps. We caught five mice and I mustered up all my courage to dispose them into the garbage bin! The traps have remained empty since then, but I knew cleanup had to happen and I would have to go through the boxes. The recycling bin has been full to overflowing every week. Mostly Hardy kept old newspapers, magazines, yearbooks, etc.; things that no one else will care to keep and mice will claim for their nests. Among all that, however, there are treasures. Below is one of them, and my heart broke as I read this document.
My mother-in-law told me the story, but here it is in black and white. The document below, written a year after the event, is a copy of an appeal to the German government for compensation of accidental deaths of three family members during the bombing of a train on which they were travelling. Hardy's aunt, Kaethe Penner Schroeder, three children and a friend were fleeing their farm in Poland in March, 1945, due to the Russian invasion. She was 47 years old, her daughter, Brigitte was 17, her second daughter, Hannelore was 11 and her son Eckart was three.
A bomb hit the train and Hardy's aunt states soberly that her eleven year old daughter, Hannelore, was beheaded and died instantly; her seventeen year old daughter, Brigitte, had severe stomach injuries and died ten hours later. Eckard, the three year old was uninjured. She, herself, received a slight head injury. Her friend also died at once.
Although this is not part of the document, I believe there was a Downs Syndrome son who mysteriously disappeared earlier and was never found.
My heart breaks for this woman who lost her children under such tragic circumstances. The oldest son, Reinhard, was not on the train, and later became a vineyard farmer in South Germany. The youngest son, who survived without injuries, became a medical doctor in North Germany. I have met them as well as their father, who remarried. Somehow they carried on. For Tante Kaethe it all became too much to bear and some years after this event she took her own life.
This is just one tragic story of innocent civilians caught up in a war that has nothing to do with them, and everything to do with domination and power! It is not something that just happened in the distant past, it is happening right now in Israel and Palestine, in Russia and Ukraine. Our world is at war! Lives are shattered, innocent children are paying the price! Do we just accept this as part of the human condition? What can we do?
If nothing else, we can educate ourselves, we can read! I just finished reading The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and realized that I'm reading it for the third time! My last reading was in November, 2013. The story takes place in a small village in Germany where a little girl finds a home after she has experienced a similar train bombing as the one described above. She loses both her mother and her little brother who dies in her arms. She struggles with nightmares but overcomes them as she listens to her adoptive father's accordion music and learns to read, stealing books first from a grave digger and later from a wealthy woman who has a library in her home.
Death is the omniscient narrator in this book, but Death is not depicted as cruel and someone to be feared. Rather, death is the one who tenderly takes the departed home. I am comforted by that image as I recall Hardy's peaceful passing.
"Let words be your weapon, stories your shield, and hope your stolen treasure. Remember, when in the grip of a book, a story can set you free". (From a book review of The Book Thief.).
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