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Appendix: Air-raid alarm jolts childhood memories of fleeing Latvia for Gotenhafen

EPISODE 12: POSTED 06 AUGUST 2010

Voyage to an unwelcome welcome

From my diary of 10 August 1944:

Fog and dampness make us feel very cold but there is nothing we can do about it but wait for the sun to come up. Its appearance is welcomed by everybody on the top deck. The fog has lifted and the sky is clear. It promises to be a nice day, the last one for us near the coast of Latvia. Our ship has started to move. Several other ships can be seen not far from us. Arnold Prieditis [AP] and myself have found a cosy place on top of a heap of life rafts.

The top deck soon becomes overcrowded and there is hardly standing room there, as people from the holds scramble up for fresh air. The wind is rather fresh and strong but we are sheltered from it by the superstructure of the ship. At this stage we have no worries about food. My Aunt and AP’s mother have taken care of that. I have fresh home-baked white bread and AP has some honey in his bag. We combine the two for a hearty breakfast.

In spite of our comfortable set up, we are worried. The Baltic Sea is patrolled by Soviet U-boats and planes and we know that many ships have been torpedoed or bombed into oblivion. The thought ties my guts into a knot. About lunchtime the convoy changes its course from north-west to south. We are leaving the Bay of Riga and entering the open waters of the Baltic.

Far away I can just glimpse the coast of Courland [western Latvia]. Somewhere there is Ventspils and a bit further inland my father’s farm. Towards the evening the wind gusts become stronger and the wave tops turn white. The escorting patrol boats are tossed by the waves but our ship is much larger and more stable. It’s our second night on the ship. The wind is howling and the ship is now lurching on the waves. At least we have some shelter and a reasonably comfortable sleep in the netting covering the liferafts.

From my diary of 11 August 1944:

At about 2pm we have our first sighting of Gdynia [renamed Gotenhafen during the German occupation] on the coast of Poland. We soon disembark the ship and march in columns to a nearby park. For the first time we are stepping on foreign soil. So far we haven’t been given any extra clothes or footwear, or other articles essential for civilised living. Most of the younger men are still in school uniform, others, such as myself, are in street clothes.

At least we are all clean and healthy, but obviously the Germans have other ideas. They make us stand in line for hot showers and delousing. The showers are fine but there is no need for the delousing [that problem we experienced a bit later]. It is well into the night by the time the delousing is finished and we can settle down to sleep in the park on bare ground. AP and I do the same as on the ship — we put one blanket on the ground and use the other one to cover us.

From my diary of 12 August 1944:

We wake from a good night’s sleep. At least there is no worry about Russian U-boats. It’s a beautiful early autumn morning. There is a tramline right beside of the park and several stores nearby. We are surprised that the shops are well stocked with goods that we hadn’t seen in Latvia since the German occupation. We spend a second night in the park under starlit sky.

From my diary of 13 August 1944:

The air-raid alarm sounds early in the morning and Russian planes appear over Gotenhafen. The trees in the park are our only shelter but we feel reasonably safe.

At last we are told to prepare to leave the park. I am disappointed. I had hoped that we could wait here for the war to end. I still have the bottle of brandy in my bag and consider this the right time to drown our sorrows. AP and I know that it is the last good drop we’ll probably taste for a long time.

A few hours later we are on our way to a nearby railway station. It is already dark when we board the train ready for travel inland. For a long period our train is shunted in various directions and the rumour is that they are sending us to Czechoslovakia for training in their modern barracks and training fields. We had heard that food supplies there were much better than elsewhere. To our disappointment, the train stops next to nowhere on the old Polish–German border near a small village called Laushana.

We, the new conscripts, had been chaperoned from Gottenhafen by a small group of Latvian soldiers who had been fighting for the Germans on the Eastern Front for the past couple of years and whose ranks had been decimated retreating from Russia. We were grouped into platoons, each led by a corporal or private first-class. Our first job at the village was to clean out a house which, we were told, was to be our living quarters. So we expended a lot of energy and did a good job. All the floors were scrubbed, the walls and the ceilings washed. But when it was finished and we started to move our belongings in, we were told that the house was for the sergeants and commissioned officers. Our place was in the stables on a heap of straw. We quickly learned a lesson never to believe this lot, even if they were Latvians.

In fact, the leadership in this camp left much to be desired. We had been left in the charge of a group of low-down bastards who cared only to brew and drink whisky and have parties at our expense. Food meant for our consumption was often sold on the black market to buy liquor for officers who were pawns of the Germans.

This was still only a holding camp only and we didn’t really receive any proper training. We were issued with food, but nothing else. Our street clothes and footwear were in poor condition now from running and crawling on ploughed fields. Many had no footwear left. The reserves of soap and razors we had brought from home had been almost used up. The only washing facility was a hand pump on an open well, but, on the plus side, the weather remained warm and dry. There is nothing more invigorating than having a wash with freezing cold water being pumped from the well by your mate.

We openly discussed the situation on both the fronts, hoping for major victories by the Allies on the Western Front, while having great concern about the advances of the Bolsheviks. Our hopes rested on the Western Allies defeating the Germans and also negotiating a post-war settlement that would forced the Soviets to abandon their hold on illegally occupied states such as Latvia.

We didn’t imagine that, as conscripts in the German Army, we would be considered part of the enemy. We thought that Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s “marriage” to Stalin was only an expediency of war, the same as ours was with the Germans. We could not believe that known mass murderer such as Stalin would be allowed to continue in his merry way murdering more millions of innocent people in other nations.

But we didn’t know that the Western press in the West had transformed Stalin from a tyrant and terrorist into “jovial, kind and friendly Uncle Joe”! We had no idea at the time that Stalin had been accepted as an equal partner by Roosevelt and Churchill, and that the three of them were already dividing the spoils — and deciding the fate of small and not-so-small nations as if they were merely produce with price tags.

Appendix: Air-raid alarm jolts childhood memories of fleeing Latvia for Gotenhafen

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John Sigurds Kalme with his mother Erika and younger brother Ivars Charles in Latvia 1942–43. Erika died in 1998, aged almost 92, Ivars in 2002, aged 63.

APPENDIX

Air-raid alarm jolts childhood memories of fleeing Latvia for Gotenhafen

Following publication of Episode 12, I received an interesting note from John Sigurds Kalme (originally Sigurds Janis Kamlme), a Latvian who was evacuated to Gotenhafen as an eight-year-old on 14 October 1944, just a couple of months after Arnold had landed there as a conscript.

The following entry from Arnold’s diary brought back some unpleasant memories for John, who now lives in the United States:

The air-raid alarm sounds early in the morning and Russian planes appear over Gotenhafen.

“We had air raids practically every night,” John writes.

“I slept with underwear and socks on, every night. When the radio said: ‘Achtung, die luft lage meldung’, we continued to sleep. But when the radio announcer said: ‘Achtung! Achtung! Die luft lage meldung’, we did not bother to listen any further. We knew that an air raid was imminent. I would put on my pants and my shoes, grab my luggage, and hurry to the air-raid shelter.

“I still have a habit of sleeping in my underwear, and until recently had nightmares about air raids. I used to dream that the Russian front was nearing, and that we had put our luggage in a truck. Then I would realize that the truck had a flat tyre, and would wake up in a sweat.

“By January 1945 I could see from the fourth-floor window German army trucks coming from the direction of the Russian front, loaded with bloodied German soldiers. Trucks and cars were allowed only a thin horizontal slit in the headlights for light to shine through. The rest of the glass was painted black to minimise the light that enemy planes could see.”

John’s father had been the Chief Prosecutor (District Attorney) of the Riga District Court from1933 and 1940.

“In 1940 he was arrested by the Russians, and only in 1992 did my mother find out that he had been shot in 1941 at Lyublyanka, the KGB headquarters in Moscow,” writes John.

“Shortly before the Russians occupied Latvia in 1940, we had changed our last name.

“My grandfather’s cousin was married to a Baltic German, and the cousin himself had managed to classify himself as a Baltic German, although he was probably Latvian.

“In 1939 Hitler requested that Baltic Germans living in Latvia move to Germany. My grandfather’s cousin moved to Gotenhafen that year and acquired a large apartment there. His daughter married a German submarine officer, who perished when his vessel was sunk.

“Having a relative who was a Baltic German turned out to be very convenient. By 1944 we knew that we would have to flee Riga. We stayed a few weeks in Liepaja. On 14 October, one day after Riga fell to the Russians, we fled Liepaja on the Mienenräumer 111, a small German mine sweeper, and landed in Gotenhafen.

“We stayed with the Baltic German relatives a few months, until we again had to flee the Russian front. I was just eight years old at that time, but I clearly remember everything that happened.”

John has provided this LINK to further information on the Baltic Germans.

John Sigurds Kalme with his younger brother Ivars Charles in Latvia 1942–43.