I met an 81-year-old Saxon lady (possibly a relative) at a recent breakfast, and she has a story similar to mine.

She obviously remembers her homeland quite well. Her father, being Saxon, was forced into the Waffen-SS. He fought in the war and became a POW, as did my father.

After her father was released and returned home our stories diverge. Having perpetrated the crime of being Saxon, he was arrested by the communists and schlepped off to Siberia as a slave-laborer. He died there at the age of 37. The lack of food, clothing, adequate shelter, and extreme cold was difficult for the healthy to survive. For those in poor health, such as former POWs, it meant certain death.

When my father was released from Russian captivity (Focșani, Romania POW camp) he returned home in extremely poor health. In the early years of WWII, before Dad went to the front to fight the Russians, he surreptitiously went against the regime to help his Jewish friend Mr. Massler. His friend, now the communist police commissioner of Bistrita, Romania (Bistritz in German) protected him from arrest. He returned kindness with kindness. My dad survived.

To add to the poignancy of the Saxon lady’s story about her father was that she once met a former Transylvanian Saxon slave laborer who had survived. In hopes of gaining some knowledge about her father’s death she asked him what they did with the bodies of those who died. He responded, “We stripped them of their clothes and dug a shallow grave wherever they had collapsed and died.” As she told me this she began to cry.