After a few days had passed, some of the neighbors told my aunt and uncle they needed to go to the town hall in Buckow and register as survivors so that they would receive food ration cards. Since Mutti and I had no home and no current address, we went with them. We all had to fill out many pages of a long questionnaire. We were allowed to list Uncle Ewald’s and Aunt Else’s address as our home address, but one of the most difficult questions my mom had to answer concerned my dad. In order for the two of us to receive some financial assistance in order to pay for food, she would have to declare him dead. How could she do that? We were looking for him to return to us every minute of every day. We were praying constantly that he had survived the big Russian onslaught in Poland and that we would see him again, and now Mutti had to say, “He is dead,” in order for us to receive some money to pay for food? She could not make herself do it, and the two of us left ·the Town Hall without finishing and signing the questionnaire. We did go back a few days later and did what we were told to do; there seemed to be no other way for us to be able to eat.
Mutti and I headed back to see Uncle Hans after a short time. Aunt Else wanted to go with us to see her sister Martha, but she did not think she could leave Uncle Ewald. It was difficult for him to get around, and she did not think that he would be able to care for himself.
We stopped to see Aunt Martha and learned that Uncle Karl had died two days earlier. She had no idea as to where his remains had been taken, for there was no place for burial; cremation was the only way of disposing of all the bodies. She had no idea what had been done with his ashes. They were probably with the ashes of hundreds of other bodies to be buried in some common grave.
She wanted to go with us to see Uncle Hans. We finally did find our way again to his home, but before we were able to go inside the remainder of his building, a worker on the ruins talked to us. He had been working there for a while and he shared with us information that a man had died and was taken away to be cremated. After asking a lot of questions, we came to the conclusion that it was Uncle Hans. We went inside the building to make sure he was not still there, and through his open front door, we saw that the apartment was empty.
The saddest moment of all this was yet to come. My cousin Horst had been taken prisoner in Africa and was shipped to America as a prisoner of war. We were never able to find out the details, but he had been given an opportunity to remain in America. Without news of Uncle Hans and Aunt Frieda, and his sister Lotte, Horst knew that they would be waiting for him to return. After he served his time as a prisoner of war, he decided to return to his home in Berlin, to be with his parents and his sister. Now they were gone, but so was his opportunity to live in America.
Aunt Martha, alone after Uncle Karl’s death, decided to walk with us to Buckow, to be with her sister Else. It was a very sad, but yet a very happy moment for them to be together again. If only my dad would come home! At least some of the Kanter family would have survived and have a chance to see each other.
We had lost so many members of our family! We did not know what had happened to my dad’s mom, my grandmother Kanter, when she was never seen again after an air raid. We did know that my cousin Franz had died in battle on December 3rd, 1942, but we had no way of finding out what had happened to our extended family. My uncles and aunts had lots of brothers and sisters with lots of children. We were always together for celebrations of holidays, and all those children I had considered my “cousins.” Some of my happiest childhood memories go back to those gatherings when I played with these many other children. They were my closest friends.
More and more of the people who had been part of my life – who had loved me as much as I loved them – were missing and no one knew what had happened to them. How could all those people who had been so close to me, who had always been so kind to me have disappeared? What about my dad, who had loved every single one of them? What had happened to him? The last letter we had received from him was dated January 12, 1945. We now knew that the Russian offensive, which Dad had mentioned in his letter, had started a couple of days later, but this information only left us with ongoing questions: Had he been killed? Was he wounded? Was he a prisoner in a camp somewhere in Russia or Siberia?
It was difficult to deal with all the uncertainties. One day we would be full of hope and expectations and the next day we felt nothing but despair. Why had the German people allowed Hitler and his henchmen to destroy our country and our lives? Why had there been no reaction to millions of their own people, German citizens, being put to death in concentration camps?
Why had the rest of the world allowed Hitler to take over the Rhineland? Why had other countries not stopped him from marching into, and taking over, foreign countries? I could not understand why the world had not reacted differently when the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia and annexed the Czechs’ country. Their land had not been part of Germany before; why was no action taken against Hitler? Was it for the sake of his promised peace that he was allowed to take over other countries? Was the rest of the world not aware of the armament that had taken place in Germany? It took place in defiance of the Versailles Treaty. The consequences of not stopping a dictator and his loyal supporters were the destruction of many countries, the loss of millions of lives all over the world. From Hitler’s actions around Germany a World War had taken place. By not having stopped one madman, who had decided to create “Lebensraum” for his people, many citizens in lots of other countries were facing the same miseries with which we now had to live.
Sometimes we saw surviving German soldiers trying to walk back home. Most of them had no shoes; their feet were wrapped in rags, their clothes were in tatters, and they were starving. We tried to help them in any way we could. Aunt Else and Uncle Ewald would have them rest in their house, feed them whatever we had, and let them wash and clean their many wounds. We asked every one of them about the outfit they had served with and the locations from which they were coming. There was always the hope that one of them might have been near the area where my dad was located when the Russians attacked and overran the German front lines. We learned nothing new. None of them had been near my dad’s outfit, so we just kept praying that Dad was also on his way home.
My Father's Legacy 