My Favourite Photograph

Of one of my favourite men, and a few of his tales.

This photograph is of my Opa. My father’s father. When my husband first saw it he said: “Your Opa makes Hunter S Thompson look like a pussy.”

The photograph was taken in a very barren, inhospitable corner of New South Wales, where red dirt and saltbush stretch as far as the eye can see. He and Omi came to Australia after World War II.

Opa, who always insisted he was Prussian, not German, was oddly at home in this barren landscape. He didn’t rail against this harsh environment, or complain about it. He worked with it, subsistence farming and hunting wild boar.

Opa was Captain of a German army signals unit during the War. In year 10, I interviewed him for a history project. His stories were utterly captivating.

There was the one about the Russian fighter pilot teaching him to dance (ie shooting at him while he tried to hide behind a telephone pole).

And the story of how he was alone in Russia during Operation Barbarossa on Christmas in 1941 and his one Christmas candle was promptly extinguished by a drip from the roof — it was a thatched roof, and passing units had removed straw from the roof to feed their horses.

At the end of the War, after getting to Munich, Opa was sent to an American prison camp in Ulm by the French occupation. He was a tall man, over 6 feet, and went into the camp weighing around 75kg. He came out weighing 50.

One day, he was lying in a horse stable in the camp. Beside him was an elderly gentleman.

He was an elderly gentleman, and he was reading a book, and I was too crook to stand up or do anything.

He said, “Do you want to read a little bit?”

“Oh yes,” I said. “But I have nothing to read.”

He took his book, tore it in half and said, “Look, I start at the back and you have the front.”

“Oh,” I said. “That was very generous.”

And then this book had its background. It was written before WWI, in the region west of the Rhine, near Strassburg — Alsace Lorraine. It was quite interesting, I remember the title and all that.

I said to him, “It must have been a beautiful district. Long before in the First World War my father was there as a soldier in the garrison.

And he said, “I too.”

“Oh,” I said.

He said, “Which regiment was your father in?”

And by queer chance, I remembered that. My father never spoke much about all of those things. He was more or less a very silent man. But I remembered that.

And he said, “It was my regiment.”

And he just remembered the name of my father.

So, I was lying beside an officer of my father’s from before the First World War. So, that is quaint, isn’t it?! So, we talked about that.