My husband Pete's story continues below:
Part II – Finding a Safe Place
In 1945, the American army liberated the German labor camp that held my parents. This posed another problem. The army didn’t know what to do with 1,000 starving refugees from this camp. This was a mounting problem, because every liberated camp contained people in the same or worse condition. The camps could not be used to provide adequate housing for the people. It was necessary to move the displaced people into adequate shelters.
Every nationality had to be accounted for—birth date, city, age, sex, marital status, names of the dead and missing, etc. The plan was to take over German military housing and other installations that could handle this huge number of people. The problem was that the German army still inhabited such establishments. As the Allies evacuated the Germans from these places, the refugees were brought in.
Some lucky people from my parents’ labor camp were immediately sent to camps under Allied control. These camps were not only under American, but also British and French control. My parents, along with the rest of the camp, had to walk. They tried to follow the American army as it advanced.
Most of the time, the refugees ate what little they could find in the fields or farm lands. Sometimes the army provided food, other times they stopped at other camps along the way to eat. There was much confusion. Try to imagine two million people wandering around Germany.
The Latvian people did not want to go back to Latvia. As I stated before, the Soviets were now in control of Latvia. Going back meant certain death or deportation to labor camps in Siberia. My father’s brother, who did not escape from Latvia, was sent to a labor camp in Siberia. He stayed alive and was released in the late 1970s. He has since died. My father died in the early 1990s. They were the last Latvian native born males from my family.
Germany after the war was divided into two sections, East and West. The Soviets controlled East Germany. Refugees in that zone were sent back to their countries, that were now Soviet controlled, as prisoners. Under the provisions of the Yalta Conference, which divided Germany, refugees could be sent to the zone that controlled their country. For example, Americans could send Latvian refugees to the Soviet zone of Germany, because it was under Soviet rule.
In one camp my parents were in, such an incident occurred. In the middle of the night, some Latvian people were rounded up and told by the Americans that they were being sent to another camp. They were taken to where trucks were waiting. The first truck was loaded with people. As the second truck began loading people, someone noticed Russian writing and a Soviet Union flag inside. Everyone got out quickly. The refugees laid down on the ground and told the Americans to shoot them, because they were not going back. In the confusion, the first truck took off. A woman friend of my mother’s, who was waiting to be loaded, had three young children in the first truck that left. She never saw or heard from them again.
As I listened to my mother tell this story, I could tell it brought back many painful memories. The people who were there really don’t want to talk about this time in their lives. I had an older sister that died in the last camp we were in. Mom doesn’t talk about her much, except to say that she died of illness on the day I was born. My sister was about 3 years old at the time of her death.
My parents were finally placed in the Bavarian region of Germany called Fischbach. A German garrison had been stationed there during the war. It had wooden barracks that had housed soldiers. Now they were homes for two thousand displaced persons. There was a huge parade ground in the center of the complex. The new inhabitants of the camp used it for dances, exercise and other activities. People came there daily for meals. A forest surrounded the camp. There also was a railroad depot that moved refugees from camp to camp.
My mother and father got married and lived in refugee camps for six years before immigrating to America.
Part III - Life in a Refugee Camp
