latviski
Peters' parents
Peters' mother, a telephony supervisor and assistant postmaster at the Talsi↗ post (and telephone, telegraph) managed to survive through the Soviet and Nazi occupations only because they needed someone who could run the office. Toward the end of the first Soviet occupation, she was fortuitously warned not to go home and not return; the Soviets came and took everyone away early the next morning a week before the Nazis invaded.
As the Red Army reoccupied Latvia, capturing Rīga on October 13, 1944↗, they were lucky to be living in the Courland pocket↗ and managed to board an evacuation transport ship, most likely on October 17th, that took them down to Danzig, now Gdansk, in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Peters doesn't know whether his parents set sail from Liepāja or Ventspils. Peters' mother did tell him she pulled her scarf over her eyes so she wouldn't see the Soviet bombshells falling around them, plunging into the sea or striking transport ships nearby.
Growing up, the story he heard from his mother was that they initially settled in what became the post-WWII Soviet zone, ultimately East Germany. She learned sewing as a potential new trade while Peters' father worked as a draftsman. And when the Soviet army threatened — Saxony was one of the last regions to be occupied by the Allies, they took their possessions from Latvia, got on their bicycles and headed west still in wartime.
Peters' parents are gone, and so we looked to online archives to fill in gaps to their story.
Saxony, Germany
The documents Peters found in the Arolsen Archives↗ solved the mystery behind the story: before the DP camps, when and where did Peters' parents live in what became the Soviet Zone then East Germany?
Leaving Danzig, Peters' parents headed south. They wound up in Niederschlema↗↗de — about as far south as one could go in Saxony — 10 miles/16 km from the border with Czechoslovakia. They resided at the Landkreis Schwarzenberg, Schützenhaus, Schwarzenberg District Shooting Club's Lodge. Their date of arrival is back-filled (handwritten) as October 1, 1944, though we know they only arrived in Danzig on October 14th. Numerous Schützenhäuser in Saxony were repurposed during the war for various purposes including emergency housing for bombed-out families or refugees. After the war, lodges, barracks, and other possible shelters in Saxony were particularly stressed as the Czechoslovakian Soviet puppet state brutally ejected ethnic Germans simply for being German↗ on the basis of collective Nazi guilt.
„ Der Herr Bürgermeister zu Niederschlema meldet... “
Eibenstock
Der Herr Bürgermeister zu Niederschlema meldet, daß die lettischen Flüchtlinge
Janis Wezrumba und Frau Irma
geb. Kullis
am 30.11.d.J. nach dort verzogen seien.
Jen bitte um Aufushme und Ubersendung je einer Aufenthaltsanzeige unter Verwendung der beifolgenden Vordrucke, sowie um Festelung, ob die Ausländer National-Pässe oder etwa gar bereits Vorläufige Fremden-Pässe besitzen. Ja Fall wollen Sie die Pässe mitsenden und wenn nicht, dann ist je ein Antrag auf Ausstellung eines Vorläufigen Fremden-Passes erforderlich. 2 Lichtbilder aus neuer Zeit wären beizufügen.
[stamped] 12 Dez 1944
“The Mayor of Niederschlema reports...”
Eibenstock
The Mayor of Niederschlema reports that the Latvian refugees
Janis Wezrumba and wife Irma
née Kullis
are said to have moved there on 30 November of this year.
We therefore request the registration and the return of one residence notification form each, using the enclosed templates. We also request clarification as to whether the foreigners possess national passports or perhaps already provisional alien passports. If so, please enclose the passports; if not, then an application for the issuance of a provisional alien passport is required for each. Two recent passport-sized photographs must be enclosed.
They moved to nearby Eibenstock↗↗de as of December 1st, taking up residence at 14 Bürgermeister-Hesse-Straße, living with the family of Paul Bürger.
Records also confirm Peters' mom's recounting of his father working as a draftsman. His employer is listed as "Fa. Hönnecke & Ditter", now the eponymously-named "EIBENSTOCK-Elektrowerkzeuge↗" manufacturer of high-end industrial and construction-trade power tools.
Saxony documents
Fleeing the Soviet advance, again
The Saxony area where Peters' parents had settled close to the Czechoslovakian border was among the last to fall to the Soviet advance. As the Red Army finally threatened, they took their possessions, got on their bicycles, and fled westward. Riding along forest trails to avoid getting shot, they pushed their bicycles uphill, then coasted back down. Peters' mother's left arm went nerve dead—limp and useless, from the strain. But, looking at a record Peters' father kept, not before reaching Haselünne↗. We can't help but notice Peters' parents first fled as far south in Saxony as their proficiency in German could take them, then fleeing as far west as they could. Eibenstock is 8km from the Czech border, Haselünne 30km from the Netherlands.
His mother spent a good part of their years in the DP camps working on recovering use of her arm through massages, hot compresses, vitamin injections,..., and—largely—sheer force of will. Her doctor told her he had seen many such injuries from war. But there was not a single mention in the medical literature of anyone having recovered.
Below, Peters' parents' trek as if all by bicycle, from Gdansk (Danzig) to the south of Saxony, then fleeing west, then through multiple camps in post-WWII western Germany. We annotated DP camps per the list on the photograph.
Peters evidently inherited his father's need to have a map for wherever he traveled. Maddeningly, none are to locations of any of their DP camps, prompting the question, why?
- A road map of the region around Hanover.
- A printed hand-drawn map of the area around Celle, a town about 19 miles/30 km north-east of Hanover. The map is of "Vereinsgewässer des Celler Fischereivereines e.V.", Club waters of the Celle Fishing Club. Peters' father was an avid and skilled fisherman. In a post-WWII devastated Germany, fishing was for food not sport. One possible explanation for having the map is that Peters' parents stopped off in Celle in October 1949 on the road from Dedelstorf to Diepholz.
- A road map of the region around Stuttgart. Being it is hundreds of miles from where Peters' parents were located in northern Germany, it's possible Peters' father visited or planned a visit to Esslingen, located just outside Stuttgart.
In the camps
Wolterdingen DP camp always stood out in Peters' mom's mind. That might because it is reminiscent of the German name for Kuldīga is Goldingen. She confessed to not recalling specific camps — reading through the list of half a dozen camps, that is no surprise especially as she was dealing with her own health issues.
DP camp documents — gallery
Documents appear in their order at arolsen-archives.org↗. Each includes front and back.
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Melle
Peters' parents' most extended single stay was nearly two years in Melle, from May 1946 to April 1948. We found very little online regarding camp life and organization there, so we searched archived Latvian newspapers for more information.
Read on for life in Melle and another family mystery solved.
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