2nd Lieutenant Seymour Bolten, 1942.
Decades after my father, 2nd Lieutenant Seymour Bolten, passed away, I discovered a drab green trunk buried in my parents’ garage. It turned out to be a treasure chest.
Many of the readers of this blog are familiar with its gems: KriegyPost letters, tiny paper journals, and black and white photos of POWs – posed on the steps of the Hospital Building wearing buttoned-up military coats, or arranged on the stage of the Little Theater of Szubin, wearing ingenious costumes made from scraps.
My father had packed the trunk to capacity. Typical of him, he had organized the papers into rubber-banded bundles and larger envelopes. The paper overwhelmed me: I moved the trunk aside for a quieter moment.
Treasures hidden in my father's trunk.
The quieter moment came another decade later, in January 2015, when I was given the opportunity to visit Poland with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. I had never been to Poland and I wondered if there was anything left to see at the site of Oflag 64, a place I had only heard mentioned a few times in my childhood.
I discovered the informative Oflag 64 Association website, and emailed its resourceful creator, Elodie Caldwell. She e-introduced me to Mariusz Winiecki, Szubin’s Oflag 64 expert. His first line to me was “Yes, I can provide you guidance.”
I had no idea of the journey that was about to begin.
That afternoon, I dragged the trunk into our dining room, and gingerly laid out the papers onto every flat service available. I sat down, took a deep breath, and started to read the time capsule that my father had packed away seventy years ago.
Like many POWs, my father, who we all called “Noog,” (pronounced n-oog, and that’s another story) rarely spoke of his time in captivity. If he did, it was nonchalantly (ME: How were you captured? NOOG: Oh, they just came up over the hill waving a flag, and told us we were captured.)
So, in the two weeks that I had to prepare for my visit to Szubin, the trunk and I began to piece together his story.
When my father enlisted in the U.S. Army, he was 21-years old, the American-born, college-educated son of illiterate Russian Jewish immigrants. He was one of the first to arrive at Oflag 64, and one of the last to depart. (In civilian life, this pattern was how my father attended most events and parties.)
2nd Lieutenant Seymour Bolten, Kriegy #1477, November 1943.
While a POW, my father kept every letter he received, wrote out tiny copies of every letter he sent, and kept a detailed account of his mail and packages. He used a separate light blue journal to chronicle where he had been and when – from the battles in North Africa, to Oflag 64, and on to Rembertów and Odessa.
In the same journal, he practiced his Russian – a pursuit the Germans had forbidden the POWs.
He followed the orders of their Senior American Officer, Colonel Thomas Drake, for the healthy POW life of an officer: he stayed busy, neat, and dignified. He worked on the two camp newspapers, contributed to the Security Committee, sang tenor in the Glee Club, and was a camp translator.
My two weeks with the trunk flew by, and at the end of January 2015, I was in front of the abandoned Szubin train station, meeting Mariusz for the first time. As we stood on the spot where the POWs had arrived, he described their three-day journey: squeezed into a locked boxcar, sharing a bucket for a latrine, and little, if any, food or water. When they arrived at the station, many were suffering from dysentery, and none of them knew what conditions awaited them next.
On June 9, 1943, my father was among the one-hundred-fifty American POWs who piled out of a dark cattle car and squinted at the sunlight. Standing on the same train tracks, I stared across the flat, boundless landscape of yellowed fields and railroad ties.
Mariusz interrupted my trance, “They walked from here to the camp. The distance is a little more than a mile, though some of them were in such bad shape, it took them three hours to make it to the Camp.”
I was transfixed: was Noog scared? Was he one of the ones in bad shape? I hoped that because he had arrived in June, that it might have been warmer than it was on this grey, freezing January day.
On our way out of the train yard, we stood under the long-abandoned Szubin water tower. Though a twenty-foot mass of dead vines hung out of one of the windows, I could not help but admire the detailed brick work of the rounded arches and circular windows.
Above one of the windows was a faded white rectangle and the word “Szubin” printed in bold black letters.
“Look more closely.”
Reminder of Nazi-occupation times on Szubin water tower.
Underneath “Szubin,” ghosted a faded “Altburgund,” the German name that the Nazis had given to this town when they took control in 1939. Again, I stood transfixed. I felt a deep chill. The letters still echo at us as an important reminder.
The two of us spent another six hours together, touring the town, the Muzeum Ziemi Szubińskiej, and then joined by Wiesław Guziński, head of the MOAS Reform School, the Oflag 64 camp site. That
day in Szubin changed my life.
With Wiesław Guziński and Mariusz Winiecki, Szubin, January 2015 and September 2017.
Since then, I’ve read every one of the trunk’s 342 letters and spoken with the letter-writers or their children. I’ve combed through the Oflag 64 Association website, and had the good fortune to interview a few of the ex-Kriegies and many of their gracious descendants. I’ve visited archives and museums, across the U.S. and Poland. Using the letters as my framework, I am writing a book about my father’s life as a POW – the life he never fully disclosed – and how that life shaped him, and the way he led our family.
The research has been interesting, but nothing compares with literally following my father’s trail as told to me by the trunk. I returned to Poland in September 2017 for a two-week journey.
A welcoming and knowledgeable network steered me in the right directions: Marek Łazarz at the POW Camps Museum in Żagan, Miłosz Stroński and Arkadiusz Maciejewski at the Arms Museum in Poznań, and Rafał Górecki, the leader of Green Lights Historical Reenactment Group. These guides brought to life the challenges and resourcefulness of the POWs and of the citizens of occupied Poland. Their attention to historical detail only rivaled the infectious passion they generously shared.
One of the first stops of my trip was Poznań, a vibrant city about seventy miles southwest of Szubin. My father had visited “Posen” (as the Germans had renamed it) many times as a translator, accompanying other POWs on hospital visits. Escorted by an armed guard, of course.
The visit in which I was interested was the one on July 12, 1944. My dad and fellow Kriegies, George Durgin, John Rathbone, and Patrick Teel, had just stepped out of the train station, when their guard, Gefreiter (Corporal) Arthur Schimmel, pointed his rifle at the gutter: “You walk here in the gutter, not on the sidewalk. I have orders from Hauptman Menner.”
My father responded, “I’ve been to Posen many times, and I have never been given that order.”
The Argument with a Guard of the Third Reich had begun.
2nd Lieutenant Seymour Bolten, POW of Oflag 64, January 1944.
On a September afternoon in 2017, I stood under the now modern Poznań train station, and found the cobblestones and restored pre-war staircase. I imagined the small crowd gathering as the young Americans refused to relent to the flustered Schimmel. I thought of Schimmel’s later account of the incident, in which he had declared, “Bolten became quite excited.” I bet he did.The resulting court-martial, was held two months later in the town of Gniezno.
SS guards, wearing the swastika armbands, cleared the Gniezno streets of all traffic and held pedestrians back at safe distance. They marched the “dangerous” POWs from the train station, across the picturesque town square, and through the gates of the town’s 13th century monastery. The Americans spent a harrowing pre-trial night inside this Nazi-occupied sanctuary.
In September 2017, Mariusz and I visited the monastery in Gniezno. A robed Franciscan monk met us at the gate, and led us in to a freshly painted, white vestibule with low, sloping Romanesque ceilings. He was hospitable, but made clear that they rarely gave tours, and especially tours that included women. I conveyed my gratitude.
Library for the Franciscan Monastery's collection of 16th century books.
He nodded once, and asked me to describe the rooms in which the POWs had slept. Based on the accounts written by POW lawyers Clarence Ferguson and Lu Wilcox, I told him that the rooms were adjoining, and I described the view from their second story window.
Again, the monk gave one nod. He glided up the wide and spiraling wooden staircase.
We followed. My boots clopped on the dark wide-planked floors, making the only sound around
us. I thought of the men who had climbed these stairs in 1944, and their worn out, laced-up boots
echoing through these halls. I walked more quietly.
At the landing at the top of the stairs, I knew we were in the right place. In the nook at the end of the hallway, Oflag 64’s detested Hauptman Zimmerman had sat guard all night in a small wooden chair. Inside the room, the row of tall windows looked down into a courtyard. I stood close to the sill – just as the prisoners had – and viewed a grassy cloister, where SS guards had once stood with bayoneted rifles trained on the windows of the second floor.
Our tour ended downstairs at a set of narrow wooden double doors and a serene entry yard. The monk explained that in 1944 this was the doorway for the monastery.
He tossed in, “This is where your father entered and exited.”
The doorway looked just wide enough to shove through one POW at a time, his tin bowl
and canteen clanking against each other from inside his musette bag, his rolled canvas bedsack
tucked under his arm.
After a few more minutes, we thanked our host, and walked to our next stop, a convenient one block away.
We stood before the courthouse where the “Field Court Martial Division Number 192 of the People’s Court of Germany” conducted their trials. The Germans had designed the grand building to intimidate – its ornate, dark brick façade took up the length of the entire block, and five floors of enormous arched windows glared down at the sidewalk.
I thought of my father’s letter home later that week: “…right now I am on the carpet for being a bad boy. Remind me to tell you about it.”
Two days after Gniezno, I was in Szubin, and finally meeting the other fellow “Kriegy Kids” with whom I’d only communicated remotely. The group included David Weinstein, ex-Kriegy Leonard Feldman’s nephew, who was there to film his documentary about his uncle’s experience.
During an afternoon of David’s filming, I spent time with Marek Kapsa, the grandson of Szubinite, Jósef Kapsa. You may recall from this site’s blog post, that in 1939, the Nazis had confiscated the Kapsa family’s home and print shop. They sent Jósef to a labor camp, and installed German Willie Kricks and his wife to run the shop. Eventually, Kricks became a guard at Oflag 64.
With Marek Kapsa, September 2017.
Once a month, beginning in October 1943, my father, Diggs, and an armed guard, walked through Oflag 64’s trellised wooden gates, turned left on the renamed Adolf Hitler Strasse, and turned right, down a narrow winding road. Once inside the one-story brick home and print shop, Diggs spread out the (censor-approved geprüft) draft pages of The Item. My father stood alongside and translated Diggs’ typesetting instructions into German.
More than seventy years later, I had the honor to be hosted by Marek Kapsa in that very same yard. How pleased Jósef Kapsa and Seymour Bolten would have been to know who stood there together that day.
Later that afternoon, in front of Barrack #9 at Oflag 64, we watched the Green Lights Historical re-enactors set up for the camp’s first Living History event, “A Day at Oflag 64.” Wearing the khaki and the drab green wool I’d only seen in photographs, they brought the camp to life. They even passed around slices of the heavy-as-a-brick German black bread made from the original recipe, sawdust included. (I hope my hosts will not be offended if I say that, at best, it was tasteless.)
With Rafał Górecki, September 2017.
From my laptop, I showed the re-enactors the POW photos from the trunk. They dug into their boxes of equipment and pulled out the coats and boots that the men of Oflag 64 were wearing in the photos. They described the evolution of each article, its pros and cons of utility and durability.
They put on the coats, these men who were about the same age as my father when he was a POW. For the next two days, I did a double take every time my father’s jacket (an M41, I now know) passed the corner of my eye.
The next day, a few hundred people arrived for “A Day at Oflag 64.” Thirty-Five Polish reenactors – British flyers, Russian orderlies, and American Army officers – portrayed the six-year span of the camp. The day left many powerful impressions, not least of which was hearing an original recording of the Oflag 64 Glee Club floating over the camp loudspeakers.
On January 28, 1945, the Russians “liberated” the POWs from Oflag 64. My father packed-up the hundreds of documents that chronicled his life of the past two years. I imagine he hoisted it over his shoulder in one of the tall, cylindrical canvas duffle bags that the reenactors had carried. He hauled these papers with him on his three-thousand mile, two-and-a-half-month journey: trucked to Rembertów refugee camp, sent by box car to Odessa, and then transported aboard ship to Egypt.
Last photo with my father, June 1983.
For the rest of his life, he kept the collection with him wherever he went, and eventually, it became a priceless gift to all of us. I am grateful that he held on to this precious cargo, his time capsule, the chronical of an experience that would not and should not be forgotten.
Sources:
- Diggs, Frank. Americans Behind the Barbed Wire. Vandamere Press, 2000.
- Ferguson, Clarence. Kriegsgefangener (Prisoner of War). Texian Press, 1983.
- Wilcox, Lu. “Life in Prisoner of War Camp.” Oflag64.us/capture-and-camp-life.html.
- “Notes Pertaining to the Trial of Bolten, Durgin, Rathbone, Teel,” 1944-1945; Box 31; War Crimes Division, Records of the Office of the Judge Advocate General, Record Group 153; National Archives & Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.
- Thanks to Julie Gionfriddo, daughter of ex-Kriegie Jack Rathbone, and Debby Churchman, daughter of ex-Kriegie J. Frank Diggs.
© 2017 Susanna Bolten Connaughton
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