The research is varied. Some days I sit and translate the letters, one by one, fine tuning my inner ear to hear and differentiate the voices of family members I never met. This is the easy part (unless the handwriting is a challenge--more on that in another post), and one of the most enjoyable.Other days I dig around the internet, make phone calls, and sometimes use snail mail to contact bigger institutions like the Red Cross and the German war graves commission. Here are three envelopes that were returned last spring, all the recipients having moved, been shut down, or were just unknown now. That's the trouble with getting information from the internet--sometimes it is long defunct.
Occasionally, though, you hit the jackpot, as I did with the German war graves people, known more correctly as the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgraeberfuersorge e.V. A letter written to them at the same time as the others shown above prompted a response to tell us what we already knew: Leo had died in Melitopol on the 21st of October 1943, and was buried nearby in a village called Novo Nikolayevka. But a few months later, in June, another letter fluttered into the mailbox, this one with more interesting news. On the 25th of August this year, in a small village about 20km from Sevastopol, there is to be a remembrance service at the cemetery for fallen German soldiers. The monument there was put up ten years ago, and this year will celebrate the fallen as well as the 10th anniversary of the monument itself. Leo's name is engraved on this monument. That means that ten years ago, while my collection of letters slumbered undisturbed in the basement of my parents' home, a Ukrainian workman sat at a workbench and chiseled out the name Leonhard Winkelbauer. It's quite a thought.
Even more surprising is that this same tidbit of news--that Leo's name appeared on a monument--had come to me just a few days earlier through an entirely different source, this time with some photos. That happened through a different channel that I shall describe in a different post.
