Memories of East Prussia / Nachgedanken über Ostpreußen

Your church and castle fortress reaches up into Heaven...
Inside your altar defies beauty
The beautiful green fields of Ellerwalde, now Olszanica
How green the grass was, and how blue the sky was! You were running in front of me with your funny straw hat, laughing and pushing me to follow you. So I chased you, and you let me catch you; we laughed and had fun, while grandpa was fishing nearby. Then you bent down, grabbed my little hand and pulled me into a twirling dance through the green fields- how wonderful it was. Then all at once you grabbed my hand again and spun me around and around, and we started to fly through the air up higher and higher… we were flying into Heaven!

Then I woke up, and standing there, no, lying there in bed, crying, your little grown-up grandson crying, because grandma had flown off into Heaven and left her little big grandson in the green fields crying for her embrace, her love. As the tears stream down the little boy’s face, he can’t stop asking, “How can I leave you, I’m waiting for you in the fields?”

Now I stand in the green fields again, the same fields your parents played in when they were little and wore their funny hats and laughed… so beautiful they are with the blue sky and clouds rushing by, the sounds of the cows and smells of the farm.
But where are you all? I stand at your graves, your grandparents and great grandparents, and I can only cry again, because you have all danced away into the sky. I see your farm, your trees, your rivers, your mediaeval churches, and above it all screams the silence of your absence, …. and it becomes a lovely song. Lovely, because we are still together, in the midst of our separation, for no persons, no wars, and no nations can take our history, our memories, our home away from us. I love the song our fields and sky sing in East Prussia, just like the soft melody of your East Prussian German. And I felt you there with me, dancing among the thick changing clouds in our sky.