Eighty years ago, on April 9, 1945, General Otto Lasch surrendered Königsberg to the Red Army. Where is Königsberg today? Its buildings in ruins, including the once famous Königsberg Castle, its people dispersed … washed away by war and now by time, like a sandcastle. You’ll only find it on historical maps. After 700 years as a Prussian city, with its most famous citizen being Emmanuel Kant, Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad in 1946 … a name that also applies to the Russian oblast, an enclave surrounded by Lithuania to the North, Poland to the south and the Baltic on the west. Along with the city, the entire province once known as East Prussia, is renamed and divided amongst the victors. And like East Prussia before, Kaliningrad remains separate from its mother land. Always in its own detached world.
By April, in 1945, many German civilians would have managed to escape the Soviet onslaught, or have died trying to reach the Baltic ports. My mom had been captured during her flight earlier that winter and by April she was on her way to the Urals as a POW. Meanwhile, her two sisters and cousins were stranded … also not reaching port cities like Pillau … perhaps saved from drowning on ships like the doomed Wilhelm Gustloff. My aunts remained behind in the ruins of East Prussia.
I’m grateful to have visited Kaliningrad back in 2019. The Russian settlers who have made Königsberg their home have learned to love the city and appreciate the history and ruins of that brutal war. With the Germans are gone, the victors have had eighty years to claim Kaliningrad as their own.
But Königsberg remains a symbol of home to the scattered survivors and now their descendants. My recent ‘cousin’ reunion down in Mexico this past winter reminded me of how memories fade away … like castles in the sand … unless we make the effort to put them into narratives.
 |
| public domain Königsberg Castle |
No comments:
Post a Comment