Horst Doehler (seated)was only 20 years old when he and his friend Richard Krumsdorf (the photographer) landed in Halifax, Canada at Pier 21 with $80 and dreams of homesteading and adventure. The year was 1930.
Horst landed on the day that would become my birthday, May 4th. Because of the Depression in Canada, its borders would close to German immigrants by the end of June.
It would be another 15 years before Horst would see his father again as communications between Canada and Nazi Germany would be banned during the war years. After the war ended, Opa Curt Doehler wrote to his son Horst and I have 8 of those letters, in tiny cursive sentences that I had transcribed by Thea Miller, in Toronto in 2007, sixty years after they were penned.
My grandfather Curt had been the Manager of the Waterworks for the entire district of Altenburg, Germany.
My grandmother, Marthe Graichen Doehler came from a family that owned a successful sporting goods and toy store in the old Market Square. By all standards, this family was middle class and lived a very comfortable existence.
During WWII, Altenburg received one lone bomb….and it was a stray one, dropped by a German returning from a raid. In spite of the family privilege and the location of the town far away from the allied bombs, the impact of the war would tear apart the fabric of the lives of every family member. My grandfather, grandmother and aunt would become vulnerable to disease, due to the severe food shortages suffered during and after the war and eventually die because of this. An uncle would spend years in a prisoner-of-war camp, years after the war had ended to find himself a widower with a child he barely knew. Cousins would loose their parents and relatives. The family as a whole would loose it’s economic and social status in the community and it’s identity.
When World War II ended, the 4 allied powers of England, France, the Soviet Union and the USA, divided Germany into 4 administrative sections. Altenburg, Germany, near Leipzig was in the ‘East Zone’ and was administered by the Soviet Union. The USSR itself had lost 20 million people to the war and was devastated by this and in no position to materially support a new Germany. In fact, kilometres of train tracks and whole factories were dismantled and shipped eastward to help rebuild the Soviet Union, leaving Eastern Germany’s infrastructure even poorer. The fact that this part of Germany that was to become the German Democratic Republic, and would grow to be one of the top 10 industrial countries just 25 years after these letters were written, is in itself a testament to the determination and hard work of ordinary people.
Compared with the devastation and genocide that families who were Jewish, Socialist, Communist or gay, the lives of the Doehler’s and Graichen’s throughout the war and afterwards was good. Still, in reading these letters, it becomes obvious that war and its aftermath takes its toll on all peoples – ordinary citizens, bystanders, children, women and men – it cannot be otherwise.
Publishing these family letters is my way of honouring and acknowledging their struggle and it is also a plea for peace. I think of all the military struggles around the world today and realize, through these letters, that there are families right now like the Doehlers and the Graichens long ago who are trying to hold their lives together in the face of chaos and deprivation.
What follows, are the transcriptions of Opa Doehler’s letters in German and translations into English, by me, Flora Doehler, Kurt Clemens’s granddaughter. If any readers notice that I have made obvious errors, I would really appreciate your comments!
You can leave a comment on the blog, or you can contact me at flora.doehler@gmail.com
Flora Doehler
grand-daughter of Curt Doehler and Marthe Graichen Doehler
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