News-Info-Alerts

Re: Retracing the Footsteps

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: October 08, 2002

"Retracing a father's WWII experiences

By: Ray Baltes, News Editor October 09, 2002

Kirstina Schunert was eight years old when her father returned from World War II. She had never seen him before, and did not know who he was. He had gone off to war before she was born.

      Her father's experiences in the war are what brought Kirstina and her family to North Iowa nearly 60 years later.

      Kirstina's father was a soldier in the German Army, and was captured by the American Army. He was sent to the Algona prisoner of war camp system, which held thousands of prisoners in Algona and 35 other satellite camps around North Iowa and southern Minnesota.

      After the war ended, Kirstina's father was loaded onto a troop transport for the return trip to Europe, but along the way the prisoners were stopped at England and spent two more years in prison. He returned in 1948.

      "She was eight years old when her father came back home because he had been gone for eight years," explained Kirstina's husband Johannes through an interpreter. "When their dad returned, the whole family had shifted - nobody was accustomed to life with dad. His daughters were eight, 10 and 14, and they didn't know him. He was a stranger in his own family."

      According to Johannes, whose own father was listed as missing in the war and who lives with his family in the northwest Germany town of Cloppenburg, a short distance from Oldenburg, where Kirstina's family grew up, "Their dad tried to be a good dad for his family," even though his young girls never really got to be close to him. "He spent his last seven years building a small house for his family before he died of cancer in 1955."

      Besides the new house, Kirstina's father left one more thing for his family - a diary written while he was a prisoner of war in Iowa. He also painted a number of pictures illustrating his experiences.
      
      More than 30 former German prisoners of war and their families have spent the past week or so visiting the camps where they were held so many years ago.

      Because almost none of them spoke any English when they were captured, and had never been to the United States, they had no idea where exactly they were held or where they worked.

      Many of the prisoners held in North Iowa during Wold War II were put to work helping out local industries hard-hit by manpower shortages when Americans went to war. A number of the prisoners even journeyed to Sheffield, where they worked at Sheffield Brick and Tile.

      The former prisoners and their families are on a tour of prisoner of war camps organized by a group called TRACES. Sponsored by a partnership between Humanities Iowa, the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs, the Library of Congress and the American Folklife Center in the Veterans History Project, TRACES gathers stories and memories of both American and German veterans of World War II.

      Nearly 60 years after the conflict ended, emotions still run deep, and the German veterans and their families have already run into instances of deep-seated hatred. Just the night before they visited Charles City, a Minnesota TV station airing a news segment on the tour interspersed footage of the tour group with clips of Adolph Hitler and jack-booted Nazis marching.

      Tracy Sweet, who helped organize the visit to Charles City, where some of the prisoners were housed in the clubhouse at Wildwood Golf Course, reported that he had received angry phone calls from Charles City area veterans - including one who had been a prisoner of war in a German camp.

      As a result, the group was hesitant to be interviewed and shied away from cameras not held by Germans. When an Iowa Public Television crew arrived to film a segment for "Living in Iowa," the tour group director had to explain to them that IPTV had no intention of politicizing the event, and would not capitalize on any reference to the Nazi Party.

      Charles City Mayor James Erb spoke about the need to bridge gaps in understanding created by the world war in his welcome to the visitors.

      "What I hope will come from visits like this is a better understanding of the history of that time," Erb told the Germans through a translator. "We always need to remember the kind of stress that occurred during World War II and do everything we can to avoid sending our sons into that same kind of situation."
      
      Understanding the past is exactly why the Schunerts and their two children made the long trek to North Iowa.

      "Our reason to be here is to see how her dad lived over here," said Johannes. "We are following the traces her dad had left in his diary. We want to lighten up the dark spots in the story of her father."

©Hampton Chronicle Times 2002"