Maria and I have so much in common. Both born in 1935. Both European. Both came to Australia about the same time. Maria with her husband Alfons and their baby daughter in 1963, Sasha and I with our five-year-old son in 1964, both in search of a better future, away from troubled Europe.
We met at a gym in 2015. Maria joined the gym for her husband’s sake; I joined it on doctor’s orders, and Sasha came along occasionally. The four of us clicked immediately.
Maria told me she liked the Serbs.
“A Serb saved my father’s life,” she said while we were having a rest. “At the end of the war.”
It felt good hearing this. But there was not much time at the gym to ask her more about it.
Maria and I looked after our ailing husbands. The four of us enjoyed meeting for lunch at local eateries or in our homes. I wish we had met earlier in life. Still, how grateful I am that we had met at all, and just at the right time to support each other when our husbands were living out their final days. We both became widows the same year, about the same time.
After two years of grieving, I was ready to hear Maria’s story about her father.
***
Konstanz is a beautiful German city on Lake Constance, or Bodensee in German, where the river Rhine flows out of the lake on its journey northward through Europe. The lake is on the border of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. One of the most beautiful places on earth. The year is 1945 – the last few days of the Second World War. Dead of night. A daring undertaking is about to take place, and the mastermind of the operation is Paul B, born in June 1906, Maria’s father.
Maria and I missed our fathers during the war. Mine was a POW in Germany after Hitler’s invasion of Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941, while Maria’s father, a military man, reached Stalingrad with the Wehrmacht a few months later the same year; he was later transferred to Konstanz where he oversaw all the POW camps around lake Constance and was away from home most of the time.
“My dad liked the prisoners. He admired them,” Maria tells me. “He admired the way they survived. They were of different nationalities, mostly Russians and Serbs. He played cards with them and enjoyed the slivovitz the Serbs brewed. He became their friend. They became comrades in arms living through the same misery of war.”
And then, in the last few days of the crumbling Third Reich, the unthinkable happened. In the utter chaos, the Nazis tried to establish some kind of order. The Russians were only 20km away from Konstanz.
Paul B got the order to shoot all the prisoners. To shoot them all within a week.
“He couldn’t do it,” Maria beamed, shaking her head. “He just couldn’t do it! They were his friends!… I was a child, but I sensed something strange was going on.”
I was all ears.
“It was very quiet in our house that day. My parents spoke in very low voices, which seemed so weird to me. I hid close by so that I could hear them better. When my elder sister Trudi came home, Mother and Trudi had a long talk. I concluded something bad was happening because there were a lot of sighs and tears. I heard Mum saying, ‘Tonight, your father will take all the prisoners to Switzerland. Your father has received the order to shoot all the prisoners within a week. But he can’t bring himself to do it. So, he went straight away to a general he knows personally to ask for advice; he was told to get in contact with Swiss authorities, Switzerland was taking in all prisoners.’ And that is what he did. He took them all out as soon as it got dark. All dressed in their beautiful uniforms. They looked splendid in clean uniforms, all polished, and their faces shining with pride. I was only nine and a half years old, but I have never forgotten that night.”
Maria’s eyes glistened with wonder and excitement.
“My sister, my brother, and I sneaked out of the house in our pyjamas and barefoot. Dad had told us to stay at home; he was concerned about our safety, of course. But we climbed out quietly through the window so Mum wouldn’t hear us, and we joined the quiet march to freedom… The night was warm, with a bit of moonshine, silent. The Russians were close by, and the people were scared, so they stayed indoors. No one knew a lifesaving undertaking was taking placed right in front of their houses. Those who noticed the march thought it was the Russian Army… I have never forgotten that night. The whole walk took about thirty minutes across a bridge to Schnetztor and over to Switzerland. It was the most beautiful parade I have ever seen. At the border everything was ready to welcome the fugitives; the Red Cross was there, and local townsfolk were distributing food and drinks. And it was expected the prisoners would rush over the border to safety, but the unexpected took place – each man stopped in front of my father, saluted, and shook his hand. We saw all that, although Dad couldn’t see us. And we could detect tears in our father’s eyes, which happened on very rare occasions… We were so proud of him. He managed to get all his men to safety. A few hundred of them. The next day he turned himself over to the Nazis and told them what he had done. They turned him over to the Russians.”
Tears welled up in Maria’s and my eyes…
“That night, he was offered to stay in Switzerland, but he couldn’t accept the offer; he knew the Nazis would have punished us, his family. Instead, he turned himself over to the Nazis to protect us, to spare us from interrogation.”
“Next, he was in the hands of the Russians. The Russian Army had a long train ready for all German prisoners about 20km away from Konstanz. They were filling the train with prisoners. In three weeks, they would be taken to Russian camps in Siberia. My father would be in one of the carriages. We’d never see him again.”
“And then, about two or three days after my father had been turned over to the Russians, a handsome, tall man in a most beautiful uniform, Mum said he was a Serb, asked me, ‘Where is your papa?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know.’ Then my mother came and gave him all the information.”
“I just kept staring at him. He looked like a God to me. And after all those years, whenever I remember him and tell this story, I cry… This Serb, as soon as he had found out where my father was, hopped on his bicycle to ride 20km to get my father off that train!”
“That long train was the longest train to leave Germany, with hundreds of German soldiers who were never heard of again, not a sign of life from any of them, no one has ever returned; that train disappeared into the night like a phantom.”
“Dad was saved… Saved by this handsome man in the most beautiful uniform.”
Maria’s face was aglow… And I understood why she could never forget him.
“The French were already in our town,” she continued. “My father was immediately offered a job with the newly established police force. But, eighteen months later he died in a car crash… I hardly knew my father. During the war he was away most of the time, and then he died so suddenly. I’m glad I have at least a few photos. And I have this most precious memory. I am so proud of him. He was a good man, and handsome too.”
Maria’s younger sister, who lives in Germany, was recently approached by an Italian Ex-POW wanting to talk to her about her father, saying to her, “Your father was a fair man.”
So was the Serb officer, repaying kindness with kindness. Both men of great integrity and common decency, men who make us feel proud of our humanity.
And I would like to add that Maria’s father was more than a fair man. He was a hero. For only a hero puts his life on the line to save another’s life. Paul B saved hundreds of lives.
©2023 Irina Dimitric
