In 2009 my mother was very ill, and I spent a good deal of time in my childhood home. One afternoon I went down to the basement to do some clearing out, and came upon some boxes of letters from my father's family.
I had long known about these letters, and in fact I had brought one box over from Austria many years previously when I had been living in Vienna. My aunt, who had pressed them upon me because she could not bring herself to read them, hoped that my father might someday want to read the pages written by their two brothers, who both died on the Eastern Front. But as it turned out, he felt like she did and the letters remained unread until I picked them up again.
I have done extensive research, collecting information about the situation in the battlefield through documents obtained at NARA in Washington, and have been in contact with German authorities on the subject of where my uncles were buried. To my surprise I was contacted by the German government in June 2011 to say that one of my uncles, the one to whom the unopened letter had been written, was commemorated on a monument in Honscharne/Gontscharnoye near Sevastopol in the Crimea. This monument, now in existence 10 years, was to be the setting of a memorial service at the end of August 2011, and would I like to attend as a family member.
My trip to the Crimea, secret war reports written in 1944, my correspondence with people who also have an interest in this subject--as well of course the letters themselves--will be the subject of this blog.
