Fritz's war stories were few and his sketches and paintings somehow filter out the horrors of the frozen battles at the Russian front. Amazingly, there are quite a number of originals that survive today and continue to tell stories of the past. The winter landscapes are reminders of the striking similarities of the beauty of harsh winters in Belarus and Saskatchewan (see blog entry of Feb 2012), but the portraits tell a more human story. And so it was that a tiny signature on a portrait of a fellow soldier lead to some surprising facts about the end-of-war whereabouts of Fritz as a Russion prisoner of war (POW).
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| Detail of signature enlarged, showing a date of March 28, 1945 |
Deciphered and unabbreviated: 'Gezeichnet von Fritz Stehwien, am 28. März 1945, im Gefangenen Lager Thorn'
Translated: Sketched by Fritz Stehwien, on March 28, 1945, in the POW camp at Thorn.
This turned out to be the only real clue as to exactly where this POW camp actually was. With the help of the Internet, it didn't take too long to find out that the Thorn POW camp was in today's Torun, in Poland. Not in Russia at all, as was presumed, from the few and fragmented stories that Fritz did tell.
This new clue had to be worth a journey to Europe! Retracing some of the paths that Fritz took with his 'Rolle', that forever roll of canvas he carried, has become part of the passion of the large documentation anyway, so why not head out right this summer.
