OZ BABY BOOMERS: BOOMERAMA

The food supply in our German camp was insufficient for our level of activity and we were always hungry. The only way to obtain extra food was to exchange personal belongings with the local farmers for food, but there was virtually nothing left in our bags. I couldn’t stand it any longer and sold my only blanket to a farmer for a loaf of bread and a small piece of ham. How I enjoyed that extra bit of food! But it was obviously soon gone.

The village was called Stidnitz, and the locals were anything but friendly towards us. We had to be on our best behaviour at all times so as not to aggravate the delicate situation. The pub was open for one hour at a different time each day, and when the opening hour coincided with our time off training we all tried to get there. Nobody ever managed to get more than one beer and many failed to get any.

In my platoon there was also a chap called Zenkevics, a motor mechanic who I had worked with in the German heavy-transport-vehicles repair shop in Riga. He was some four years older than I, and easily the oldest man in our company. He had completed his compulsory training in the Latvian Army before the war.

During the Bolshevik occupation he had lost his relatives — all transported to Siberia — and it seemed to me that his only reason for living was to revenge that tragedy. When the workshops closed and I was conscripted in the German Army, Zenkevics was still free, because those of his birth year hadn’t yet been called up. But he volunteered so as to be together with the other boys. He had been in the same base camp as me in Laushana but in another unit. Because there were no German instructors and because he was a former soldier he had been asked to conduct the training.

Zenkevics was a strict disciplinarian and had gained many enemies, some of whom were now with us. He was the only one among us who wore combination overalls — most likely pinched from the Germans in the workshop. His height, broad shoulders and substantial midriff had gained the nickname “Pontoon”. It stuck for the rest of his life ... which unfortunately wasn’t all that long. I found him to be sincere, helpful and a good organiser. Since we were the same height we were allocated to the same platoon.

There was also another older man in our platoon. His name was Rudzitis, and like me he had escaped conscription for more than two years because he was a tradesman — in his case an electrician —and a university student.

My job was to convince the patriotic German farmers to sell some of their potatoes so that we would be fit “for the coming battle”.

All the others in our platoon were three-to-four years younger than we three, so we decided to stick together and solve our own food problems.

Since I could speak German — though actually not much better than the other two —my job was to bargain with the German farmers for potatoes and flour. Meat and bread were out of the question. We had a little bit of German money, which was virtually valueless. The official price for potatoes was low if you could find somebody silly enough to sell them to you. My job was to convince the patriotic German farmers to sell some of their potatoes so that we would be fit “for the coming battle”. Zenkevics and Rudzitis appointed themselves as the cooks. I was rather pleased about that because my cooking experience was almost zero.

Late in the evening, after the training sessions and the official mealtimes were over — and we felt more hungry than before — we set out to boil those potatoes. This took place in the cooking room attached to the barn, where the farmer prepared meals for the animals. There was no light and all the cooking was performed by burning splinters of wood, just as our ancestors had done many years previously.

There was a 9pm curfew, but the three of us would sneak out to enjoy our special meal of potatoes cooked in their jackets and served with salt. While we ate we would use the North Star to plot the position of our homeland. We patiently listened to each other’s stories before we became sleepy, abandoned our “feast” and went to “bed” at about 11pm.

The weather had turned really cold and we had difficulties learning morse with frozen fingers. It was obvious that without better accommodation we had little hope of successfully completing our course. There was little sunshine and the mainly overcast skies and cold wind gave us little encouragement, especially when we were sitting on the barn’s bare earthen floor.

Our instructors’ complaints to higher authorities about our plight paid off, and one morning we were told to be ready to move again. We were to travel to a place called Borntuchen, some 20 kilometres away. Most of the company marched those 20 kilometres, but eight of us remained to ensure that the place was left in good order and to take care of the equipment which we would be accompanying by rail. We left for Borntuchen about eight hours later by train.

The Borntuchen railway station was right in the middle of the village, which was quite a bit larger than Stidnitz. There were two restaurants, several shops and a pub. The place was really quite beautiful, with lots of fruit and vegetable gardens and generally friendly people. On arriving at Borntuchen we had been issued with clothing and footwear. They were probably ashamed to let us into people’s homes with bare feet and largely bare bottoms. The clothes were second hand and often still blood-stained, but they had been cleaned and repaired and they covered our bodies.

While the telephonists were quartered in a barn, we funkers were billeted in private homes, 12 or 15 in each house. We, the eight rearguards, had arrived first and only about an hour later arrived the worn-out and angry columns of the company. So began the happiest period of a generally unhappy life in the German Army.

Our landlord, Herr Hildebrandt, his wife and their Polish maid were the only other people on the farm. They had no children and the maid lived in an attic room. The 15 of us were given another larger room upstairs — a room just big enough for us to be able to stretch our legs when sleeping on the floor.

We had been warned that we had to be very polite in all our dealings with the locals and to always say “Heil Hitler” when meeting them. On our first encounter with Frau Hildebrandt, we were told: “There is no Heil Hitler in this house. Our greetings are Grags Gott (Greetings in the name of God).”

That was a good omen for us. We became good friends and life turned for the better. The farm had a large outbuilding with electric light, large table and benches that had been used by seasonal workers as a meal room. This became our morse-code training room and our mates from other farmhouses often came over to our training room to do work.

Our training began in earnest. For me, and I believe for all of us, the success of our training could mean life or death. It was one thing to be with the divisional headquarters in a motorised unit and another to be accompanying regimental infantry units, with a heavy pack on your back, right up to the front line.

Most of our time was spent sending and receiving morse signals between farms. No one who hasn’t tried to do it could fully appreciate the difficulty. It’s easy enough to learn the dots and dashes for each letter, but it’s quite a different matter to translate the incoming signals in rapid succession and write them down on paper.

We had among us a couple of “geniuses” who were always 10 or 12 letters per minute ahead of us mortals. One of them was a chap called Birznieks who I suspected had some pre-knowledge of the subject. He finished the course with an unbelievable 120 letters per minute — equal to our top instructor, Corporal Dzelme.

This wasn’t our war and our only interest was to stay alive — and what better way to preserve yourself than to be some kilometres from the front line.

We all plodded along, trying to gradually master the subject, though our numbers grew smaller day by day. As the speed settings increased, more and more of us dropped out and were sent back to the infantry units. I managed to hang on. We exercised our brains every free moment, even late at night before going to sleep.

This wasn’t our war and our only interest was to stay alive — and what better way to preserve yourself than to be some kilometres from the front line, sitting in a motorcar and sending morse signals while others had to be up front near the action.

I really couldn’t complain about my situation regarding food. While the army rations were as meagre as ever, our threesome had organised things to perfection. I soon became friendly with a farmer across the road. He had a son serving on the Eastern Front and sold me potatoes — and even the occasional loaf of bread — at the official price, which was at least 20 times lower than the going black-market rate. Sometimes I even managed to get some butter. The potatoes I bought for our little cooperative while the other goodies I bought from my own money and for my own consumption. There just wasn’t enough of those to share.

Another nearby farmer had a huge plantation of swedes which we could all buy cheaply. They weren’t unhealthy but they certainly weren’t nourishing either. More than 95 per cent of our food intake — the potatoes and particularly the turnips — was water. We had to climb an old wooden staircase to get to our sleeping quarters, and on average we had to go down the stairs four to six times a night to relieve ourselves on the back lawn. You can imagine the noise made by 15 men each walking four to six times a night up and down the squeaking stairs.

One morning our landlord appeared at the top of the staircase with a shy smile on his lips. He had a large bucket and suggested we use it during the night. We usually filled four buckets a night. It wasn’t much fun to face an overly full bucket and have to cart it down that narrow, squeaking staircase.

And then there was the Polish housemaid in the room next to us. She was in her 30s —ancient to our way of thinking. We had no interest in her but she obviously was of a different mind. For some reason, she had cast her eyes on me. When we met on the narrow staircase she stopped me and offered me apples and cookies. I accepted the goodies but offered nothing in return. In fact, I tried to avoid her like fire.

She was short and fat and had a square face, somewhat like some of the Russian generals we had seen pictured in newspapers. She tried her charms on Rudzitis with the same results, but we were punished for not appreciating good value. She pinched my only pair of socks and Rudzitis lost his shirt, the stolen goods going to her new boyfriend, an older chap from the telephone company. He had more sense than us greenhorns and received plenty in exchange for his nightly visits.

On 14 October 1944 we received the bad news that the Russians had entered Riga, our capital. There was now only a small corner of Latvia still free from Russian occupation — Courland, where my father’s farm was located. I received several letters from my sisters and that lifted my mood considerably, because in our situation you only lived for the odd contact with your relatives.

No one doubted that the war would end soon. It seemed that Hitler alone still believed in a German victory — but it was a belief that would cost many more thousands of lives.