Coincidence or Miracle? A Christmas Story

By Paul Schubert

Born in 1930, I was a first-generation German-speaking boy whose parents had immigrated to the United States in 1923, when life in Germany was bleak and work was impossible to find. They learned English, found jobs, and started a new life together. I was eleven when we heard President Roosevelt’s radio broadcast declaring war on Japan. “Germany is next,” my father predicted, with a tone in his voice I had never heard before. He was right.

My family was living on a fox ranch outside Lyon, Wisconsin by that time. Dad was an excellent cabinetmaker, and after the war began, the government assigned him to a plant in Illinois, where he built troop gliders. My mother was naturalized in 1942, and she worked in a defense factory, sewing ammunition pouches.

The war years were remarkable for the patriotism that all Americans felt, but German-American families had additional worries: not only about our American friends and family members in the fight, but also the Old Country relatives and friends who were fighting against them. As a youngster, I learned that life could be very complicated. And for German-Americans, as well as anyone else with roots in Europe or Asia, the war didn’t end in 1945.

My mother’s brother, Willie Klank, had immigrated to the U.S. and studied engineering. Against my parents’ advice, he returned to the Fatherland when he heard the German economy was expanding in the 1930s. Although he was in his forties when the war began, he was drafted and served as a captain of engineers. In 1943, Mother received a Red Cross telegram telling us my favorite uncle had been killed outside Moscow. We mourned.

Another uncle, Hans Klank, was an artist and professor in Berlin’s Institute of Art before and after the war. He served in the infantry and fought at the Battle of the Bulge, where he saved a British soldier at the risk of his own life. They became life-long friends.

Two cousins, Arno and Fritz, served in the Luftwaffe as gunners. When Fritz was shot down, he was severely wounded.

But this is the story of a holiday miracle involving my father’s brother Walther. I share it with friends and family every Christmas. Like the war, this tale has two sides, one in our Lutheran church in Wisconsin, the other in Europe.

Walther was a bank teller, husband, and father of two babies when he was drafted into the German army and sent to the Western Front. Captured by the Russians in 1943, he spent seven years in a Soviet prisoner of war camp—long after peace was declared.

At the end of the 1940s, Americans continued to hear about the millions of displaced people in Europe trying to make their way home or find relatives. In October of 1949, my father suggested that our church youth send boxes filled with food and medicines to the towns where church members had relatives. My father and I worked together packing them and carrying them to the post office. We never imagined that we would learn the fate of one box and the family that received it.

But we did. In the form of a long letter delivered in 1950. I still remember every detail.

About the time I was packing boxes, German prisoner of war Walther Schubert was summoned to the Soviet prison office, where a Russian officer handed him a crumpled brown envelope. “In here, you will find your papers and enough rubles to leave Russia,” he told Walther. “Gather your things and go immediately to the front gate.”

Within minutes, Walther walked out of the prison camp with his feet wrapped in burlap, carrying all he owned in a sack. Nearly skeletal, Walther was still wearing the remnants of the German uniform he’d worn when captured six years earlier. He was driven to the nearby railroad station and issued a ticket that would take him as far as the Polish border. From that point on, he had to find his own way home.

Months later, Walther wrote to tell us about the series of miracles that took place on his journey home.

He had ridden several hours when the train conductor suggested he look for work at the next stop, where Polish farmers often waited, hoping to recruit workers for fall harvest. “You can earn a few Polish zlotys to help you on your way home,” the kindly conductor said.

Sure enough, Walther saw one elderly farmer sitting on the seat of an old wagon, who offered him five days of work. Between phrases in Polish, Russian, and German, the farmer explained that Walther could sleep in the barn and help himself to the bin of apples. “I marveled at the generosity and hospitality they were extending to an enemy soldier,” my uncle wrote. “A pile of straw in the tidy shed was the best bed I had slept on in many years.”

That night the farmer brought him a meal, a bar of soap, and ointment for his sores. Walther bandaged his feet with strips of burlap.

On the second day, the farmer brought Walther an assortment of clothing gathered from neighbors.

Soon afterwards, the farmer offered three pairs of shoes, one of which fit Walther’s bruised feet. On another day, a pair of black leather boots fit for a military officer appeared. The local shoemaker took Walther’s foot measurements and resized the boots.

Someone else offered a sack of woolen socks.

When I think about it, each of these gifts was a miracle—that people who had been so oppressed by the Germans only a few years earlier were showing love to a former enemy. And more miracles followed.

Seeing Walther’s condition the farmer and his wife offered him more work, so he could regain his strength. The five days extended into December, and Walther grew stronger. When the farmer’s wife offered him an outdated newspaper published in German, he cried. That was the first news he read in his native tongue since 1943.

Farm in Wroclaw, Poland, post 1945. Photo: Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe

As Christmas neared, Walther thanked his Polish friends profusely and told them he wanted to return to his family for the holidays. The farmer called Walther into his kitchen, where he had stacked rows of Polish zlotkys on the table for the journey.

My uncle spent long days hiking and hitchhiking through Poland. When he crossed the German border, good fortune brought him to a filling station, where he spotted a small truck with a business name and address (“Borna/bei Leipzig”) painted on the door.

Borna was his hometown! He hurried to the driver, who was fueling his truck, and extended a handful of coins, asking if he could pay for a ride to Borna. He explained who he was and told him he was desperate to reach his home and family for the holidays.

The driver shook his head at the coins, opened the passenger door, and bade Walther take the seat. “I could hardly believe my good fortune,” Walther wrote.

Hours later, the driver stopped outside the apartment house where Walther had once lived—although he had no idea if his wife and sons were still there, or even alive. After thanking the man profusely, Walther tried the door. Locked. He pressed the bell repeatedly. No response. He picked up a handful of pebbles and tossed them at the window. No one came to look.

His knees buckling, he gathered pebbles one last time and tossed. The curtains parted and two faces peered down at him. After long moments, Walther could hear a muffled, “Vati! Vati!”

He heard hurried footsteps When the front door swung open, Walther collapsed into the arms of his family, who had to carry him up to their second-floor apartment. Although Walther hadn’t arrived in time for Christmas, he did arrive on New Year’s Eve.

Early the next day, a knock sounded on the door. The pastor’s daughter stood there, holding a sizeable cardboard box. She told Walther his driver told her father he had delivered a former prisoner of war to this address. The girl explained two packages from America had arrived at the parsonage the previous day, with a note saying the pastor should keep one and give the other to a family in need.

The family was amazed. But a greater surprise was in store. The return address read “Youth of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Lyons, Wisconsin, USA.”

They knew that Walther’s youngest brother—my father—had emigrated to America. His last known address was Lyons, Wisconsin.

That was the box my father and I had packed, addressed, and shipped.

As soon as his strength returned, Walther wrote to thank us for the food and medications that arrived at such a critical time. My father had known that cigarettes were the most useful currency in war-torn Europe, so he had filled a tin marked “Popcorn” with cigarettes.

“We traded the cigarettes for the medicines and treatments that saved my life,” Walther wrote.

This is the story of my family’s miracle. I am 93 years old now, and in possession of memorabilia from long-gone family members. The memories they invoke are a miracle in themselves.