Readers Who Write

It was a few years after World War II, when I visited my aunt and uncle. I had been at their place before and always enjoyed the time I could be with them.

Aunt Gertrude would talk and tell many stories about the time when she had been a young girl. Uncle Jake on the other hand, never said much. He was a quiet man and kept mostly to himself. I knew he had been in the war, but he never talked about that time.

It was on one of those visits that I found Uncle in their garage. He was re-arranging several items and doing some cleaning. I was standing close to him when my eyes spotted a wooden box on one of the shelves. I had never seen that strange looking object before. I asked my uncle what kind of crate it was upon that shelf.

“That’s not a crate,” he answered, “it’s a suitcase.”

He took it off the shelf and wiped it clean. It had been put together by a former neighbor of his, he said. It was made up of a number of tough wooden boards. It did have a lid with door hinges and could be locked with a few hooks. The handle was like a door handle. On it’s side I could see a few barely legible letters in faded red paint.

I was curious and asked, “What’s inside?”

“Memories,” he answered and placed the suitcase back on its shelf.

I remained curious as to what those memories would consist of. Later in the evening when Uncle had retired for the night, I asked Aunt Gertrude about it. She told me that it had to do with the war but she would rather not talk about it at this time.

It took several more years and visits after Uncle had already passed away, that Aunt — upon me asking again — finally told me as to what had taken place during those war years and Uncle’s involvement. She said that the period I was asking about was a dark chapter in the history of that war. She related that more than half a million men had worked in Germany during the war. They had been forced to perform the forced labor for the Nazi regime after the German men were fighting on the eastern front. Men like Uncle Jake had been rounded up and brutally placed on transport to factories to manufacture weapons for the German armed forces for them to continue the fight against the allied fighters. Uncle had been a mechanic and a truck driver while serving over there. Those that did survive received very little pay and not much food. Adolf Hitler needed the war industry to keep producing.

After the men came home they received much undue reproach, judgements and misunderstanding. The blame these men often heard was, “why did you, as a healthy person, go to work in the land of the German occupier?” Or, “why did you not go into hiding or flee the country?” It was not understood that the men often did not have the means to live at a hiding place or the opportunity to leave the country.

Many of the forced laborers never opened their mouth after their return home because they were looked at as traitors to their home country. They never wanted to talk about their experiences.

The Nazi’s had about 10 million Europeans working under miserable circumstances for them. The worker’s lives were always in danger from the allied air raids. The American pilots were not aware of the fact that innocent men were working in the factories they tried to destroy. Around 10,000 Dutch workers died in Germany during the war. Uncle did survive the bombings of Hamburg, witnessed many atrocities of concentration camps and made his way home through an anarchic and collapsing Germany at the end of the war.

It was much later when I finally had the chance to take down the suitcase, open it and find the memories Uncle had spoken of before. It soon became a huge disappointment as to what I found. Only a few dirty, oily work pants, a well-worn pair of shoes and a number of mechanic’s tools like wrenches and screwdrivers. That was all I found.

Memories? Yes, of course, only in Uncle’s mind.

Send us your copy So you say you want to write? Go for it. Send us 500 or so words of scintillating copy. Make it funny. Make it poignant. Make it count. Make it any way you want. Just don’t cuss. Don’t be boring. And have a point. If we like it, we’ll run it. Email submissions to community@rv-times.com. Put “Readers Who Write” in the subject line, and tell us the city where you live.

So you say you want to write?

Go for it.

Send us 500 or so words of scintillating copy. Make it funny. Make it poignant. Make it count. Make it any way you want.

Just don’t cuss. Don’t be boring. And have a point.

If we like it, we’ll run it.

Email submissions to community@rv-times.com. Put “Readers Who Write” in the subject line, and tell us the city where you live.