While thinking of a victory

Tomorrow, as is customary, russia will be doing their annual parade celebrating their own sort of WWII victory. This time without the military equipment because of.. reasons, but with a threat by their foreign minister, that ghastly creature, warning Europe to not sabotage their parade by "walking in Hitler's path".

And it reminded me of a story - a few stories, actually - that I learned only last week after searching information about one of my grandfather's best friends.

Ever since I was young I kept hearing stories about my grandfather and his two friends in Poland, one of whom was Arnold Kosmahl. Grandpa was studying in Warsaw and somehow met Arnold, the wealthy half-owner of a mill in the town of Warka.

Arnold would pick a handful of students each year and support them with scholarships. My grandfather was such one student. Over time, apparently, they developed a friendship and I have inherited a bunch of photos from the early 1930s picturing them seated in an open Chevrolet with my grandmother and a company of other very well-dressed people, at parties or at Warka, during the wedding of my grandparents.

My grandfather returned to Bulgaria after his studies and then WWII started. The contact he maintained with Arnold (who, my uncle told me, even visited him at some point) broke during the war and the first time a letter arrived was after it ended. The letter was from one of Arnold's sisters who informed grandpa that a big part of the family has fled Poland to Germany. Since they were ethnic Germans, they hardly had a choice.

A second letter arrived some time later with information that the family was moving to the US. Neither my mum, nor my uncle, could tell me what has happened to Arnold, and my grandfather destroyed the letters out of fear. Bulgaria was freshly forced under a communist regime (yeah, russia's business again) and it was dangerous to receive letters from the West.

That's all I knew along with the photos, but had no idea who the rest of the people on these photos were. Until last week, when a random search suddenly gave results. One of them led to an FB page with a family story and photos, and among them I suddenly saw my grandparents during their visit to Warka. One e-mail later, I was talking to the grandson of one of Arnold's sisters. But, that's not today's story.

Back then, one of Arnold's brothers, Leopold, was drafted in September 1939 and sent to the Eastern Front to fight the russians. He got captured under unknown circumstances and imprisoned.

And here's the thing: russians, being allies of the Germans, would free prisoners of war who were of German extraction. Leopold's wife declared that she's German and tried to free him on the basis of him being German too, but he refused to make use of this fact, remained in captivity till the spring of 1940 when he was murdered by the russians in Katyn.

His wife, ironically, became a mayor of Warka and collaborated with the German occupiers. People are people, regardless of nationality or ethnicity.

All I know about Arnold at this point is that he tried to mediate and protect locals in Warka from trouble with the Germans and got arrested twice. The other one of my grandfather's closest friends who lived in Krakow later told him that he spotted Arnold at a street corner there by the end of the war, wearing a German military uniform...

Arnold's co-owner of the mill, Alfred Stegner, first fought against the russians, got captured in 1939, but freed as a German only to get back and a few years later, after reportedly taking part in the Warsaw Uprising, to be imprisoned again - this time by the Germans. He died on a train on the way to Dachau.

I've been thinking of those people for a week now, about the difficult choices they had to make and about the torn family and friendships. Wondering what grandpa would have thought had he known all of that.. or if he did. And about the lies that generations of russians are being fed about the war, and the lies they tell now while celebrating a victory over an evil they gladly supported. An evil that they have themselves been and have again become.

Grandpa, Grandma and Arnold at Warka, possibly 1934.