Lest I forget.
My grandmother was born in January 1913. In the summer of 1917, when the Germans invaded our country, she was old enough to remember. She was telling us how her oldest brother, who was about 18, took the horses in the woods, to hide them from the invaders, and how they loaded a full carriage with their most precious and most necessary belongings and left for the city, for there was nothing left for them in their village. Being the youngest, she was on top of the pile of packages, and was always ending her story with the image of smoke coming from the woods, and her question, always the same: "Do you think the horses survived?"
In 1942, she was a teacher in another village. The children were 3 and 1. Her husband was on the front, somewhere in Russia. A mate of him, named Fish, on leave, passed with a note from my grandfather: "Send me with mate fish socks and shirts". She did send socks, shirts, and after a frantic search at all the people in the village she found some smoked fish and sent it too. My grandfather laughed and laughed, the fish, all rotten, arrived wiith mate Fish . But mate Fish was collected in a blanket from the front, anmd never made it home.
My other grandfather was a carpenter. Widower, with three small children, he was taken in the army in 1942 and become a prisoner, and was forgotten in a camp in Siberia until he was diagnosed with a tumour in 1956. He came home to find his only son adopted by someone, his teenage girls strangers. He did have enough time left to marry again and have a new son and daughter. He died soon after the daughter's birth. The new son died at 33, forgotten by the doctors on a corridor. The daughter died last December, aged 55, from a tumour.
There are other stories, too.
