Читать книгу A Letter from Frank - Stephen J. Colombo - Страница 4

Imagine what I felt, sorting through a cardboard box filled with dusty family photographs, discovering a letter to my father from a German paratrooper. Signed only “Frank,” it thanked my father in Canada for his help at the end of World War II.

My father died in 1986, and twenty years later I found the letter. I was consumed with curiosity about the mysterious German correspondent: Who was Frank? How had he met my father? What had my father done for him? And most important: Was Frank alive? I felt compelled to enter this gateway into the past.

This book documents my journey to discover the story behind the letter from Frank. It tells the stories of two lives briefly interwoven but forever linked. The first is about my father, Russ Colombo, who grew up in a small town in Ontario during the Depression, joined the Canadian army in 1940, and served as a tank commander in northwest Europe during World War II with one of Canada’s most prestigious army divisions.

I also tell Frank’s story. With little more than a first name, sixty years after he wrote that letter, I did find him, alive and living in Germany. In our first phone conversation Frank described how on the final day of the war, my father and he fought for opposing armies. His voice breaking with emotion, he explained the circumstances under which the next day my father accepted his unit’s surrender.

A year after our first conversation, Frank and I met in Berlin, where I learned more about his life as a German in Czechoslovakia growing up under the Nazis. His story provided me with insight I rarely had of what it was like to be German in Europe between the First and Second World Wars and to fight against the Allies. Frank also explained how my father’s actions and friendship helped him take his first step in coming to terms with being German after the war, culminating in his work in Israel with the German diplomatic service.

Russ and Frank’s stories come from an important time in each country’s history. Such stories are fast disappearing from living memory and theirs might have been lost forever if not for the letter from Frank. To understand these men I needed more than just an account of the battles they fought in. I also wanted to know what it was like growing up when they did and in the places they came from.

The men and women who took part in World War II overcame challenges few today can imagine. By piecing together my father’s life, I hoped to learn what it was like to be part of his generation, and how it differed from mine. What was it like living through the Great Depression? Could I have handled the extreme physical and mental challenges and the dangers of being a soldier in World War II? And would I have been able to accept the friendship of a man who, only hours before, I had been trying to kill and who had been trying to kill me?

In the end, this became my story too: my search for Frank, the piecing together of events from my father’s life, my search to understand what it meant to be a Canadian in those extraordinary times, and its significance for Canadians today.