LOST, LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY...

~~~~~Dad's birthday is approaching again. It seems that lately I am acutely aware of the limitness of time. I sense the potential of loss around me. Yet, while I can grasp, as Tennessee Williams wrote that "Time is the furthest distance between two points", I cannot alter my behaviour. I have written of this before and how it frustrates me that I cannot reach out to the people I care for. There are so many questions that I want to ask and things that I want to tell them.

~~~~~My father, himself, is a fairly self contained man. However, as he gets older, he is opening up more. This is probably how he came to relate a story from his youth. In the past he mentioned it to some degree. I want to know more. My grand-parents never spoke of it. To them it was obviously no big deal. I think it's something of which they need to be proud. It's also something that I'd like to understand, as I am very interested in war history.

~~~~~My grand-parents lived in a small town in Finland. This area was known for its socialist beliefs and was therefore suspect during the war, as Finland was under the domain of the Germans.

~~~~~When I was a kid, the old house that they'd lived in still stood. Dad related to me that in the winters it would sometimes get so cold that water would freeze inside the house. My family had a small farm, as did many others in the area. They certainly were not well to do. One would have to go down to a root cellar to store items such as potatoes over the winter.

~~~~~For a year and a half, my Grand parents had a Jewish family from Helsinki staying with them. The family had once owned a department store, or clothing store, Dad recalls. They had been fairly well to do. It must have been a culture shock for them to have stayed in this farm house. The reason they were staying with my relatives is because they were attempting to get safe passage to Sweden, which was a neutral country. As anybody knows, Europe was hardly a safe place for Jews during the war, although Finland was not shipping people off in box-cars. While it was certainly not as risky for my Grandparents to have this family with them as others who took this chance in Germany or other nations in Europe, I am very proud of them.

~~~~~Dad told me that they got in touch after the war. They made it. I tried to see if there was any information on the Simon Wiesenthal site about Jews in Finland, but I couldn't find any. It would have fascinated me to see how the rest of their family did.

~~~~~At the same time that this family was in residence, there was a Russian Prisoner of War also living with my Grandparents. At that time, there were not enough facilities to house all of the soldiers taken prisoner in the conflict. The decision was made to have these men help on farms. Three men were sent to the town my Dad was from.

~~~~~Dad was twelve when Sergei arrived, whom Dad recalled as being about 40 to 45 years old. While the Jewish family was in the house, the father could speak some Russian. They left, however, to escape to Sweden. As kids will do, Dad tried to communicate. He worked in the fields with Sergei, as it was sustenence level farming and living for everybody. Dad would point at things and Sergei would say the word in Russian. They managed to communicate, as kids pick things up.

`````I can imagine that a man of that age probably had kids. Perhaps my Dad reminded him of his family, so far away. He was from Siberia. Through the way that they'd managed to communicate, he told my Dad about how they hunted in Siberia. It was some traditional way which involved a tool or weapon that they manufactured themselves. The days in the fields would be spent sharing stories. I hope that he got some joy in those memories; that he could see his family so far away in his mind when he went to bed at night. For of course, there were no letters. There were no phone calls and no reports. He would have no way of knowing how they were doing.

~~~~~Sergei ate with my family; he was treated no differently. He came and went as he pleased. In fact, he developed a friendship with my great uncle.

~~~~~The other prisoner of war that Dad knew, in the family up the road a bit, was a Cossack. In his homeland he'd kept bees and he was more then surprised to find himself with a family who did the same. He also had a fondness for the horses, evidentally. As I said, they came and went as they pleased. The community didn't care. Dad recalled this man as being huge and powerful; a man who could lift bales of hay and wood like they were nothing and throw them onto the back of a wagon.

~~~~~It was this fairness that was their downfall. I've always hated "the suits"---officialdom---and the petty people who complain to them. It came to their attention that the prisoners were not being treated harshly enough.

~~~~~My father is not a demonstrative man. Like me, he'll do anything not to cry at funerals or show his emotions. But all these decades later his voice choked up when he told me what happened next. As I type this, I find it difficult not to be troubled. One day, they came to collect the trio to take them elsewhere. Dad, who was still only a kid, really, had to tell Sergei. As they sat on the steps, Sergei began to cry. Sergei had had the opportunity to escape himself but had not done so as it would have put my Grandfather into a bad spot. Sergei didn't want to do that to the people who had treated him so well. Talk about self sacrifice. He took the address and he promised that when that dreadful war was over, he would get in touch.

~~~~~Sergei was never heard from again. I was hoping for a happy ending, with him meeting his family once more in some Siberian sunflower field. What was it? Illness? Did he return to Russia only to be sent to his death by Stalin's insane policy?

~~~~~I only know that I cannot but help look at conflict and war reports from different angles. Most of the combatants are ordinary people caught up in a tsunami they don't understand. Those flattened in its wake tend to be women, children and old people. The common soldier doesn't necessarily support the politics. All they know is that they're far away from those that they love and they may never see them again.

~~~~~I regret not having asked my Grandparents about these things. My Grandmother was an amazing woman, in that she had kids late in life and managed to do this while living with severe migraines. She could bend over and touch her toes well into her late eighties, and despite going blind, she continued to crochet constantly for others. My Grandfather knew so much about nature and the environment. He's passed his stories onto my Dad. I still have time to ask him questions....I just have to do it.