MY FATHER

A recent conversation has me thinking about my father.

I never enjoyed a healthy relationship with him. Several years ago he passed away. It’s too late. I refused to go to him on his deathbed, and I don't regret my actions. What I wish is that he'd had the courage to own up to how he wounded me, before he died.

His family were German Mennonites living in Russia. (Mennonites were invited by Catherine the Great, to live in Russia, because they were being persecuted in Holland). The Mennonites lived in their own colony in Russia, raising silk worms. My father's family became extremely wealthy.

When the revolution happened, the Mennonites had everything taken from them, and were forced to work on collective farms. My father was around five at that time - much younger than his siblings. He and his family suffered from malaria, starvation, terror and hopelessness. His mother (my grandmother) lost all her hair, from lack of food and extreme stress. One of his older brothers went insane, was imprisoned and escaped several times before he eventually died in prison. Eventually the rest of his family were sent to the Gulag in Siberia, where they were forced to collect wood in the forest until they starved and froze to death.

When my father became of age, he was drafted into the Russian army, but because the Russians had so horribly persecuted his family, he hated them. And he had no wish to fight against his own German people. He escaped from his unit, and joined the German army. They valued him because he was a German who knew the Russian language.

He rarely talked about his war experiences, but occasionally he would tell us a few memories. He told us that his unit had been sent to Warsaw the day before the uprising. I think they were on their way from the training camp, to fight on the Russian front. When the uprising occurred, they were ordered to stay in Warsaw. Whenever I see wartime photographs of Warsaw, I look for him.

At some point he fought on the Russian front. Because he knew the Russian language, he was sent on a special mission with two other soldiers who did not know how to speak Russian. The three went over to the Russian camp. When they neared it, his two companions stayed behind while my father, pretending to be a Russian sympathizer, went into the camp to talk with someone there, and gain information.

But as he was talking with this person, his companions were discovered. My father heard yells, and shots, he cut off his sentence midstream and ran for his life. He reached his companions, found them dead with their faces blown off, and ran on. A handgernade hit him in the leg. He told us it felt as though his leg had been blown off. I remember the horrible scar that was revealed each summer of my childhood when our family went on vacation and my father wore his swimming shorts. People on the beach would ask him about it, and he would shrug it off. I remember the tension.

He struggled back to his camp, narrowly escaped being shot by his own comrades as he approached, and was taken to the hospital. As he was convalescing, the Russians overtook that area and stormed into the hospital. My father remembered a nurse rushing into his ward, warning him and the other patients in his room to make a pile of their stuff and burn it for their own safety. I never understood the significance of this as a child. As an adult I was told that my father had been SS.

He and the other patients were taken prisoner by the Russians. While a prisoner, my father's wounded leg was deliberately broken several times. Eventually he escaped, and, with his leg still in a cast, jumped on a train to Germany where he hid in barns, and was taken in by kind farmers.

After the war, he lived in Germany for a decade before emigrating to Canada. A year later, he met and married my mother and they started our family. He was nearly forty years old. He never told us about his post war life in Germany. My dad had many secrets.

It's a strange and sad thing to be looking at a photograph of jews being herded together and shot, and find yourself automatically searching for the face of your father among the German soldiers. It's eerie to watch a slide show of pictures your father took when he returned to Warsaw as an old man. He took photographs there, of a statue of German soldiers with guns, and told me "This is a statue commemorating what the Germans did for the Jews during the war."

When I tried to correct him “Don’t you mean what they did to the Jews?”, he looked right through me.

“That’s right.” He said as though I’d agreed with him. “What we did for the Jews.”

I feel terribly sad when I think about my father. I feel ripped off, and I feel that he was ripped off as well. I have to believe that there was a good man in there somewhere. Even though I rarely saw that side of him, I think my two younger sisters were lucky enough to experience it.

My father was not good to me. He wounded me terribly, and then he died, leaving me with nothing. But I like to think that if he hadn't been twisted by the horrors of his early life, he might have loved me to bits.