EC 625 at http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/

How They Shut Down Populist Latvijans

By © E. Antons Benjamiņš, 2017

A countryside Populist is employed by Nature all day long; an urban Populist chokes and enslaves Nature until it dies.

9 Put Out to Skate On Shattered Glass

(Part 1)

The dawn of that morning (1944) began quietly. But as soon as I looked out the window, I knew catastrophe had arrived. Like that morning four years before (1941), the highway—on the otherside of the brook about a kilometer away—was filled with horse drawn wagons. This time the horses were facing not east, but were moving west. I did not need to think. Time ceased and went on automatic pilot. It was again as if the house shook and rocked. Only the most dramatic moments remain in memory. I ran downstairs and alerted aunt Emma, who was already in the kitchen making breakfast. By this time she was feeding not only her household, but also the Germans. The officers may have been sitting at the kitchen table already. I am not sure; I did not see. My mind was in a state of a blur.

The Germans had arrived several weeks earlier. It was a Wehrmacht field post office detail, one that distributed mail to German soldiers in the field. The ‘field’ was but 25-30 miles away. The Germans were not yet aware of what was happening. Though we had a telephone, no one answered when we tried calling the village centre. The Germans then sent their heavy truck to reconoitre the situation. The driver returned but a short while later. He had learned from those fleeing that early in the morning a column of Russian tanks had attacked the German defenses and had broken through. The tanks were already at the edge of the village, which was about 10 km (6 mi) from Sokleni. Then the phone rang and the village elder requested that uncle Rudis send someone from the farm to the village to dig trenches. Aunt Emma’s stepdaughter Liene took her bike and pedaled off. Several hours later she was back on foot and out of breath. She told of having run past Russian tanks, which hogged the road, slowly moved forward, and fired at random to sow panic and force the refugees into the ditch* to let them pass .

*Two days later, when returning to the front, I counted several burnt out hulks of such tanks by the roadside. Their bodies were soot covered and black. The muzzles of their light cannons had pealed back like banana peels. I was told this was due to firing too many rounds and overheating. It occurred to me that the bodies of the dead soldiers may still be inside the tsanks. Nearby a German soldier’s helmet on top of an upturned rifle signaled a hastily dug grave.

My alert threw the household in a panic. Almost everyone acted as if they were about to be shot. While the duck and her half dozen ducklings serenely marched across the yard at the back of the house, the officer in charge of the German detail, a tall gangly man, stood in the middle of it with his pistol drawn and firing into the air to try bring everyone to their senses. It did no good. The German lieutenant with whom mother had begun an affair promised to take her and her family along when the Post Office pulled out. We ran to our room and began to pack frantically. My fingertips were stiff and white. For the second time in my life, I thought that I was about to be killed. Except now I was eleven, not eight years old. The Germans left at about noon, and took us to a railroad station about forty miles away.

That evening we went to sleep in a hayloft but a hundred yards  from the railroad station, where the Germans were able to comandier a wagon where to put their mail. Finding myself still alive, I began to think of what was happening as an adventure. I listened excitedly to the anti-aircraft cannonade as the Germans tried to protect the railroad station from a Soviet air attack. Nor did it escape my notice that at the other end of the loft a young German lieutenant and my mother were making love.

One never knows what price one may have to pay for having stayed alive; one never understands what an ‘adventure’ is until many years later.*

*When fifty years later, I met Liene (who then made her life in England) on a visit to Sokleni, she appeared to be in a hostile mood. When I tried to figure out why, no reason came to mind. Was it the result of shock of returning to the site of cstastrophe nearly a half a century before? Only later did it occur to me that when we left the farm with the Germans, we left the rest of the household behind. My aunt and uncle and their family members left the farm only the following day and were strafed by Soviet airplanes. While no people were killed, one of our horses was. Of course, I also remembered that aunt Emma was the sister of my grandmother, and that my grandmother* was the mother of my father, and that my mother had pulled off a love affair with a German officer right under their noses. In later years, mother seemed to avoid contact with my aunt. Depending on how loyal one is to one’s own (even if disloyalty saves one’s life), one may forever bear a grudge—especially if it is a mindless slight.* Who really knows what dirty laundry means?  *As I mention in an earlier book, my paternal grandmother may have been murdered by my grandfathers second wife (my godmother) in an effort to protect her wealth and keep my grandmother from giving evidence against her in court. To make things even more incredible, the millionaires died in the arms of my mother’s mother in a far off labor camp in Siberia. No, she did not confess to anything.

                                                              

The Post Office detail did not wish us to become their ward for ever, so when a day later a German counter attack, led by Tiger tanks, beat the Russians back, the commanding officer had us taken back to the farm.

But Sokleni had been turned into a field hospital, and the rest of the household was gone and were—who knows where—in a hundred kilometer long line of horse drawn wagons of refugees moving west. Listening to the pleas of his junior officer, the German commander allowed us to be taken back to the railroad station once more, and the following night at about two o’clock in the morning, we were in Riga and going to bed in the apartment of Latvijas First President.

My aunt, my father’s sister, took care of us the best she could. As her family was making arrangements to escape to Sweden (I do not remember seeing my godfather, the Supreme Court judge; he may have been at the seashore trying to find a fisherman to take him and his family to Sweden), she found us a doctor who had similar plans of escape, and who could possibly get us on a fishing boat too Sweden as well. It did not work out as planned, and we ended up on a German transport ship that took us to Danzig (Gdansk), whereafter, under the wing of the doctor’s brother and his family, we took a train and ended up in Weimar, Germany.

And thereafter? With my nerves honed to expect immanent death, I saved myself from death at least once more. This time it was an escape from bombs being dropped by American B29s. Then we were taken to a refugee camp in Filsek, an abandoned ammunition dump (now a NATO base), then on to Amberg, Bamberg, Esslingen, and finally ended up in Boston, where an acquaintance of my maternal grandfather (the one who had been an ambassador to the Soviet Union and was shot by the Soviets maybe in a Lubjanka cellar years later) was working as a realtor in the suburb of West Roxbury. The realtor got the Congregational Church of West Roxbury to sponsor us. Thereafter, I enlisted in the Marine Corps and was sent to Korea, where I arrived three days after the Armistice. With no Peace Treaty ever signed*, today, sixty-four years later, the lid in Korea is threatening to blow again.

*The United States appears to have done another maneuver like that of the entente after WW1 in Latvija: by refusing to sign a Peace treaty with North Korea and by creating a capitalist South Korea, it was leaving itself open to further expansion—if not by gaining territorially, then by expanding its power and influence through repression of opposition from what would otherwise have been a sovereign People. By repressing sovereignty and monopolizing nuclear arms (limiting same to UN Security Council members), the consequence necessarily is an exceptionalist nation replacing a formerly isolationist nation. Not surprisingly, postSoviet Latvia as well as postJapanese South Korea are in essence right wing ‘democratically’ elected blind-to-fascism countries.