Sentimental Journey

Dearest Old Bolds, Family and Friends,

Greetings from the city of Dresden.

They say time heals all wounds.  And to some extent, that is true for this gorgeous city.  Dresden has been working hard to regain its glory since the reunification of Germany, and has made great progress in restoring the loveliness of the city.  The Frauenkirche is a good example.  Destroyed in the bombing raids in 1945, the pile of rubble that once was the church was declared a memorial to the war by the DDR.  After the fall of the wall, the new management decided to rebuild the Frauenkirche along with the city’s central residences and palaces.  Many of the old stones were used, but a fair number had to be cut anew.  In the astoundingly short time period of ten years, the magnificent Frauenkirche has once again found her place in the heart of the city, crowned by a cross of gold.  The donations for this cross came from England, a main impetus from the son of a bomber pilot who took part in the destruction of the city.  In 2000, His Royal Highness, the Duke of Kent, handed over the donations which helped to bring forgiveness and reconciliation to a whole city with the restoration of this architectural beauty.

But I’m not sure people really know about Dresden.  Or perhaps it still seems to carry the taint of the DDR.  Either way, we are benefitting from Dresden’s relatively unknown status.  Our hotel is a restored baroque noble residence in the Neustadt.  Palatial would be the right description, but at a shockingly affordable price – less than that of a mid-range American hotel.  If you plan to come to Dresden, now would be the time to take advantage of the good exchange rate and the unbelievable prices.  They cannot last long.

Our mission here was not as tourists, but to search the Saxon State Archives for the citations for Charley’s father and grandfather, who both won the Saxon army’s highest medal for bravery.  We also hoped to find unit histories that would detail the battles they took part in during the 1870-1 war and World War I.  Unfortunately, however, these archives, like German archives everywhere, were captured by the Allies and brought abroad before being returned.  In this case, the Russians took the archives and returned bits and pieces of it.  The bits that were returned did not seem to include anything about the Russian front in World War I, where Charley’s father fought.  Now, isn’t that strange?  I suppose what we are looking for is buried somewhere deep in the Russian archives, if it exists at all anymore.

Our trip started over a week ago in London, England, a bewitching country about which, unlike Dresden, word has definitely spread.  Despite England’s many charms, the affordability of hotels is not one of them.  Despite this drawback, the English wherever we went were unfailingly polite and charmingly friendly, and our goal of visiting the remaining Sherwood Rangers and their families one last time was all-too-quickly reached.

As we drove across the country to meet these old friends, melancholy often overtook Charley.  His current physical condition, which was never a factor on previous trips, no longer allows many flights of fancy. It is clear this may be the last time we will be able to see his dear friends – his comrades from the other side, as they are almost affectionately called in German soldiers’ parlance.

As time continues to drive us onwards, we realize with heightened awareness the preciousness of every minute of life.  This is even more apparent to us as we are about to embark on a most challenging assignment: to find the Russian front battlefields from World War I where Charley’s father fought in what is today central Poland.  Unlike France or Belgium, which maintain memorials of century-old battles fought regardless of the winner, Poland has not been keen on preserving many of the painful reminders of World War I or World War II.

We are going deep into a land where we have never been before, whose language we do not speak, which does not want to mark or perhaps even remember its last 100 years of battles, without even a unit history to point the way.  Only one of the many Polish agencies we’ve reached out to for help in English and German has responded to us – they wrote back in Polish, and in the negative.  Now, we have only the names of small towns not far from the Vistula river to guide us.  It is a true adventure, one that I view with not a little trepidation, but which Charley insists we take on while we still can.

On our way we have planned several days to visit our dear Theresia’s Breslau, once in the German state of Silesia, which was given to Poland at the end of World War II, and is now called Wroclaw.

Wish us luck.  Please.